What Startups Really Mean by “Why Should We Hire You?”

By 2034 the majority of proles were on illegal performance-evaluation enhancing drugs, necessitated by the fact that the average prole was also on The Company's indefinite performance improvement probation. They occupied over 20% of their working hours proving their worth to The Company, which had hired Prefects to wander the endless halls. The Prefects started administering the Voight-Kampf employee aptitude tests on proles, but soon began testing each other on their own effectiveness in administering the test.

Before The Fall, the end state of the system was that The Company existed only to vet its own employees, all of whom were in charge of secretly monitoring other groups of employees. They had their nominal tasks such as programming or planning, but employee evaluation was based solely on the ability to evaluate others in their nominal tasks.

I've been in this industry a long time, I've been in startups and in big enterprises, and I've been a hiring manager in both cases and an executive in the former.

Very, very rarely would I say that my hiring manager or executive peers (especially of the typically inexperienced startup variety) would be asking questions like these with the awareness of intent and interpretation being claimed here. Mostly these questions are being asked because, just like the fairly pointless "whiteboarding" questions, they're just the questions everybody thinks they're supposed to ask. That is of course until an alternative model is presented and nurtured.

If you find a great hiring manager who is actually putting in a lot of forethought, intent, and consideration into their hiring and interviewing process, then do whatever you can to work with them. But, one of the ways you'll be able to detect such a person is they won't likely be asking cookie-cutter questions or giving you cookie-cutter quizes.

"The theme is familiar to anyone who's tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It's not supposed to make sense. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is —I am not making this up— non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up."

http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html

I don't think there should be a right/wrong translation. And based on that, there are rarely terrible answers.

These questions are open-ended on purpose, so people will talk and say things which are essential to them.

As an example: “I didn't get along with a coworker.” isn't a terrible answer. It means that interpersonal relations for this person are important. “I struggled to balance work and life.” isn't a terrible answer, but rather show that he/she prefers an environment where the work doesn't occupy all the time/energy.

The only answer which I wound consider bad is a dismissive answer (trying to ignore/deflect the question).

We can gauge your ambition and your resilience just fine in your first few weeks (in which we've signed you on as a contractor-under-evaluation - if your situation allows). And yes, we've had to learn how to do this the hard way (having kept people on for longer than was good for anyone). But I think it's nuts to think that you can test someone's ambition asking "where do you see yourself in 5 years?".

I'm pretty convinced that that place deep down where people's natural drive comes from is, especially for engineers and other creative roles, very disconnected from conscious career planning. If you want to tap that natural drive, you need to create an environment where it can flourish. I don't think that asking "Why should we hire you?" when you mean "Do you understand what problem we're solving?" contributes to such an environment. You want to be open, clear, direct, and honest, not play guessing games.

Here are mine.

Tell Me About A Time You Failed Theirs: Can you stomach failing until we figure things out? Mine: When the shit hits the fan, do I have to worry that you will engage in defensive CYA?

Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years? Theirs: Are you ambitious enough for a startup? Mine: What are your long-term values? (For the record, I think that this is a terrible question. But I answer the translation honestly.)

Why Should We Hire You? Theirs: Do you really understand the problem we're solving? Mine: What value do you think you bring?

"1. Tell Me About A Time You Failed

Translation: Can you stomach failing until we figure things out?"

No. No it doesn't. It's far more likely that they're asking you if you can identify that you've got something wrong in the past and have learned something from it. Rambling on about things that you didn't get wrong, but someone else did and were out of your control will only serve to make the interviewer wonder why you're avoiding the question.

"2. Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years?

Translation: Are you ambitious enough for a startup?"

Again, no. This is a simple question to find out what sort of direction you want your career to go in. It's a common question to help evaluate whether the company and you are going to be a good match. If you want to be a CTO and they want someone who's OK staying more hands-on, this is the sort of question to help make sure you're not going to be unhappy later on.

"3. Why Should We Hire You?

Translation: Do you really understand the problem we're solving?"

I'm really unsure how the author got to this conclusion. This is the same old question that's been asked for donkeys years, and the underlying reason for it (if any) is that they want you to sell yourself to them. Any halfway competent interviewer is going to have some much better questions for finding out if you understand the problem they're solving than this would give them.

