An unnamed colleague goes hard in interviews. "How many r's are there in strawberry!". "What's the capital of Ubuntu!". "Why is Mark S from 42 Mulholland drive, Slough, in so much debt!". All of the questions were purely fact-based trivia disguised as logical reasoning. There is no way ab-initio a candidate can derive which African countries have defaulted in the last 5 years. These questions exemplify a bad interview process, a process which particularly for younger candidates does not screen for creative critical thinkers but people who know a thing.

Knowing me knowing you, interviews I can do

Interviewing is extremely important, particularly in tertiary sector jobs. For a company it determines their talent pool, quality, culture. For individuals, as Simon Caro is at pains to point out for Lyndon Johnson, it is a path to power that can be used to facilitate feudal allegiances affording the interviewer leverage¹.

What does make a good interview? Like all good things it seems to be structure and standardisation. Google has done a lot of thinking on this so that we don't have to:

1. Define the mix of characteristics you are looking for and assign a standardised rubric. These may be something like: ability to know at least 26 letters of the alphabet, leadership (in office offsite sports days), and some other lame soulless corporate characteristic so I get my tricolon.
2. Pre-set a standardised set of questions with a standardised set of responses matched to your scoring above. Sadly for the smart Alec interviewers of the world brain teasers as questions appear to be useless².
3. For feely questions ask for:
   • Concrete examples from the past: "what is your greatest weakness". "What is your second greatest weakness". "What is your fourth greatest weakness". "Do you know how to count"³.
   • Hypothetical examples in the future: "in an infinite pool of knee height water, would you rather fight..."
4. For thinky questions ask questions complex enough that candidates can't solve it by drawing on job experience alone but also does not require technical or job-specific skills to respond. This should have a clear initial prompt (imagine your candidate is Chatgpt - this mentality will serve you well in the future should you be promoted!!). Respond to the prompt with defined follow-ups.
5. Keep to time

There is no point in an interviewer just showing off their intelligence. Taking the time to avoid trivia, to be deliberate in what you are looking for and asking about rightsizes interviewing to its purpose - finding the best people. Devising a really great interview process is hard because it requires you to boil down your job. Coming up with really great interview questions is hard because most jobs do not exist in a contextless vacuum. Most people don't do it, they know already that they are the smartest cookie and can ask whatever heckin pub quiz questions they want.

Footnotes

1. In the financial sense.
2. Google Finally Admits That Its Infamous Brainteasers Were Completely Useless for Hiring - The Atlantic
3. Inspired by a true story. These are patently bad, ask something more like "tell me about a time you..."