> The second sentence (context/problem/solution) is important for helping the candidate keep their initial answer focused—otherwise, they are more likely to ramble for a long time and leave less time for you to... Dig into details

How about, instead of asking "Tell me about a time you...", and you presuming to understand the situation so well that you can make judgments about nuance based on the off-the-cuff example you asked for, and trying to cut them short from "rambling"...

You instead ask them "Say you have a situation like X; how would you approach it?" And you can change the situation by adding information, "What if the report responds Y?"

Then both people are operating from closer to similar information about the situation. (Though it's still possible that the interviewee understands something about these situations in general that the interviewer doesn't.)

This also avoids dredging up past unpleasant situations (someone with more experience will have handled more unpleasant situations, but that doesn't mean it doesn't invoke a somber mood, if they're not acting or oblivious).

It also means they don't have to also think about how much they can say under NDA and being discreet about personnel matters (while a poor interviewer might take hesitation or choosing words carefully as interviewee trying to put themselves in the best light or keep a fabricated story straight).

An expected objection to this approach of spinning a hypothetical situation is that candidates might just say what they think are the correct answers. But knowing the correct answers is at least half the problem. And what do you think many candidates are doing in the interview anyway, if they are the kind to know the correct answers, but not follow them in real life.

> Say you have a situation like X; how would you approach it

everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face

that’s why you ask what happened historically vs. what you would do

if you ask me what will i do if you put a cookie in front of me when im on a diet, id say id turn it down

historically, ive never turned down a cookie

Highly-trained boxers have a plan until they get punched in the face.

A bigger problem is that you have a lot of people getting into fights without even being able to think of a credible plan in theory.

Tell me what your ideal self would do, and if you have great answers, you're ahead of maybe most people. Even if you don't know for certain that you wouldn't freeze the next time you're punched in the face.

Also, the fighter who can relate multiple times they got punched in the face and were stunned might still be a better fighter than the one who cherry-picks a time they didn't get stunned and can spin a story of the plan working out well. (ObSeinfeld: karate class. "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nuOtsgHjdY&t=3m17s")

Both yours and the author's suggestions are great, will have to give em a try.

So many candidates torpedo their own interview by doing that "Word Salad" dump when you ask them a question. It's like they have a bunch of unstructured responses prepared for any topic, and if you mention one of those topics in your question, they just unload the dump truck full of words and ramble until you tell them to stop talking. Always looking for techniques to steer candidates away from this behavior which sadly is happening more and more.

It's happening more and more because interviewers are asking these questions.

They are looking for a nice story where I had conflict with my manager I used STAR to solve it and everybody was happy.

So interviewees have to prepare such stories, remember the details and adjust things to make them look good. Because saying "I don't really remember anything like that happening recently to me" or "We sat in stunned silence for a minute and went on with the meeting" doesn't cut it during interviews.

Maybe managers ask these "personal conflict" questions so much because that is a bigger part of their job. But for ICs (mostly anyway) they are pretty uncommon.

That Word Salad dump sounds like something politicians will sometimes do in a media interview. In that case, I guess they want to project an image of having a response, and also hit voter emotional notes and party talking points.

In job interviews, I guess part of the problem could be that we've institutionalized "interview prep" rituals now, and people train for the rituals, including things like the "correct" answers to behavioral questions, and even the right keywords to hit.

So, people not being confident of the answer they're trying to get correct might kinda spam the Word Salad of keywords, either as panicked flailing when they think they should be talking, or because it's a conscious last-resort tactic (like the standardized test prep classes that teach you what to do when you don't know the answer but want to maximize your score anyway).

One time I remember going kinda Word Salad myself, was in a non-interview meeting, when I was escalating a serious issue through official channels, a long time ago. The official in the meeting was (unbeknownst to me, when I was going to a ton of work to get this meeting) secretly misaligned with their ostensible role, visibly very hostile to me from the start, and misunderstanding something. There was insufficient bandwidth to keep up with correcting them, and I realized that the situation had just taken a very bad turn... so I started desperately using rapid vague hand-waving generality high-level summaries. Maybe this Word Salad-ish instance has some overlap with some job interview Word Salads -- it's not necessarily always that the interviewee doesn't know the answer, but maybe the interviewer isn't getting something, or is asking a poor question, or seems negative towards the interviewee?

