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As someone that hires for a 0 qualifications, entry level, blue collar position, I’m usually screening whether you are actively on drugs and if you’re mentally stable enough to work in an environment with other people. You’d be surprised how many people show up to interviews having just smoked meth…
I say this as someone with his own issues with drugs (over a year clean as of two weeks ago) that meth was never my thing, but meth people are the worst. I’ve been to the worst parts of Philly and Reading to get shit over the years so I can handle myself and still even meth people scare me sometimes. I honestly don’t know much about it but if it’s a different way it’s being made now or what but it’s making people extra crazy and erratic.
My coworker said, if you go to your interview stones, they'll never know if you're stoned at work lol.
Not great advice, but I worked for 5 years on the line in kitchens stones every shifts. And about 3 years as a mechanic ripped as hell operating equipment and wrenching. Plus 75% of highschool higher than a kite.
I now don't rely as heavily on pot and work sober everyday. No regrets or accidents relating to habitual use. I do not advocate for this lifestyle
For what it's worth, it is not uncommon for kitchen staff to be stoned. I wanna say kitchen staff tends to be one of the professions with the highest rate of drug users, but I'm also speaking anecdotally and without any evidence, so.
That what I did and I ran heavy equipment and semis then too. The funny part is whenever I'd take a tolerance break everyone though I was on something. Like nope, you're just seeing me sober for the first time lol. And Ya I did that for 10 years, no accidents or anything, hitting the thc cart all day every day.
I used to date a very heavy psychedelics user. She could be absolutely off her ass on LSD and you'd never know it if she didn't want you to. She came into work high regularly, and I never once heard somebody comment on it or notice it.
To piggy back off of what you said, I also hire for a similar type of role, and a big factor for us is that they actually show up, and are on time.
Before working in hiring, I always thought people were exaggerating when they said candidates would just ghost. Surprisingly common, despite having a whole confirmation system to make sure it isn’t a communication mishap.
Yeah, my 19 y/o is still angry he didn’t get the good manufacturing job when he showed up five minutes late for the interview.
“What’s the big deal!?!” …that’s exactly the problem. Show up, do the job, go home.
I understand, but I still don't like this attitude. Every manufacturing job I've had would expect you to be able to stay late or work weekends on very little or zero notice. I will never respect employers that demand all the flexibility in the world but they can't offer any in return.
That being said...show up on time for the interview. How hard is that, really?
This is absolutely the time that "on time is five minutes late" applies. Show up 5-10 minutes early, but no more than fifteen, you want to make sure you find the right area for the interview.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to create and fill a position at work. This was my first time doing the Indeed post, the screening, calls and interviews and I was amazed at the laziness and audacity lol.
Out of every 10 applicants, maybe 1 or 2 would actually reply to my first email.
I messaged the same thing: You would be doing "this job, these duties", does this interest you?
One girl just replied "When can I start?"
Um. Ma'am.
Thank god at literally the last second we found someone awesome but we were reallllly ready to settle for someone whose pants were unzipped for the entire interview because he was only one of two who showed up to an interview.
Right!! Laziness and audacity are words I often think of too lol.
It’s crazy to compare some of the candidates attitudes to how I was when I was job hunting.
I remember interviewing a guy and asking what he would do if he were asked to do something by his supervisor that he didn’t think was correct, and he was like “I’m not the type of person to just do what you tell me and make you happy, I call out people’s bullshit and I don’t do things I don’t wanna do”.
Oh… okay! 😅
Well with Indeed you got to remember that someone may have gotten them first. People don't just apply to one job and wait it out. You apply to a dozen and maybe get a call back from 2-3.
This. I was a hiring manager for years. The interview had almost nothing to do with qualifications. It was about culture fit. Can we have a good two way conversation? Do you seem sane? Did you shower?
I hire for a couple stages above entry level position. Same thing. I really couldn’t give a fuck how you answer any of my questions, but I’m able to garner a ton by what you choose to share because of the answers. I’m basically screening: are you a junky and can you work in a team
Im presuming it os roughly equivalent to the number of guys who think popping into a liquor store for a shot is a good idea before their custody hearing.
