Interview Questions for Hiring Top Performers

We look for a time the candidate wanted something so badly, they were unstoppable in pursuing it. Or a time they overcame an obstacle,” Hamilton says. As you listen to the answers to those questions, pay close attention to both the tasks and the duration described. “Try to get a sense of how long that person can stick it out. How long are they going to beat their head against a stats problem?”

Good qualities for an academic (or inventor type), but doesn't seem to have much correlation with the kind of "grit" needed for most commercial development work.

In which, the vast majority of the time, we benefit the most from "triaging": that is, discerning when not to go down rabbit holes, and when not to "bang our heads" against problems when it may be better to simply... route around them, or leave them be until some sunny day arrives when there's a legitimate business need to properly resolve them, and we have appropriate resources available to do so.

The problem is: if the interviewers are "constantly learning," (and they are, just ask them), then they are consistently making mistakes that the future, more learn-ed version of themselves wouldn't make. To take an example from the article: interviewers are to ask candidates about some time that they used data to make a decision. What if a candidate responds with a story in which they realized the data were pointing the way to a local optimum that the candidate cleverly avoided? To you, smart HN reader, you are perhaps impressed, and tempted to slap the candidate on the back and rejoice in your shared membership in the club of those who've discovered ambiguity ("Complexity, such a bitch, right?"); but if the interviewer but dimly remembers calculus but is proud of themselves for using a sentence with the word "data" in it, then the candidate's response will come off not as an indication of the ability to "ask the right questions," but a sign of non-cooperativeness, "irrational refusal to let decisions be driven by the data," and perhaps intellectual arrogance.

For interviewers, I have no idea what to tell them. For candidates, I can only say: Lie, and then follow through. If they are looking for "grit" but you had a privileged upbringing, make something up and commit to yourself to be grit-ful[0], rather than saying what's in your head, which is "I haven't had much hardship but I get the importance of resilience." If they ask for your greatest weakness[1], say anything but your greatest weakness; instead talk about the difficulty of coping with other peoples' weaknesses ("I don't deal with my father's alcoholism as well as I ought," or "I get impatient with lazy people.").

[0]This is basically what the sales people in your org do, which is why you get those requests.

[1] This is a dishonest question, because there are wrong answers. The only acceptable answers are weaknesses that the interviewer shares; but by making that the only right answer the interviewer is implying that they have the "best" weakness and therefore have no "real" weaknesses. If they don't introspect honestly, why the hell should you? Or, more charitably, which is a better approximation of reality, that you are both about equal on your paths to enlightenment, or that you are an imbecile? Is truth best served by communicating the former through omission, or the latter through facts?

She doesn't mention correlation of their process to successful outcomes and until you do that you're guessing.

Also doesn't mention reviewing quality of past work which I'm guessing has a better correlation if the contributions are properly vetted.

Unless you're doing A/B testing you'll never know, and are certainly screening out candidates who could have ended up being star players.

Here's what all these HR sourced "top performer" filters are missing: top performers are a nurture not nature thing i.e they are a function of the environment.

What's the incentive for a top performer to work for you? We hear a ton about how the best people "take ownership", but a lot less of why they should build your company for you (rather than starting their own).

The most important thing a manager/CEO can do is to align the company's success with the individual. That's how you make top performers out of people you already have.

But, I like that these are all personality traits with no easy answer. I get the feeling that an interviewer trying to craft questions to test "grit" or "impact" will discover good stories about the candidate. They'll probably push the candidate to talk about real challenges, or explain below-the-waterline projects they thought were important. Assuming there's a technical screen that validates that they're woefully uneducated (I'm thinking FizzBuzz, not 3 hours of red-black trees), it feels like an interview designed to capture these attributes would be pretty probing, and if the topics were divided among different interviewers, they'd all get different angles on the candidate.

That seems good. Interviewing for the nominal job description is easy to game. This checklist, if thoughtfully prepared for, seems harder to game.