That behavior is the result of nervousness and being in the stressful and unpleasant situation of having to do interviews at all. I'm not sure there's a lot that can be done to reduce it, honestly.

What a lot of companies could do about it is make their interviews be less totally full of poo.

And if they don't know how to interview people (which apparently many don't), they should err on the side of being less aggressive and overconfident about it.

problem with hypotheticals is most people can give an ideal way to handle a situation, but when the actual scenario presents itself, they deal with it in a non ideal way. I'd like to find out what that non-ideal way is and if the delta is small enough, then that person meets the bar. i can also add supplementary questions if i didn't get enough of a signal, such as the one you presented (i.e what do you think you could have done better)

should add that the more you dig, the better you can identify where truth/embellishments lay. a reaaaaally good liar is rare and you can somewhat tell across differing kinds of quetsions where the red flags are. just need to create a robust system of questioning. this all sounds dystopian as i write it, but unfortunately that is the nature of interviewing

"Say you have a situation like X; how would you approach it?"

This is the opposite to a behavioral question, as given by the context.

Because it empirically doesn't lead to as good hires as asking about past experiences.

I'm very sympathetic to wanting to weed out people who'd CYA in my org. I'd start by conveying our culture, and go from there.

The Amazon interviewing system came across as uncaring big-corporate cattle pipeline. So it was effective in making me withdraw my application. (Maybe that was a good thing for both parties.)

> People have a really hard time faking it. Seriously try it.

I know multiple storytelling-skilled people who I suspect can fake this easily. Most of them seem to go to pains to only use their powers for good. Interestingly, those ones have a very negative reaction when they sense someone being dishonest/manipulative. Though, the one who hasn't always used their powers for good... is CEO for something you use. :)

I wonder whether some of the differences in how people think about interviews are due to varying strengths of the interviewer. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if those storytelling-skilled people are better than average at detecting when someone else is fabricating elements of a narrative.

Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I hear a question like “tell me about a time…” - I simply can’t remember. These routine job-related things just don’t stick out in my mind as something to catalog for some future contrived performance and disappear out of my mind together with other uninteresting and unimportant noise, like a name of the clerk at the DMV or what was advertised during the commercial break when I turned on the TV in my hotel room.

I suspect that people who readily jump in with an answer - are the ones you claim to guard against, those who drilled and trained for giving responses to these interviews.

Exactly

Essentially every single interview/recruiting process is selecting for someone who is good at going through the process, rather than selecting for someone who is actually good for the job

It’s pretty frustrating and incredibly time consuming

You could be the perfect person for a job, but if you haven’t practiced interviewing for a while, you’ll most likely not get the job

And the opposite is true. After enough interviews, you’ll get practice, gain confidence and will start looking like the better candidate, even if you are not the best for the job

I can still remember an interview that consisted of nothing but those questions and I hadn't prepared answers so I either answered "I can't think of a time sorry" or tried to recall one on the spot. Interview was a train-wreck.

Since then I have a bunch written down that I review before I interview. It's like leetcode questions, if you are going to get them during the interview you study for them. You don't expect to naturally solve them without prep.

> if you are going to get them during the interview you study for them

And a lot of interviewers (at least in my limited experience) are quite okay with you referencing your notes during the interview.

… which just serves to reinforce the point that the interview becomes a rehearsed dog and pony show where interviewer asks contrived questions that are compiled and put into an “interview prep course” shilled on Linked In, and interviewee “references notes” they prepared from said course on how to best answer said questions. All done while claiming to look for “genuine insight”.

Like leetcode these sort of interviews got gamed to death and are just a total waste of time

This sounds like an honest attempt to be more objective, but it’s still so subjective that I question the value.

>Vague platitudes: some people have a tendency to fall back on vague generalities in behavioral interviews. “In recruiting, it’s all about communication!” “No org structure is perfect!” If they don’t follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.”

I don’t think that conclusion follows. I think what is usually happening there is that the person is saying what they think you want to hear.

Ironically the phrase “first principles thinker” sounds like vague business speak to me.

The point of interview is not to be objective or something like, the point is to maximize chances for a good hire. Your chosen example is the one of several, and don't forget it is an hour of talking. No one decides on this answer alone.