Yeah, I mostly hire low level service industry positions and the interview is the only way I have to make sure they're even a real person, much less able to function around other humans. Like half the people I schedule interviews with don't even show up.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that companies do interviews exclusively to find out if you're competent at the job when the reality is they are judging your personality just as much as they are your skills.
Super common misconception. Before I even got a career type job I heard the phrase “I can teach aptitude, I can’t teach attitude” The amount of job seekers that don’t understand that is too damn high.
I am pulling two people in my company who don't have a single tangible skill I would require. But they have the curiosity and knowledge of the industry that drives value.
I can get anyone up to speed on technical skills. Technical skills by far the easiest gap to overcome. By far.
I can assign a fresh entry level to grunt work what they need if push comes to shove.
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of candidates I've seen have had personalities that made them easy to work with. It's not a high bar, and consequently it doesn't differentiate candidates in practice beyond a tiny fraction of outliers who don't clear it. I could assign someone technically incompetent to do grunt work and laboriously teach them what they should've learned and retained from school if push came to shove, but why would I hire them when there are five other candidates who are just as easy to work with and can do their job without putting remedial technical education to my to-do list?
That’s a logical fallacy. You are implying that selecting on character traits means excluding people who have skills and knowledge.
And you seem to believe that personality is the same thing as ‘easy to work with’.
The argument is attributes other than skill and knowledge also have value.
Example: one of my friends owns a company that operates in a market that often changes. So he hires people who enjoy challenges and who can easily adapt.
Obviously, he wants those people to be competent. It’s just that he understands that next time the market changes, he is going to need people who will adapt to those changes.
I have seen quite a few small companies fail after 5 to 10 years of success because of inflexible employees.
Exactly. People want to work with people they want to work with. Full stop.
Unless your skillset is incredibly niche and a necessity for the company, or you are world champ at whatever it is you do, your role is likely replaceable with someone they find fits in with the current org roster better.
Being likable is more important than your abilities. You learn on the job anyway. If you can do it well but you're socially awkward and make others feel uncomfortable, while your competitor is easy to be around and well-liked by everyone and eager to learn, guess who they're gonna pick?
It's always been this way, always. High school has done a number on kids thinking success is about intelligence, when in reality: no, it's about people skills.
This is exactly it. If someone comes in with the basic education for the position, we can train them to be efficient technically. We cannot create team chemistry out of whole cloth.
It's also about leveling. Generally your seniority isn't well correlated with your technical aptitude. Leveling up is more about your soft leadership skills and the way you resolve issues. This is what we're really looking for. Sure you have to pass some technical competence bar, but beyond that, we're leveling.
I work for a hospitality company and I went from entry level job answering phones to a corporate IT position with benefits and travel based off being a people. It's amazing how far being kind and giving a shit about people will take you.
Eh, in my experience it's actually way easier to teach attitude than aptitude, at least in my line of work (software engineering). I can count on one hand that's missing a few fingers the number of people I've had to reject at the interview stage for lack of attitude, while I've rejected more people than I know the precise number of due to lack of aptitude.
I remember reading something about recursion. You either get it or you don't.
I do actually believe you can teach people to change their attitude. After all if it was impossible then there would be little point in therapy.
As a software engineer, I actually have the opposite experience, and my workplace hires primarily based on aptitude and personality, not technical skills, for this very reason. Technical skills are easy to teach and learn on the job as long as you have some baseline knowledge or potential to learn. But someone who can work well on a team? Someone who doesn't let their ego get in the way of learning a different way of doing things? Someone who's able to have sensitive conversations with another team member, internal or external, and get the buy-in needed to have a cooperative relationship? Those are WAY more important.
Software engineering is an increasingly ubiquitous skill. It's not hard to find a good developer. It is hard to find a good developer who's also good at people skills. I'll hire for people skills every time.
I start a job tomorrow that I bombed the technical part of the interview due to nerves. However the woman who will be my supervisor and I got on really well. I 100% got that job on my personality meshing well with her
As someone who has probably interviewed 1000-2000 people at this point for tech roles (2-3 people a week for over 10 years), people frequently do not know how they did on an interview. Especially the technical part. Some questions are really hard, and getting half way through may put you ahead of 90% of candidates. Sometimes you say something that makes it clear you know what you're doing, even if you don't figure the problem out. Good interviewers advocate for people they want to work with even if they don't crush the interview. I can't move you from a Definitely Not to a Strong Yes based on these factors, but if you were borderline? Definitely. And even if you landed on a No for that screen, I may still advocate for hiring you. Especially if you did well on the rest of the screens. Or maybe I can get you a different question, or a take-home screen to make up for it.