Now, of course, different hiring managers are going to disagree with what I've just written there, and that's just fine! We're all going to have different motives for interview questions, whichever side of the table you're on. Point is, you can't "translate" common interview questions like the article attempts to do as you have no idea what the interviewer is actually looking for. Be honest, be friendly, and be yourself.

edit: formatting and duplication

> Some interviewees try to judge if the candidate asks “intelligent” questions. Personally, I don’t care what questions they ask; by this point I’ve already made my decision.

I maintain my belief that nobody in software has a clue how to do technical interviews.

"Why should we hire you?" Is a weird one, specially if it was the company who contacted the interviewed. They should already know why they want to hire and instead ask specific questions to corroborate.

In general, this article assumes that the company holds all the cards and the applicants should be grateful (and waste plenty of time doing the "homework") just because they were given an interview. This is very often not the case.

'Plastiq—a startup that allows users to pay their bills with credit cards'

Is that a thing in America or someplace you can't use credit cards to pay your bills? I followed the link thinking that it would be something else but it seems that really that's what it does.

* the question * Why we ask this question * What a good answer looks like, and often what a bad answer looks like; and occasionally follow up questions depending on their answer.

This is nice because then we can all internally debate about columns 2 and 3, and any new question you want to ask has to come with a 2 and 3 yourself. We actually learn a lot about our own values with this method.

It's 404. Can somebody provide a working URL? Or is finding one is itself the exercise and you are supposed to hack around the error someway?

An evidence-based approach (aka the scientific method) + a little knowledge about cognitive biases shows why questions like "Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years?" are not great.

All the research into interviewing and cognitive biases says that asking questions for "color" reduces interviewer's ability to predict outcomes while simultaneously increasing their confidence that they've gleaned information from the interview. There are experiments where interviewers are given some diagnostic information (e.g., hard facts about background) and conduct closed-form interviews (yes/no, this/that questions) with the interviewees responding randomly. They'll still believe they've "learned more" about the candidate than they did from the candidates who they had biographical information alone.

See the Dilution Effect (https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social...) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking.

Here's a fun paper: http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.html

A good interview process reduces an interviewer's exposure to non-diagnostic information and directs their attention so they only evaluate diagnostic information (and does so in a consistent way). This is the basis for the "structured interview".

"But Jesse," you say, "'Where will you be in 5 years?' seems diagnostic to me!"

Questions aren't diagnostic; responses are! So you have to think about the nature of the responses and how those responses will be evaluated.

Here are some alternate questions. Consider the responses you might get to these vs. the 5-year one. Are those responses more diagnostic? (Note: I just thought of these off the top of my head and haven't fully evaluated them).

- At your last job, what career goals did you have when you joined? Did you achieve them? How?

- Imagine you've been working here for 18 months. What would need to happen between now and then for you to not feel disappointed you joined?

- Think back to a manager who helped you define and achieve a professional goal (big or small). What was that goal? How did they help you achieve it? Why did that work?

As a first pass, these questions control for more and are likely to get higher-signal responses that are easier to evaluate in a consistent, interpretable way.

How can you tell the original 5-year question isn't great, though? Think like a scientist.

Why 5 years? Why not 1? Why not 10? 2? 4? How might those numbers change the answers you receive? Are you even testing to see how people's responses change as a function of that number? Are you even coding the responses in a way that would be able to detect how their responses change in response to that number? Is the variance in the responses small enough that you can even come up with a way to code them?

For example, if the interviewee is startup savvy and you ask the 5-year question then they understand the vesting cliffs are at play. Suddenly you're taking into account how savvy the interviewee is about the way vesting works. Was that the intention? If not: more variance!

Is it clear what the question is trying to get at? Do all candidates understand what it's trying to get at? Could candidate misinterpret the intent of the question given the fact that they're in an interview? Could different interviewers interpret the same response differently?

It's a "bad" question because it controls for very little and therefore inherently produces non-diagnostic information (such is the nature of humans). The level of variance in all the components of this question is exactly the surface area on which cognitive biases become the determining factor.

And the nature of cognitive biases is that you become more confident when they're operational, not less.

The upshot for startups is that implementing a structured process is easier than doing so at a larger company. Half (or more) of the challenge of implementing a structured process is the package + selling + training + rolling out + reinforcement of the "new" approach. At a startup, you can get everyone on the same page much more quickly and bake it into the culture from the start (or close to it).

Because you need a programmer and I am one?

Stupid questions get you stupid answers.