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Interviews are on my mind again (see above for why) and I’ve been having conversations about the experience on both sides of the Zoom camera.
Finding out whether a candidate can do the job is incredibly challenging. The usual slate of techniques – from so-called “experiential questions” (“tell me about a time when you didn’t agree with a coworker”)
1 to google-style brain teasers (“how would you go about finding out the weight of the moon using nothing but croutons”)
2 to supposed leetcode questions (“You have two linked lists and you need to combine them.”)
3 – fall short in so many ways, but primarily they fail in the most critical way:
None tell you if the candidate can DO the JOB – the work of the work, day after day, showing up and pitching in and getting things done.
Add to this the growing trend of candidates to use AI during interviews by quickly typing questions into a separate window and then scanning for the “right” answer. And before you cry foul, just remember that every single company is using AI to recruite candidates, so fair is fair. Also, in what world would a real employee be chastised for using a tool (including AI) to solve a problem? Why would you handcuff them during the interview by prohibiting those tools, and how does this reveal anything about their day to day on the job performance?
MEANWHILE… on the other size of the zoom call sits the candidate. Someone who is being asked to go through 8 rounds of interviews with each company, telling variations of the same stories in the hopes that the message of “I can do this job” lands and distinguishes them from the 9,634 other people vying for the same role.
And they are getting… Those same lame-ass techniques that are either trick questions, invitations to invent an answer out of whole cloth, or irrelevant to this (or any other) job.
To both of those scenarios, I’d like to offer up my favorite interview question.
“Tell me how to get to your favorite restaurant.”
Why do I like this question so much?
First, it can’t be gamed. There’s no emperically right or wrong answer. Any answer is fine (even if the candidate makes it up) because the critical information you gain doesn’t come from the answer, but from the WAY in which it’s answered.
- Maybe they ask clarifying questions first: “are you a left-right person or a north-south person?” “from here?” “Are you driving or walking?”
- Maybe they don’t.
- Maybe they verify that I want what I said I wanted “My favorite restaurant is Thai food but it’s pretty spicy. Do you like that?”
- Maybe just pull up google maps and show me the result
Even in the variety of options for execution, there’s no ONE right way to approach it. I might be interviewing for an SRE who’s job is to quickly fix things, and sending a link to a google map (or more appropriately a knowledge base article), who doesn’t burn a lot of time explaining why manhole covers are round or how they learned all this is what I need.
There’s also the chance to see how they respond if I change the scope halfway: “Oh, I’m trying to be more climate friendly. Can you tell me how to get there with public transportation.”
No, this will not tell me if they can program a fizz-buzz in Perl. But it goes a long way to telling me how they approach a task and interact with a requester. It opens the conversation up to asking procedural and even technical questions along the way. “What tools do you normally use for this task?” “If that doesn’t work, what would you do next?” And so on.
Also, if it’s not obvious, “tell me how to get to your favorite restaurant” can be replaced with any process that focuses on the experiential rather than a simple set of instructions or a single-answer question.
Because the focus is on “your favorite”, not “restaurant”.
Meanwhile, back on the other side of the Zoom call, whenever the conversation strays into those standard techniques I share this technique with interviewers (I’ve got chutzpa. I know.), but with a twist.
“You know,” I start out. “I understand where that question is coming from, and I’m going to answer it. But I’ve sat on your side of the desk and I know it’s hard to find ways to really assess a person’s ability to do the job. If you don’t mind, I’d like to share MY favorite interview question. “
And then I share it.
And then I finish by saying:
“And more than the question itself, I’d like you to consider that this is what I do. I quickly shared that question with you and a little of the idea behind it, and yet you can now execute it perfectly. Not only that, but you can go to your team, tell them, and THEY will be able to execute it perfectly as well. Because what pride myself in is finding solutions that scale. Solutions that not only work for me, but which can be quickly and easily shared with the team and allow everyone to have the same results I do. That’s what you get if you hire me.”
Interviews are hard. Hopefully this idea catches on and makes it easier for everyone.
If you’ve got your own favorite interview technique, let me know in the comments below.
Footnotes:
- I’m sorry to all the HR folks who swear by these, but for a theater major all you are doing is asking me to spontaneously improvise a plausible-sounding fiction where I come out sounding wise, insightful, and reasonably level-headed. Which we all know I am not. ↩︎
- My son had the all-time best answer: I would find an astronomer, ask them the weight of the moon, and throw croutons at them until they told me. Chip off the old block, that one. ↩︎
- Alberta.tech has the best answer ever. ↩︎
Top comments (1)
I totally agree. I am also an interviewer and I can see that some questions or tests are often unnecessary or less important.
For me, the most important aspect is how the candidate would deal with everyday problems. How would he solve the problem, how would he deal with the people who are necessary to solve the problem in question, would he be able to ask for help quickly? Would he be able to express what difficulties he has? And if it is a position for a senior level, for example, would he be able to support other people on the team? Would he be able to share solutions, on his own, that can help others?
I believe that all of the above questions can be answered with your simple and informal question: “Tell me how to get to your favorite restaurant.”
Anyway, thanks for sharing this, I hope that both interviewers and companies pay more attention to their hiring processes 🤞🙋♂️