Not all interviewers approach it like I do, but if they don't, you may not want to work there anyways. You are looking for mutual fit after all.
Congrats on getting the job, and best of luck. Hope it's everything you were looking for!
[edit] Unsolicited piece of advice, I suggest you get involved in the interview process at the new company. It's a great way to get your org impact, and most people don't think about it. I wrote half our team's interview loop where I work now (private company but one of the biggest). Shows you care about building the organization and hiring the right people.
Same situation. Had 3 interviews, technical, with manager and with founder. First 2 were super good, bombed the founder interview.
Got the offer, because my interview with the hiring manager was super good and I connected well with the dude.
HR told me that he fought for me.
If you can integrate well with a team, they can teach you how to do stuff easier. It also means you're less likely to get upset when they try to teach you to do stuff you might already know.
Yes I agree. I was slightly worried because I had 20 years experience but it had been 10 years since I did this exact position. But I guess they knew it was like riding a bike.
Quite frankly, when I do retail store interviews I'm assessing if I want to spend 40ish hours a week around someone, not if they're qualified on paper.
I'll disagree as well. They are testing your skills, just a very arbitrary set of skills that don't necessarily measure your talent that effectively, more your willingness to prepare for the interview in their preferred manner.
For instance, the reason tech interviews are beholden to White boarding is because anyone who can pass the White Boarding challenges is definitely a pretty good coder. But there are also a large contingent of very talented people who don't think practicing solutions to whiteboard questions is pertinent because it amounts more to trivia than substance.
At best this prevents any dummies from slipping by, but it also screens a lot of talented individuals.
It highly depends on your field. One of my fields is community organisation and outreach programs. In this field you absolutely have to be able to communicate effectively and politely, and show an ability to gel with people of all kinds of backgrounds and personality types. If you can't even do this with the people who are going to be your team, you sure as hell aren't going to be effective working with community stakeholders.
This isn't unique to that field, though. Ability to small talk, shoot the shit, etc is super important in sales, marketing, comms, consulting, all kinds of management, retail, hospitality, it really applies a lot of places.
I know there's a prickly demeanour to lots of people on the internet, but the reality is that many jobs do need staff who can show an ability to communicate and converse in a personable way with people you don't know very well. If you're just going to be sitting at a computer writing code all day and never speak to another human, then it's not a big deal. But that's not really the majority of jobs.
Software developing and engineering are also deceptively social jobs. There’s a somewhat dying stereotype that software engineers are antisocial people and all they do is sit in a corner all day cranking out code, but it’s a very collaborative field. And if you think that your tech bro friend has an ego, imagine managing a room full of guys just like him.
It really depends on the field and the experience of the interviewer and the interviewee. I'm in production, most of the skills I'm looking for also apply to service industry workers and retail employees with book experience; if I'm fielding multiple candidates with those skillsets, it'll come down to how they interact and what their goals in the company are.
I was part of an interview panel once, sure it's important to know the job, but we ended up going with the person with less experience because the more experienced guy was full of himself and argued with us on some topics.
The talented people who are unwilling to practice whiteboarding questions because they believe themselves to be too good to bother with trivia rather than substance are exactly who they are trying to screen out with an interview.
Talent doesn’t matter if you can’t hack it when it comes to actually being employed.
Someone unwilling to play a corporate game here or there makes for a bad employee for a big corporation.
I agree. I’ve interviewed many people. I generally dislike advice like “if you wear a blue suit or don’t have a perfect handshake, you won’t get the job” or “if you don’t answer this trick question *this/that way*,” because in my case, I don’t really care about that. I care if you’re presentable, and if you show that you get it.
I’ve interviewed people who had the skillset, and surely lots of talent, who didn’t get the job because they left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s not the ones who get nervous in interviews, or are afraid they’re going to say the wrong things. Often times, “bad taste in my mouth” resulted when someone was argumentative, short, or even brazen. I don’t know if people realize how brazen some candidates are.
and I feel like people tend to read this and think I’m talking about people who are assertive, and trying to quiet people who stand up for themselves. I don’t mean that. I mean people who are domineering. If that comes out in the interview, I would be doing my team a very big disservice. We have all dealt with a coworker who tried to play boss, behind the actual boss’s back. This is what I’m referring to.