From other hand if it is so hard to get some kind of behaviour from an interviewee then maybe it is really not their kind of behaviour? Not something they would do naturally without nudging?

Judging by my own experience, it is hard to me to hide my normal way of thinking, it needs some conscious effort, and if given an excuse to talk along my normal line of thought I would do it. And if I was nudged to do it and I didn't because I thought it is not the right time or place for it, then it would be a pathetic inability to read a situation I'm in.

Anyway it is all probabilistic judgements, you cannot get anything certain in a psychology. But if you got a bunch of probabilistic signals then you can decide probabilistically.

And you cannot get anything "objective" in psychology. Everything is subjective, even formalized tests. To this day people have no test that allows to decide if there is a human on the other side of a communication. The best we have is Turing Test which is laughable excuse for a test, not an objective measure. We cannot reliably measure a difference between human and non-human, how could we hope to measure reliably a difference between a good hire and a bad one?

> how could we hope to measure reliably a difference between a good hire and a bad one?

We can’t. That’s my point.

The hubris of those hiring tips & tricks posts never cease to amaze me.

Hubris in the sense that they really think that they are doing something right, so much so that they blog/post about it.

Yet, if I take this post as an example, I notice a lack of self-reflection about bias en why you would interpret behaviour a certain way and not another.

In the end, it's all subjective, and everybody is doing their best, but how valuable is it really?

Especially, if you don't know anything about the company/organization that this person is hiring for?

I'm sad to have scrolled down so far to see your comment. This type of content is scary and a huge red flag for the company the person works at. I mean it's one thing to experiment/improve/etc.. but to come out with 'the right way' (TM) and publicize is straight-up Dunning-Kruger.

Also,

> To get a strong signal from a behavioral interview question I usually need around 15 minutes

I laughed out loud on that one. I also need about 15 minutes to get a strong signal from any interview question for any candidate, because I am biased and then I challenge my bias for the rest of the interview, because I don't think I'm smart enough to have cracked the 'hire the right people' code.

> doing this stuff worked better than not doing it

Better for what? Is there a follow-up on the performance of the hire based on doing vs not doing this? Or can it be rephrased to 'doing this stuff gave me a superior sense of confidence about how well I interview people'

thank you, 100% agreed!

Strong recommend to use these techniques when interviewing.

For example: employees from large companies may claim credit for substantial initiatives but when you drill in they had only a tangential involvement. They don't intend to mislead, thats just the language people speak inside of large companies, and behavioral interviewing can help translate that into more objective information.

From the examples section:

> making their reports feel psychologically safe

> ask how they thought their report felt after the tough convo

> bad answer = not sure, or saying things in a non-supportive / non-generous way

I wouldn’t feel “psychologically safe” with someone who expects me to read minds. How can you ever be sure about how others feel as a manager? I check in with my reports and their colleagues but I’m still never certain. Your reports don’t want to be fired and as such every interaction you have with them is flavored with coercion.

If I asked this question and they didn’t say something to the effect of I’m not sure, that would be an enormous red flag to me that this person doesn’t give others proper agency.

> Ask how big of an effect something had and how they know. (Example: I had a head of technical recruiting tell me “I did X and our outbound response rate improved;” when I asked how much, he said from 11% to 15%, but the sample size was small enough that that could have been random chance!)

Where is this evidence in this post? What beneficial effects did your new behavioral interviewing technique produce?

One thing that I've noticed makes a difference is to be positive and complimentary to the candidate at the start of the interview. Make it clear that you're excited to talk to them and that you are genuinely excited to hear what they have to say.

I've missed out on hiring good people who were nervous or worried about doing a bad job in the interview. I'm sure I still do miss out on some but I've found a method that lets some people feel more comfortable without being overly difficult on me and can live with that.

> To figure out whether they’re real or BSing you, the best way is to get them to tell you a lot of details about the situation—the more you get them to tell you, the harder it will be to BS all the details.

This is exactly the feature that allows people to distinguish a genuine recording from a faked one in Iain Banks' sci-fi series "The Culture"---it's impossible to fake a recording taken by a (machine) Mind because there's too much detail to fabricate.

