Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

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I worked in an organization where we used behavioral interviewing techniques to get to the core of how someone operates.

"Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well. If they resist answering the made mistakes questions we prompted them to understand that an honest answer is important. If they could not do that then they were not considered.

These were not developer roles but most were very technical / analytical roles for an organization that paid well and candidates knew up front they would be interviewed this way. In addition some jobs were "cased" where you had to solve a problem and talk about how you solved it to the interviewer. Great fun when I went through the two days of interviews. I ended up doing maybe 200+ behavioral interviews over 6+ years for the company. I saw this approach work time and time again.

Some people could not answer for themselves: "the team did..." "They did...". When pressed we usually discovered that the candidate did not have the ability to get the job done themselves.

> "Tell me about a time in which you..." works very well.

These types of questions probably cause me more stress than any other. Being asked to think of a situation where you felt a certain emotion or had a certain mental experience is not actually that easy for everyone. My memory is terrible at that kind of thing.

It's like my memory lacks a necessary index for what you are asking. I can start going through every major work experience I've had in sequence and filter out the ones that fit, but we might be sitting there in silence for 2-3 minutes which gets awkward enough in itself.

And it's not an inability to remember mistakes specifically, I mean the old "tell me about a time where you solved a problem with no prior knowledge of the domain..." gets me. I solve problems like this ALL THE TIME. That's a skill I have. Fetching those times from memory is not a skill I have.

Luckily I've had these questions in enough interviews that I generally try to have some examples in mind.

Hah, I'm exactly the same, and not just with this, with everything. I just have a hard time retrieving things by index when prompted, and I envy people who can just recall interesting/funny things that happen to them. Things happen to me too, I just have to be reminded of the situation to recall it, I can't just go "funny thing? Ah yes, I remember X".

I have the same problem. I couldn't think of these things on the spot for the life of me. So awhile back I googled 'Top Personality Questions on an Interview" and filled out prompts for each question way in advance, and then I review it each time before right before I go into a an interview. Made the rest of the process much simpler.

Exactly, same here !!

I've got one particular project that usually fits these questions. And if it doesn't, I can tell enough interesting stuff about it to satisfy the interviewer anyway.

Incidentally, behavioral questions are common in nontechnical interviews, since the entire interview is spent analyzing a candidate's skills in the abstract.

How will I know if this person is good at, say, sales or biz dev in a vertical with long lead times? I can't vet that skill set directly; I can only ask the candidate about it. Behavioral questions give me something to cross-reference in the absence of on-the-spot performance data. So do case questions, which (at least ostensibly) tell me how a candidate thinks, and how she organizes her thoughts. (And of course, domain-knowledge questions help me assess the depth and quality of a candidate's experience in the field.)

Behaviorals aren't perfect, though. They can be gamed. It's not too much of a stretch for a candidate to memorize a half-dozen anecdotes to trot out in response to any question that begins with "Tell me about a time when..." (Nevertheless, you'd be surprised by how few people do that sort of prep work.) Canned responses are especially common with candidates straight out of school or grad school, where they are often trained in how to answer behavioral and case questions.

I find your last comment interesting!

From my experiences with employers in many parts of Europe, they value partial contributions to teams more than complete individual achievements. Talking to much in "I did..." sentences instead of "We did... (...and I helped with...)" can come across as self-centered, which often is considered a negative trait here.

So noted. We asked follow up questions to get to a person's contribution. It is valid to move the team forward. It is not valid to ride on the contributions of the team without putting your own contribution in.

This is exactly where biases creep in to evaluation. It's really, really hard to assess these signals objectively, and not use them to justify your snap judgements or prejudices. So maybe when the guy with a college sports background and a military-style buzz cut talks about how 'the team' did stuff, you mark it down as a sign of being a great team player and sharing credit. But when a guy with long hair does it, you assume he didn't make any individual contribution. And if a young woman talks about 'I' did stuff, you interpret it as confidence and evidence of personal contribution, but an older lady with kids does it and you dig in hard for evidence she's taking credit for others' work. Not personally accusing you of these specific biases here - just trying to show how these vague 'personality' judgement signals can be unconsciously misjudged by an interviewer, without them even knowing that's what they did.

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