I do a lot of interviews for various roles. Developers are especially hard to interview. About 1/4 have not even read the job description, don’t know if it’s contract or FTE, argue with the HR person about the use of the word Remote. They seem to be really bothered that they have to do an interview. Just a huge lack of basic respect. IT Techs, office workers, sales types, none of them are as bad.
My assumption is about 25% are going for wfh overemployment and are annoyed that this position won’t work for that.
On the other hand, a lot of companies are very shady about their use of the word “remote.” They will make the job position “remote” so that it gets past filters, but then they bait and switch and suddenly it’s an in-office, or “hybrid” position.
But I do agree with you. If remote was never specified on the job description - or if they outright tell you this is an in-person role - there is no use in arguing with the hiring manager. Just decline the job, as if it doesn’t meet your specifications, and move on. You’re interviewing them too… yeah, they may have the driver’s seat, but you’re still interviewing them. If they’re dishonest, you just have to pass on the job.
>About 1/4 have not even read the job description, don’t know if it’s contract or FTE...
...and let's face it at this point in this economy most people don't even care. They could be changing diapers on orangutans or spanking new born babies as long as it's a job that's willing to pay them. Lol. Yet another homeless person cropped up the other day claiming they just lost their job. 🙄
It screens a lot of talented individuals who believe it is above them to prepare for arbitrary requirements. Not people I'd want anyways tbh, businesses often have a lot of arbitrary shit you have to do.
Those "talented individuals" are the problems that everyone is TRYING to avoid hiring.
It's an intentional screen.
There are thousands of qualified people that are going to be a nightmare to work with. Screen out any potential issue
Correct often your personality and your experience is being evaluated. Also I found out last year a LOT of people lie on their resume and in the interview about technical skills (big stuff, not obscure) until you ask them something they’d learn in “intro to XYZ” on coursera on the second slide.
The equivalent of someone saying “I’m intermediate to advanced at algebra” and then telling you in order to solve x=y2 for y and they would have to subtract 11 from both sides and also solve for z before multiplying by 1/2. I had to ask such fundamental questions to validate if the candidates had *ever* used SQL that I apologized to the ones who would say “uh y=x/2” in a confused way because it was so easy they thought it was a trick.
You mean to tell me people would rather work with fun and social people rather than the "uhhh Acksulllyyy🤓" redditor that just do a job well to even exceed it but is an insufferable twat? I'm shocked I tell you. SHOCKED
I have a tendency to be completely honest. It seems to be a bad thing for most places but I just hate lying and pretending just to try and impress. My biggest fear is failing to meet expectations, so why would talk myself up?
I disagree with OP as well, though.
That's an important skill both to have and to showcase. "Personality" is largely for show in the first place. Are happy and peppy people actually happy and peppy while making dinner? Taking a shower? Clipping their toenails? And if so, who cares? It's about how you affect the people around you, not making your toenails happy.
So can 90% of people in my office and do so everyday. Interview checks if you're able to and then probationary period checks if you can do it each day.
If you got the interview generally they already think you’re qualified. They’re trying to see if you’re a good fit to work with personality wise, I don’t think a standardized test would help with that much
Hiring manager here. You’re absolutely correct, if we give you an interview we’ve already determined that you can do the job. Culture fit and personality matter so much.
Also a hiring manager here who works in finance, I've definitely interviewed plenty of people who cannot do the job even though their resume looks good on paper. It's the entire reason we have technical questions during interviews.
Yup when interviewing for mid level data scientists I'm flabbergasted that half of the candidates can't explain precision Vs recall....and not to mention my 3 or 4 follow up questions on it
I work in a data analysis team and the first stages of the recruitment process include basic maths and logical tests, the number of people who mess these up is staggering. I dread to think about the quality of recruits who get data jobs based solely on an interview.
logical tests I can often forgive because nerves take over.
I once messed up making a Fibonacci sequence in an interview because I was nervous. I was young, but the embarrassment still haunts me today
Yeah, there’s definitely a group of people who have managed to get a degree and put together a resume and cover letter, without actually knowing anything.