Hiring/interviewing is like judging a medicine by its packaging. It is error prone and there is little you can do to avoid making bad decisions.

Many people get good at it after making so many mistakes. It is much easier to ask an expert in the field help you choose a candidate for the role.

To me, though, there is one "metric" that trumps all the rest, and that is personality fit with existing employees. If you have two brilliant software engineers that just absolutely cannot stand each other, nothing will get done. The best interview experience I've had, personally, has been to be placed into a technical interview - "start programming application X that does Y" - with two existing employees looking over my shoulders asking me why I'm doing what I'm doing and why not something else.

The technical justification for my chosen solution to the technical interview question didn't matter much once it was clear I covered a base level of technical ability, but it was incredibly valuable that I and the employees looking over my shoulder didn't want to get into a fistfight after an hour - it meant that we could amicably disagree, support our reasonings for our arguments, and then not have sticks up our asses when the other person's proposed solution ended up being the right one, and then gracefully defer and say "thank you for the conversation and debate." That meld is immensely important.

That said, I do recognize that it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge this sort of interaction with increasingly large teams. My experience interviewing and being interviewed is limited to cases where it's been a team of 3 - 8 people. For larger teams, perhaps such a formalized approach makes sense. I do not have any experience that informs me as to whether it is or isn't.

But then I have to ask whether there should be a team of more than about 8 people without a dedicated manager. I don't have anything more than a gut answer to that question, but my gut says no.

Have your candidate tell you about a time _______

I hope they're giving their candidates time to prepare answers to these. I feel like I wouldn't be able to think of anything during the interview.

I have some thoughts regarding possibly giving the interviewer some more leeway (like for engineers, don't start off with solve this first) but haven't thought enough about that.

Given a person who knows nothing about technical work, might sell them on the OP.

Bet if take five interviewers and have each of them read the OP and apply it to interviewing 100 people and compare the results, will find (1) validity, the interview results will on average be a poor predictor of anything important and (2) reliability, the interview results will scatter with huge standard deviation. That is, it's throwing darts where the scatter is huge and the center of the scatter is far off the center of the target.

Uh, didn't see where there was some good double blind tests of the OP for such reliability and validity. Uh, the OP was big on analysis -- good, now have them tell us about their 7 devices and reliability and validity, that is social science 101.

Let me just guess, from reality and common sense, what is going on with the OP: The whole OP is essentially just plausibility psycho-babble that HR interviewers would like to entertain. It's aimed at HR.

The OP is yet more evidence that under no circumstances should anyone in HR have a substantive interview with an important candidate for anything important.

Instead, HR should smile, be nice, offer water, coffee, tea, soda, smile, be nice, give directions to the rest rooms, help with the interview schedule and the organization chart, hand over the benefits packet, smile, be nice, help with the travel and lodging arrangements, help with expense reimbursements, smile, be nice, etc.

E.g., the OP wants to ignore school work but wants to emphasize ability with, what was it, analysis?

Okay, I can understand why an HR humanities major would get confused here, but a good solution is to look for majors in math, physics, electronic engineering.

The OP wants to give as a test of ability with analysis something with Excel. Upchuck: I avoid Excel because it is nearly always way beneath me -- I use much more powerful tools. Excel will do Lagrangian relaxation, the fast Fourier transform, Wiener filtering, least squares, multi-variate spline interpolation, L. Breiman's random forests or even CART, stochastic optimal control, solve some differential equations? I don't think so. I don't waste time with Excel. That's like testing a cardiac surgeon on cleaning bedpans.

"Top Performers"? Right, maybe for toilet cleaning. Even then they'd be at risk of mixing the Muriatic stuff with the Drano stuff -- don't do that!

HR tries again, fumbles with the ball, drops the ball, trips over the ball, falls on the ball, loses the ball, is face down in the mud.

HR: Smile and be nice.

In any case, you can use whatever questions you like, they are very trainable and people good at BS and making up anything quick will do well at those.