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Comment by vaishnav92 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like you either misinterpreted or I didn't communicate as well as I should have. I'm not arguing for making interviews "adversarial" in spirit (or even in substance). I'm saying that interviews are implicitly adversarial games, inw hich the recruiter is trying to (ideally) maximize the chance of obtaining relevant signals and the interviewee isn't always aligned with that goal. Often, interviewees want jobs even if they're not a "great fit". Which is why I'm arguing for in fact a less adversarial conversation, in which you infer negatives from other positive information interviewees will excitedly share.

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It's never going to not be a negotiation. All you're doing is limiting your options by arguing from personality typology. What you should be doing is asking behavioral questions and digging in on the responses you get. You'll get better information about what a candidate will do and how they reason through interpersonal problems than asking them questions like "which would you prefer on your time off -- going to a party with a lot of people, or spending time inside reading a book?" Questions like that which appear on many personality inventories are so abstract as to be almost meaningless.

Also you need to understand that if you start personality testing people you will never get any truthful information from your candidates. They do this kind of testing for many retail sales roles and every sales associate you'll ever meet knows exactly how to answer every question to maximize extraversion and minimize undesirable traits. It quickly stops being a test of whether you have what it takes, unless your intent is to test whether people are deeply aware of how fake personality testing is and exactly how to game the system to get past it.

Inferring negatives from positive information sharing seems pretty adversarial to me, both in spirit and in substance.

My comment was to question why the interview should be framed as something implicity adversarial to begin with. And why it's probably better to use something like references to validate what it would be like to work with someone rather than rely on our own dubious judgement or the positively biased judgement of the candidate's.

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