Job Interviews

I don't care if they don't have a dress code. That only means you can dress down when you get the job. But when going to a job interview, always wear pants.

Because if you don't, you'll probably get very embarrassed when people notice.

What if I'm female - why can't I wear a skirt as usual? -- CarolineWilliamson

I recently had to do a TeamWorkAssessment as well as the usual psychometric tests.

I hate the questions that ask interviewees to testify against themselves. We can't reasonably expect good answers to these kinds of questions! What are your weak points? I don't read enough technical journals. What would you improve about yourself? I'd like to be even smarter. ... blah .... Or worse, we make the poor person spill out the one thing that they honestly feel really bad about and are probably working hard on fixing. Hard enough that maybe we shouldn't worry about it at all. I'm interviewing developers right now and the best thing I've come up with so far for this type of question is, "Everyone on our team needs to be cut some slack for something. None of us are perfect here. Where will you want us to cut you some slack?" ... Perhaps I shouldn't even be trying to ask this kind of question. Any suggestions or comments are welcome.

There are at least two problems with questions like What would you improve about yourself? and such. Firstly, interview technique books are full of supposedly good answers to them, secondly they ask a hypothetical. Asking hypothetical questions essentially boils down to asking "Do you believe that you would do this job well?". Almost any answer to it means "Yes, I believe that I would do this job well." You can trivially no-hire someone who gives a different answer, I suppose, but the benefits of this line of questioning are marginal.

About all you learn from those questions is whether they read a book on interviewing, which might tell you they care enough to be prepared. I used to work for a company whose website gave advice on how to interview with them. They apparently wanted to know if you are willing to play the game. Since they are a consulting company, part of the job is performing the right song-and-dance at client interviews, so being able to prepare is an important skill.

We tend to interview in pairs, the candidate sees our operations manager, and a senior techy (usually me, in the first instance). John asks questions like: "What gets you excited about about your work?", and "What do you get angry about?" Similarly, I ask questions like "Tell me the tasks you did when you went into the office yesterday?", "When you did that task, what artifacts did you produce? These are questions about the past, and admit concrete answers about behaviour, rather than predictions about beliefs.

If we consider the Dunning Kruger effect, or UnskilledAndUnawareOfIt, perhaps the candidates that are most critical of themselves should be hired as the smartest. -- MartinSpamer