February 11, 2014 at 9:53 am
Sean Lange (2/11/2014)
LOL that certainly explains ... . 😀
Sean,
We have to find a way to justify any hire, and we try to use what tools and options we have available. In both written and oral interviews and tests we have to find a verifiable way to differentiate between individual candidates. Then once a decision is made one way of the other we have to be able to justify it and if necessary defend the decision in a court of law.
The real challenge is that we have to look at the process and determine if we are creating a bureaucratically mandated bureaucracy or not. Odd world we live in.
M.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
February 11, 2014 at 9:56 am
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
Sean Lange (2/11/2014)
LOL that certainly explains ... . 😀
Sean,
We have to find a way to justify any hire, and we try to use what tools and options we have available. In both written and oral interviews and tests we have to find a verifiable way to differentiate between individual candidates. Then once a decision is made one way of the other we have to be able to justify it and if necessary defend the decision in a court of law.
The real challenge is that we have to look at the process and determine if we are creating a bureaucratically mandated bureaucracy or not. Odd world we live in.
M.
Like you said...government. 😉
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February 11, 2014 at 5:08 pm
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
Sean Lange (2/11/2014)
LOL that certainly explains ... . 😀
Sean,
We have to find a way to justify any hire, and we try to use what tools and options we have available. In both written and oral interviews and tests we have to find a verifiable way to differentiate between individual candidates. Then once a decision is made one way of the other we have to be able to justify it and if necessary defend the decision in a court of law.
If you find that you have a number of candidates that are all acceptable and all at the same level of competence then surely you just pick the one you like? I cant see why anyone would need weird questions to get a feeling for a person's personality. Or, if you find they are all alike in every way (you probably need to work on your interview questions) it is reasonable to toss a coin.
February 11, 2014 at 5:33 pm
mtucker-732014 (2/11/2014)
If you find that you have a number of candidates that are all acceptable and all at the same level of competence then surely you just pick the one you like? I cant see why anyone would need weird questions to get a feeling for a person's personality. Or, if you find they are all alike in every way (you probably need to work on your interview questions) it is reasonable to toss a coin.
mtucker - I wish it was that easy.
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box. It also might give you information as to how creative or conservative their thought processes are. Also, asking something a person has no possible way to prepare for can even cause you to see how they think, reason, or freeze up.
M.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
February 11, 2014 at 7:29 pm
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box.
If it takes a weird question to get the candidate to think out of the box, thinking out of the box is not something you can expect them to do in normal circumstances. So you are getting no information about whether they will think out out of the box in any situation where there is a box for them to avoid thinking in - ie no useful information whatsoever.
Tom
February 11, 2014 at 10:40 pm
L' Eomot Inversé (2/11/2014)
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box.If it takes a weird question to get the candidate to think out of the box, thinking out of the box is not something you can expect them to do in normal circumstances. So you are getting no information about whether they will think out out of the box in any situation where there is a box for them to avoid thinking in - ie no useful information whatsoever.
You took the words right out of my mouth. I want someone that can think out of the box when that type of thinking is required and it's actually required for more things than a lot of people think.
As I've been known to say, "Before you can think outside the box, you must first realize... you're in a box". 🙂
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
February 12, 2014 at 7:46 am
Jeff Moden (2/11/2014)
As I've been known to say, "Before you can think outside the box, you must first realize... you're in a box". 🙂
That's the trick right there - getting interviewees out of the box. As an interviewer, I've found that the overwhelming majority of interviewees all come to the interview inside the same box. They're wary and reserved (We just met, after all, and no one likes being judged. And an interviewer's job is to judge). They give the same safe, canned answers to the typical questions you'll hear in any interview. After enough interviews over the years, those 'safe' people are largely indistinguishable from each other - making a hiring decision difficult and, truthfully only based on likeability of the candidate.
That's why oddball questions are important. They allow a candidate to stand out, for better or for worse. It could be the answer given to the question. It could be their reaction to the question. It could be a change in attitude towards the rest of the interview.