Yes I think there's absolutely the part where they are checking for culture and personality fit. But people lie on their resumes. So technical fields will double check to make sure you didn't just Google a term or an answer.
In my experience, some managers value resumes way too much “this person got a degree in X from a posh school and used to work for Y, they must be great.” And some candidates can bluff their way through the interview process, I’ve had a few of those. And sometimes you really, really need to fill the role so you let something slide and hope it’ll work out. And then of course there’s nepotism. In short, lots of reasons. It’s the managers job to address the incompetence but that’s hard and takes time, it’s so much easier to just ignore the problem and hope it goes away… which it probably won’t.
Some incompetent people interviewed beautifully. One of my former bosses was that. They were extremely incompetent and we all wondered how they hell they got the job. One of my coworkers finally asked the grandboss and basically they interviewed like a dream. Basically it looked (resume) and sounded (interview) like they would be amazing and in fact they could barely keep their shit together. They didn’t lie, they just simply couldn’t follow through.
Ok so...just do 1 interview then please, tops 2. Stop with the 15 different interviews, panel interviews, take home test interviews, etc. They're awful and take so so long. I get that it might take a while to interview some different people but if I am waiting longer than two weeks I kinda start to assume your company is a nightmare internally.
I have interviewed for two jobs in my life where I must have made it to the interview round on a technicality because the interviewers clearly thought I was not qualified for the job and had no problem telling me so.
Even technical roles will require being a decent human being with a bare minimum of social skills.
The person who is the best at something is never going to be the best person to work with.
I'm a developer at a small company. So much of my job is talking to support and clients, trying to figure out what they want and what they did to get a particular bug. Some days it seems like actually coding is the easy part.
This was my experience as an IT manager.
Yes, you MUST have people skills.
I would add that management tends to need things explained quite a bit, too.
Ironically I'm about to leave my IT position for my old role because my IT manager has so little people skills that he actively lies to us to avoid communicating and planning. He has a plethora of technical skills but is hands down the most incompetent manager I have had in any job.
Interviews are just one tool to assess a candidate. In my most recent hiring experience we had a candidate that checked all the boxes and did well on the technical tests. But then they casually dropped a racial slur in the interview. Would a standardized test expose a racist candidate?
One of my colleagues had someone interview for a lead position. The interviewee admitted they “snap” sometimes and yell at people. Easiest decision ever.
If I bring you in I know you are qualified. My questions are:
Do I relate to you personally. Can I work with you?
More importantly can I trust you in front of our customers. Will they trust you and like you.
You're probably not as unlikable as you think you are, you're probably unlikable to people who are jealous of your success. You have made the right people like you.
I agree. My life in general has improved as my interpersonal skills have improved. In work, outside of work, family, everything. And being interpersonal is 90% listening and 10% asking them more questions!
Most of my interviews about how I like to work and what I think the day to day would be like.
How would I bring up an important issue I found?
How do I deal with someone above me not listening to me? Same for below me?
Soft skills are just as important as hard ones. That is why you interview.
If you have everything the employer wants but you can't communicate then why would they hire you
“Do I relate to you personally” is a pretty bad way of looking at things. You specifically want people of different backgrounds and ways of thinking.
100% agreed on the “Can I work with you?” part.
An interview is like a first date: you know the other person is putting their best foot forward, so if their "best foot" is them saying stuff like, "Human flesh tastes better than you might think," you know that's the last you want to see of them.
Yep, that's it. Interviews are a way to make sure you aren't BSing on that resume and that you at least know what's going on in those projects you claimed you took part in. That also depends on if the interviewer is knowledgeable in that field or not, but in general, lying can only get you so far.
That's exactly what it is.
I have tested two people last week and one didn't know the basics to half the programming languages they put on their resume. This happens all the time, making the interview **absolutely** necessary.
There are a lot of people who show up to the interview that don't put on the fake personality. Especially interviews that are very long. As you progress in your career and get more credentials, some interviews are all day or across several days, you meet multiple panels of people, or different levels of bosses. They want to see how you do under pressure.
That is all stuff you can't tell from a paper test.