I've had a few of these interviews. Some do it well by showing genuine interest and maybe they have expertise in the area and it's fun chatting about the project. Other's see it more like cross examination or make it adversarial. I personally get nervous and tense up when I feel attacked. Maybe it's a good way to opt myself out of working in those environments.

This is spot on. Having shadowed my share of interviews, I've found that the attitude of the interviewer is the biggest factor in having a good interview experience.

Making sure interviewers show genuine interest, and are open to different candidate background is one of the most difficult things to guarantee when you have many people interviewing.

My personal experience has been that people dramatically underestimate how easy it is to bs and simultaneously overestimating their ability to tell if someone is bs’ing vs just being nervous/forgetful. Which leads to some hilariously poor outcomes…

I don't know. I don't do a lot of job interviews, but I do a lot of research/expert interviews. To me, there is not much distinction and the major takeaway from this post seems to be, "Preparation and objectives are good when doing research"....umm yeah. You're there to find something out, so putting in the effort to know what that thing is and design the questions that can plausibly get you to the answers you want seems like obvious advice.

To me, if you are using interviews to determine the best way to spend your $salary_money on a person to get $outcome_stuff, then you really can't be walking into it without first introspecting on the knowns, unknowns, and unknowables of a decision. I'd hate to estimate potential team dynamics from interview responses, but I can absolutely validate that the candidate knows facts they need to know. But, it would take the preparatory effort to understand those things myself.

The major thing I take away from this post is the conviction that hiring approaches really don't seem to have progressed.

Is there any way to filter out high-drama people from low-drama ones? I've come to appreciate people who are chill, low-drama, professional, and focused on the tasks at hand. People who, even when they hold strong opinions about something, are willing to work through a group problem-solving process that aims to build consensus and buy-in around the eventual solution.

Can behavioral interviews consistently identify those people, filter out their opposites, with minimal false-positives?

These types of questions are somewhat simple to go into in smaller teams/projects/companies. It becomes very complex in large enterprises where politics and nepotism plays a role. It's all good in theory. My approach is more based on values, morals, priorities, way of life and so on. This has enabled me to gather great individuals working in poor environments...

Any guide or blog post on how to interview that doesn't compare interview notes to performance reviews after hiring someone is basically bullshit.

Anyone can write a blog post about what they think is a good interview but there's no empirical proof that their interview technique works.

True to the extend that you'll never get a real evaluation, because you'll never know how the people who were turned down, would have fared.

That suggests an interesting idea.

Figure out what might be meant by "a good employee." This is hard. Maybe factor in tenure, promotions, projects delivered, peer evaluations, etc. Develop of set of measures for an employee's overall all-time job performance.

Now take each candidate's "interview binder" and map it to some set of ratings (coding proficiency, favorite ice cream flavor, etc.). Set thresholds for each rating initially to reach hiring targets and some vague notion of an acceptable employee profile.

Always allow some small percentage of candidates below the thresholds to receive an offer.

Correlate the interview rating dimensions with the set of employee performance measures as employees work through the job.

Adjust the interview thresholds and experiment with adding or removing dimensions as you learn which things in the interview are correlated with "good employees."

Maybe this is how it's done when it's done properly, but it's the "extend offers to a few people below the cut, and see if they fare worse" idea that I like.

I've almost never been part of an interview so well thought-out, but I continue to hope to be. I find this is also helpful reading for candidates.

Good advice overall, and definitely an improvement over the usual interview boilerplate that candidates have to trod through.

However, in some places it seems to be too cavalier -- in the sense that it suggests we now have a magic prism with which we can "diagnose" the candidate's shallowness or lack of candor. When really they're just saying something basically innocuous. Cause it's like, been a long and mostly boring interview process so far, has it not, and they're trying to slog their way through the canned / pre-programmed (if arguably necessary) part of the process like you are.

For example, under "Things to watch out for":

High standards: if they say there’s nothing they wish they’d done differently, this may also be lack of embarrassing honesty, or not holding themselves to a high standard

Or they had a genuinely shitty experience (with high costs to finances, relationships and/or health) that was 80 percent out of the blue and beyond their control. And they'd really rather just move on. Or if they did tell you the real context and their real reasons for doing X -- you'd very likely ding them (quite likely fatally) for doing so.