In my experience, using an oddball question as an icebreaker at the start of the interview leads to dramatically better data about the candidate. Specifically because of the attitude shift. Subconsciously, interviewees realize this interview isn't like the others... after all, who opens an interview with a question about video games/superheroes/zombies/whatever? What happens for the followup, more typical questions is that I get out-of-the-interview-box answers. I get real stories and not canned responses. I get personality. I get engagement. I get a unique candidate profile. Some of the stories I've had told have lead me to find truly amazing people, and they've been hired and thrived. Some of the stories have been (unintentionally on their part!) horrifying, and have lead me to avoid making a bad hiring decision. I don't believe any of these would have been told if I stuck with the typical, safe, boring interview routine.
Most interesting to me is how many people have thanked me at the end of the interview, sincerely believing they just had the best interview experience ever. This is true regardless of whether I want to make an immediate offer or run away screaming. That tells me I'm doing something right with how I'm using these oddball questions.
So long story short: There's a reason behind every question you get asked in an interview (and many times more than one!). Your direct response to the question is but one of the reasons, and sometimes it's not the most important reason.
February 12, 2014 at 8:14 am
mwyss (2/12/2014)
Jeff Moden (2/11/2014)
As I've been known to say, "Before you can think outside the box, you must first realize... you're in a box". 🙂That's the trick right there - getting interviewees out of the box. As an interviewer, I've found that the overwhelming majority of interviewees all come to the interview inside the same box. They're wary and reserved (We just met, after all, and no one likes being judged. And an interviewer's job is to judge). They give the same safe, canned answers to the typical questions you'll hear in any interview. After enough interviews over the years, those 'safe' people are largely indistinguishable from each other - making a hiring decision difficult and, truthfully only based on likeability of the candidate.
That's why oddball questions are important. They allow a candidate to stand out, for better or for worse. It could be the answer given to the question. It could be their reaction to the question. It could be a change in attitude towards the rest of the interview.
In my experience, using an oddball question as an icebreaker at the start of the interview leads to dramatically better data about the candidate. Specifically because of the attitude shift. Subconsciously, interviewees realize this interview isn't like the others... after all, who opens an interview with a question about video games/superheroes/zombies/whatever? What happens for the followup, more typical questions is that I get out-of-the-interview-box answers. I get real stories and not canned responses. I get personality. I get engagement. I get a unique candidate profile. Some of the stories I've had told have lead me to find truly amazing people, and they've been hired and thrived. Some of the stories have been (unintentionally on their part!) horrifying, and have lead me to avoid making a bad hiring decision. I don't believe any of these would have been told if I stuck with the typical, safe, boring interview routine.
Most interesting to me is how many people have thanked me at the end of the interview, sincerely believing they just had the best interview experience ever. This is true regardless of whether I want to make an immediate offer or run away screaming. That tells me I'm doing something right with how I'm using these oddball questions.
So long story short: There's a reason behind every question you get asked in an interview (and many times more than one!). Your direct response to the question is but one of the reasons, and sometimes it's not the most important reason.
I've not actually gotten to the "Think outside the box" questions on most of the interviews I've conducted. Although the resumes claim huge amounts of experience, 18 of 20 candidates in a recent stream of candidates with "more than 5 years of experience" couldn't even tell me how to get the current date and time using T-SQL. I've also had people claim "years of tuning experience on complex stored procedures, functions, and triggers" yet they couldn't tell me even the basics about the differences between clustered and non-clustered indexes nor which two tables are made available automatically in triggers. One guy even had the nads to tell me that, despite his claim of 10 years of performance tuning, he'd have to look up what a Clustered Index was because he'd never used one.
That's what I meant by "you must first realize... you're in a box".
The "real" story for most of these folks is that they haven't actually done anything to learn the trade that their resume says they supposedly a part of.
Oddly enough, we just interviewed two fellows where everyone thought their resume sucked. They had very little in it to go on and no one wanted to interview them. I said "Bring 'em in... it's the only way to know". They turned out to be some of the smartest people I've seen in the last 2 years of interviews both on the front end and in T-SQL. AND, they didn't need any coaxing to "tell their story". I think that asking "oddball" questions to supposedly get someone to "think outside the box" is a mistake. Either they have it or they don't. Anyone that's interview more than 2 or 3 times should know that.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
February 12, 2014 at 3:19 pm
L' Eomot Inversé (2/11/2014)
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box.If it takes a weird question to get the candidate to think out of the box, thinking out of the box is not something you can expect them to do in normal circumstances. So you are getting no information about whether they will think out out of the box in any situation where there is a box for them to avoid thinking in - ie no useful information whatsoever.