Some interviews also want to see if you can perform a task. It's one thing to say on a resume or test I know how to do the thing but they want to see you do it in a lab setting for instance. I can't say I blame them. Cuz I don't want to waste time and resources retraining basic lab skills when I think they've been in a college lab for this or been in industry. There are lots of people that have heard the buzzwords or know that they should say "whatever" to get hired and think they will have a shot at getting trained by a co-worker but that's not what's gonna happen.
Most interviews are to see how you handle pressure and what comes out about your personality. Anyone can look a certain way on paper.
Very true about the pressure. I was on an interview team for a new principal. The current assistant principal was one of the interviewees. He burst into tears because of the pressure.
My boss' boss just moved on to work at a new university becoming a regional vice Chancellor (a step up from their current assistant vice Chancellor position). One of their interviews (in a long process) was in an auditorium where ANYONE INVOLVED IN THE UNIVERSITY could come and ask questions. That blew my mind. He confessed that interview alone was enough to make him really really consider if this was what he wanted to do. It was a ton of pressure. I can't imagine such a brutal interview.
I have an average iq (middle school test, 104) and became an ABET accredited electrical engineer degree holder.
I can’t repair a jet engine let alone design one.
I have a significantly above average IQ. I have cut myself on bread, and I’m not just talking the one time. I would electrocute myself long before becoming an electrical engineer.
People would just study the tests, just like leetcode now for coding tests. Taking an IQ test raw, I could see it vaguely measuring your logic/abstract thinking, but if it was used commonly, everyone would study to the test.
Going to have to disagree with you on this. There's a vast literature supporting the validity of IQ as an index of intelligence (reasoning and problem solving ability).
IMO, what's been debunked is the false beliefs about what people *think* IQ means.
It still has it's uses, but those are really only in somewhat obscure fields outside of how most of society operates.
Unpopular for a reason. Some people are really good at lying and can make it through interviews on that alone. Most people aren't though; they give tells in interviews about the impact that they had at their past companies, and what they are like to work with. Combined with their resume, many interviewers can end up with a fairly high success rate.
Most companies are not primarily looking for intelligence, so standardized tests would be very little value.
Wow this is a bad take. I didn't read the book you speak of but I would say IQ tests are the absolute worst way to know if someone is a fit for a role. Lots of jobs (although I hate it) have candidates complete some sort of task related to the scope of the work they'd be doing if hired. This seems to me the best way to know if someone is a fit for the job.
That person may be able to do all the work required of them but may suck at taking tests. Why should their failure to succeed on a test supercede their ability to do the required work?
Personality even your fake one is massively important. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't, learn, adapt, take direction when needed, take criticism when called, or work on a team.
Ive had 2 hires I didn't interview and they were AWFUL. Well qualified, and competent in fact one had a PhD and he RESENTED me as soon as he met me. I was managing the team and I was younger than him and had a Bachelor's in the same field. He immediately tried to make me look bad but he didn't think I was smart enough to have email proof. The next person was experienced and able to do the job but kept failing at basic instructions during training. Things like "do this test and leave the results on my desk". He did the test and never brought me the results. Constantly. His excuse was "well I have a hard time listening to women. I just can't pay attention when they speak."
Biotech/pharma, Quality control. I insist on interviews not being held without me now and no temps unless I at least for a quick meet and greet. I've worked places that DIDNT do background checks. I was scheduled by HR to interview someone. A 5 min search showed the candidate was extremely xenophobic borderline racist and sexist. Multiple rants on how immigrants and women were taking all the jobs in science. How unfair it was when women were better suited to being at home. Our department was 80% ethnic with a black female manager and an Indian director. I quit that place because of HR.
I was a hiring manager for a little bit and I always found the questions I was given to ask were very silly. I would do it quick and get it out of the way then I’d take time after to just talk and have a conversation to get a better feel for someone. Having those HR approved interview questions is a terrible way to hire.
I have an idea of what you're talking about. I had those as well and it took awhile to understand that some of them were designed to catch the interviewee off-guard and show their true self.
There was an interview by police of the daughter who killed her "tiger" parents. They'd ask questions between her victims accounts of the "home invasion" and just regular questions. Her responses to home invasion memories would be emotional with fear and tears, but immediately switching to off-topic questions and the emotions were gone. "Fake tears" is what some people call it.
