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The problem with "Tell me about a time when ..." questions is that they more so test the strength of self-righteous memory than offer a clear picture of valuable job skills. These questions assume the interviewee has a vivid set of occurrences of which they can commend themselves. A good candidate who frequently leads, salvages, solves problems better than the rest probably doesn't store a list of these occurrences as special times they were able to do good work, they think of them as the norm, and may have trouble praising themselves in detail. In fact, I'd be more weary of the candidates that have a go to story to answer these questions as it may mean it's the type of thing that doesn't happen regularly.

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> may have trouble praising themselves in detail

Yes that happens quite often. The really good interviewers know that and understand that their job is to help the candidate to present his/her skills. That means additional questions, rephrasing the question, patience, empathy and first of all: taming the premature judgements.

It's really hard but it can and should be done, if interview is to have any sense.

When I used to interview at Google (non-Eng interviewing), I found the "Tell me about a time when..." questions hugely helpful. The initial answer is just the start of a conversation where I as an interviewer could go deeper and deeper into the skills they exhibited, their thinking processes, how similar these situations were, etc.

If you just take their initial response and move on to the next question, you fail as an interviewer. You've got to go deeper... that's also the way that you can quickly spot a bullshitter or someone making a proverbial mountain out of a molehill project.

+1. People who have been in management (or are "people" people) are often good speakers that do very well at a surface level, so it requires digging deeper to get a richer picture of what they were thinking and what they did.

All good interviewing is done this way. The goal of the interview is to get into the thought process of the interviewee. You just need them to give you a thread to start pulling.

I think a lot of candidates think they're immediately screwed if they don't have a compelling answer to every question. It's not seen that way on the other side of the table, at least not when I'm there. Often the interviewer himself is just trying to find a foothold that he can take to really start digging into something. Good interviewers throw out a bunch of questions that are designed to get you talking until you start talking about something they can sink their teeth into. Bad interviewers have no idea what to do and throw out stupid, random questions that sound like job interview questions to them, accept your answer, and then do it again for the entirety of the 30-60 minutes. At the end of your interview, they'll make the same decision they would've made if they'd only seen your picture and were told they had to decide from that (unless you managed to offend the interviewer during your responses ;) ).

Any nervousness I had as a candidate was permanently resolved after I started interviewing people and seeing how others reacted to interviews. Most interviewers are not disqualifying you for all the stupid crap you imagine. If you're good and they pass, they're either that incompetent in which case you don't want to work for them anyway, or they have many good candidates and the choice is then based on unknowable differences in perception like perceived likeability or other superficialities.

Totally agree. Also, not everyone is a good story teller. I'd find it difficult to pick one such occurrence ("Tell me about a time when ...") and describe it vividly in a blink of an eye. My answers tend to be laconic and concrete, especially when I'm nervous (which is somewhat natural during interviews). Such questions might be great for managing roles, but not so good for technical ones imho.

The real "best interview technique" is not so much black-and-white structures-vs-unstructured. It depends a lot on the type of job you are interviewing for. Structured interviews work really really well for engineering jobs, particularly software engineering. However for marketing, sales, finance, assistant, etc. jobs, the unstructured interview questions work quite well. These are the jobs for which "Tell me the time when..." actually works.

I don't understand. Isn't the point that your example good candidate will prepare for interviews by reviewing those occurrences such that they are vivid, but a bad candidate will be unable to do so regardless of how much they prepare?

No, the idea is that people who find it easy to praise themselves may actually do fewer praise-worthy things. Like when I sit on my butt for weeks, then wash the dishes one time and consistently remind my wife of that one time I washed the dishes. Whereas she might wash the dishes every night and never asks for praise.

In that situation, if someone asked "tell me what special activities you've done in the past month", I might point to that one time where I washed the dishes, whereas my wife, not seeing dish washing as anything impressive, might say she's done nothing special. Even though I only washed the dishes once, I come off looking better there since I have an example I can point out.

Simply saying "I did my job every day" isn't good enough. However, not doing your job except on one occasion makes that one occasion seem special.

In your example, "I washed the dishes once or twice" is not going to impress the interviewer and is quite revealing. (This is true for the more general version of your anecdote as well.)

No, but you'd come up with a story to go along with it. You didn't just do your job building a website for a client, but rather you had a client with a pressing need for a custom site and they were on a tight deadline. Normally your team wouldn't work contracts like this, but you thought it would be a good challenge and a way to test your skills. You had to work late nights for a few days, but you managed to get the site done in time and on budget. Sounds pretty nice, it's good that you were selfless and spent some of your personal time to help the client on such a tricky project.

What actually happened was you just sat there browsing reddit until the deadline had almost arrived, then worked like crazy trying to get the site finished. Normally your team wouldn't work contracts like that (which means normally your team would do their job properly). And it was a challenge and a test of your skills, because normally you don't do jack squat at work. In fact, the reason you're looking for a new job is because if you don't quit your current employer will fire you.

Now you have a great story to tell an interviewer about how you completely fail to do your job properly. But by dressing up the words a little bit and using some creative euphemisms, you can make it sound like you went above and beyond. And it's not really a lie, because you did go above and beyond... eventually. You just didn't have to do that if you had worked properly. All you have to do is leave out the fact that you're a massive slacker.

So you get the job because you told an awesome story of how devoted you are, and all you had to do was leave out one single fact (that the deadline was only tight because you procrastinated). Meanwhile your really awesome coworker tells every single fact 100% true and you get the job instead of him, because your story sounds better.

It's not too hard to tell a story about how you wanted to do something great, as though you actually did it. It's like the pseudocode of programming.

I think this is a good point, but an even more likely one is just claiming credit for someone else's accomplishment. People who are good at self aggrandizing have an advantage for these kinds of questions.

If the interviewer follows up with all the team members who were actually there it wouldn't work, but I kind of doubt this happens a lot.

Yeah, but "I took on the undesirable task of fixing all the shitty excel cleaning because no one else was going to do it" isn't going to score you many points in a job interview.

It makes sense that this could be the case, but do you have evidence that it actually is?

For example, one could make the argument that they favour people with good situational recall, because they're better able to think about occasions where they've done something that applies given the criteria specified. Or that it favours people who have depression, as they tend to be more self-aware and self-critical, so have a larger bank of answers readily available.

I disagree with "A good candidate who frequently leads, salvages, solves problems better than the rest probably doesn't store a list of these occurrences".

Unless one is talking many years prior, these situations are still in the memory. The question isn't meant as an approach to rehash a particular solution. It is meant to set ground work to explore decisions, options presented, etc.

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