What would your impression be of a candidate, who, when you ask at the end of the interview if they have any questions says "How would you start a fire using only an old shoe and piece of string?"
Do you think your answer would provide much useful information to the candidate about their future in the company?
February 12, 2014 at 3:36 pm
mtucker-732014 (2/12/2014)
L' Eomot Inversé (2/11/2014)
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box.If it takes a weird question to get the candidate to think out of the box, thinking out of the box is not something you can expect them to do in normal circumstances. So you are getting no information about whether they will think out out of the box in any situation where there is a box for them to avoid thinking in - ie no useful information whatsoever.
What would your impression be of a candidate, who, when you ask at the end of the interview if they have any questions says "How would you start a fire using only an old shoe and piece of string?"
Do you think your answer would provide much useful information to the candidate about their future in the company?
Interesting you should ask. It was about 25 years ago when I was interviewing a person who said that they had 15 years experience working on an IBM Mainframe. I asked two or three questions about 360 JCL that were totally historic with no relevance to the job we were interviewing for. He did not know the answers but came very close. When I was done with that tangent and was ready to move on he asked me if I remembered a couple of other JCL parameters concerning other things. Turnabout is fair play right? I was able to give him an answer then but probably could not do it today. But by doing so we developed an instant bond.
By his asking the questions he showed that he was not intimidated and actually knew more about the historical information then most would. This illustrated his ability to memorize and to retain information over a long period of time even if it was not used. Again not the main issue but good to know.
In the remainder of the interview we exchanged a number of other friendly questions and after the interview he thanked all of us on the panel. Later we offered him the job, but he turned it down. Two days after he interviewed with us he interviewed with a .com in the Seattle area and landed a job that paid about four times what we could. The interesting thing is that in the email he sent informing us of his new job, he took time to say that he greatly appreciated the questions and interaction he had had with me and that it was the perfect warmup for the interview for the much better job.
We learned a lot and so did he.
Not all gray hairs are Dinosaurs!
February 12, 2014 at 5:40 pm
mtucker-732014 (2/12/2014)
L' Eomot Inversé (2/11/2014)
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box.If it takes a weird question to get the candidate to think out of the box, thinking out of the box is not something you can expect them to do in normal circumstances. So you are getting no information about whether they will think out out of the box in any situation where there is a box for them to avoid thinking in - ie no useful information whatsoever.
What would your impression be of a candidate, who, when you ask at the end of the interview if they have any questions says "How would you start a fire using only an old shoe and piece of string?"
Do you think your answer would provide much useful information to the candidate about their future in the company?
I much prefer the one about how to open a corked wine bottle using a shoe.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
February 12, 2014 at 7:35 pm
mtucker-732014 (2/12/2014)
L' Eomot Inversé (2/11/2014)
Miles Neale (2/11/2014)
A wield question can cause a candidate to think and speak out of the box.If it takes a weird question to get the candidate to think out of the box, thinking out of the box is not something you can expect them to do in normal circumstances. So you are getting no information about whether they will think out out of the box in any situation where there is a box for them to avoid thinking in - ie no useful information whatsoever.
What would your impression be of a candidate, who, when you ask at the end of the interview if they have any questions says "How would you start a fire using only an old shoe and piece of string?"
The impression would depend on what position I was interviewing for, and also on how the interview had gone up to that point. The position issue would include position relative to me - am I interviewing someone who, if they are offered the job and accept, will be one of my direct reports, or who will report to one of my direct reports, or who will report to the same person as I do, or who will be interposed as an extra between me and the person I currently report to.[/quote]
Do you think your answer would provide much useful information to the candidate about their future in the company?[/quote]
If I wanted it to it would provide some information about my atitude to odd-ball questions and/or some infomation about the company attitude to problems to which we don't yet know the answer (whether because there isn't yet enough detail in the problem description, as in this question, or for some other reason). Of course if the interview up to that point had determined that the applicant was a waste of space (as in 18 out of 20 of the interviews mentioned by Jeff) nothing I could say would convey any information about the candidate's future in the company since the candidate would have no such future, but I prefer to deliver that information in writing, so that I can think about what I want to say and how I might be able to help the candidate to look at more appropriate positions, so I wouldn't want to convey that information in my answer to his question.
Tom
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