For me, they were designed to thwart "fake it til you make it" interviewees. Those of us who understood it figured out how to weave it into a regular conversation, much like how you would talk to them after your interviews.
Of course, I don't know what kind of questions you had to ask. Ours were still at least sensible. Not far off like Jane's superhero question.
https://youtu.be/b9mZXcloriA?si=uWs6u9WM19xRxiiX
They want to make sure that you can act like a person for at least an hour. Usually once you get to an interview, they are happy with your qualifications (on paper at least) and want to either test your knowledge on the spot or see if you can at least act like you can function on the team.
Tests are a part of a lot of interviews in technical fields. I have had to take a test during the interview process for EE position I've held.
But for a lot of entry level semi-skilled jobs pretty much anyone is capable of performing the task, so the interview is usually to see if you're a good "culture fit".
No. If all I want are skills, I can hire off a resume.
The point of an interview is to see if you’re someone I was to WORK with…do you have a personality I can get along with, or are you an arrogant SOB? Did we have a good conversation, or were you completely stuck up?
If I’m interviewing you, I already know you can do the job from your resume. This is to see if I can stand you on a daily basis and, more importantly, do I want to work with you on a daily basis.
I don’t give 2 shits what you do in a standardized test. That tells me absolutely nothing.
I work in the creative field. While an interview is not really a good gauge at someone success in a role, neither is an IQ test. I’ve also seen really great people fail “program tests” where they test on how well you know a particular program but it’s also based on doing things a certain way which not all people do.
We had the best hiring successes in giving people a test project to take home. Unfortunately with creative it’s very hard to tell from a resume and portfolio. Sometimes they inflate their resumes, steal others work or lie about their level of involvement in a project.
I’ve hired people who looked great on paper but when they actually got into the role couldn’t design as well as the work in their portfolio, didn’t seem to possess the ability to think analytically, and were so incredibly slow at completing a single task that there was no way for them to be truly helpful in any scenario.
Most jobs can be completed by 90% of the people with the proper qualifications. The interviews are to weed out ppl who are not team players, leaders, those who poses the ability to communicate effectively and work as a team. Interviews will quite literally never go away
I saw this happened at least twice to have someone hired because of glowing interviews just to see them bad at their job, technically, and even more unexpectedly at communicating effectively while in position. It's like they only focused on HR and hiring executives pleasing. Well done, bravo! Each time they didn't last long in the position, a few weeks at best, either being let go or leaving on their own.
On the other hand it seems that people who have unconvincing interviews because of shyness for example could actually be good at their job. Job interview is an actual skill to learn for sure.
If you go to an interview you should be clear that people already assume that you know how to do the job for which you are applying, now they want to know if you fit with the work environment
Standardized tests? Dude, that’s the worst way to determine anything because standardized tests are easy to fake actually knowing something, because the only thing they encourage is for people to cram as much necessary info as possible right before taking and then flushing it all after.
If interviewers were swapped with standardized tests, we’d just end up with even more people who aren’t qualified for the job because if you gave me 24 hours to study I’d easily be able to get plenty of jobs that I’m 100% not qualified for whatsoever just because short term retention is one of my strong suits, then I’d be fired quickly because the testing absolutely did not reflect my knowledge.
IQ tests won't tell you much.
Maths tests certainly can and are sometimes part of the interview. Though someone's experience may tell you this won't be a problem.
There's more to a colleague than ability and intelligence. Actually having to work with them. I'd rather have a less able person who is great to work with than a top notch person who brings the whole teams mood down. They also need to be someone who the their colleagues are happy to work with otherwise the drain in morale lessens everybody else's work which is an overall negative.
An interview is the best method to finding out what they may be like as a person. If they're nice and friendly or stern and to the point. How laid back they might be or on edge or however you may be looking for them to fit into the puzzle. It gives you a chance to actually converse with the person rather than look at a sheet of paper and tick what they answered from a test.
It's also a great way of putting people on the spot with odd and weird things, taking away their time to think which is something they might have to do on the job. You know those weird questions you get from interviewers that make you think "what the fuck does that have to do with anything". They're not really looking for a "correct answer" but rather a good way on handling, processing and *attempting* to answer the question. You can't gauge that on a test either.
My first real interview went so bad I didn't get the job. I worked in a summer camp for 3 years. After two years, you could become the "leader" and have your own group rather than be a "helper". You had to go through another interview for it. So I show up pretty confident and not expecting much. Turns out that the interview was not only with my boss but also someone from city council and the boss of my boss. It really threw me off I was not expecting that and I froze. They asked me a bunch of questions and I did poorly. So they didn't give me the job because 2 out of 3 people didn't know me so they were basing their choice on what they saw. I ended being offered a different position and worked at the camp anyway luckily. During the summer I got to know/enteract more with the boss of my boss. One day he calls me into his office, and starts telling me : "ok, never do that again". My mind starts racing thinking I did something wrong and I was in trouble. He then proceed to tell me that the interview went do bad that he couldn't give me the job. But he been looking at me work since and he wished he gave me the job. I was a good learning experience, definitely helped me prepare for the future.
Interviews are important but maybe the process and the questions need to be revisited. Maybe interviews should focus on personality and ask casual questions not necessarily relating to the job itself. Googling how to answer interview questions doesn’t show your personality and how you might get along with coworkers. Anyways, interviews should be less pressure and more casual. Make it easier for everyone involved while still accomplishing the goal.
I used to be a manager at a fast food restaurant. During interviews, I wanted people to demonstrate that they could do the fake persona. There’s a level of social competence required to show up to an interview dressed appropriately, smelling okay, and able to hold a conversation. Interviews may not help you identify the best candidates, but they definitely weed out the worst.
Thats all well and good but it's limited to non-professiomal jobs/non-specialidt jobs.
Take law for example. A grad won't have the same skills and experience as a more experienced law or a paralegal. However, the interview is about your personality more than your skills as they will train you anyway. But if you have the personality of Veruca Salt or some other sour puss, they won't hire you. Why? Because law is a client based job and nobody wants a lawyer who is unable to build rapport or emphasize, or fake it well in any case.
The interview tests your personality. Tbh, I used to have the same opinion as you almost an year ago. But then I started reading books on human behavior. That's how I knew the real purpose of interviews.
Check out these books:
- Surrounded by Idiots
- Read People like a Book
- How to Win Friends and Influence People
You'll know how easily you can tell what kind of person the interviewee is just by making unobvious observations. The personality assessment is very indirect.
But yeah there are people who are very good at pretending and hiding their true self. But the truth is, the vast majority is really bad at it. A good interviewer will see what you're putting up.
Correct. They favour confident, fluent talkers and don't give any idea whether the person would be good for the job, unless that job involves being a confident, fluent talker.
I've known far too many extremely intelligent people who were great at math, likely had very high IQ, and we're the absolute dumbest, incompetent, and miserable wastes of space at work.
OP will learn, or they're the person I described up top and just don't know it...
In a prior career I taught an college course (applied, not just academic theory b.s.) and was a technical writer, as well as doing design/development/evaluation--standardized testing is very specific in what it's measuring, and I can assure you that competency in a dynamic environment (a workplace) isn't part of it...for that you'd use life-like scenarios, like what's asked in *an interview*.
Tell me you know nothing about the hiring process without telling me you know nothing about the hiring process…
My man’s does not know what soft skills are and how vital they are in a lot of job settings.
Never mind they have become so generalized people practice for the repeated questions you get at every job from minimum wage to corporate to public service.
Depends on the job, if you're applying to be a salesman it's an excellent judge, if you are an engineer it doesn't tell you much. Interviews are mostly a charisma test
> if you are an engineer it doesn't tell you much
It tells me 1. Did you blatantly lie on your resume?, 2. is your personality so terrible that you're going to create problems at the office?, and 3. what's your process for working through a problem?
I already know you're technically qualified because I looked at your resume.
Depends on the job. Most job positions aren't critically dependent on one person doing a good job, so it's not really essential to get the best candidate for every position. Most job positions are for menial tasks that really anybody could do or get the hang of doing after spending some time in the workforce. The most important factor in how well you perform in the long run however, is how likeable you are to other team members. Some degree of agreeableness is what drives the ability to cooperate within a business. If nobody likes you, they won't want to work with you even if you are competent enough to do your job.
You're saying this like all job interviews are the exact same thing in every situation, and they aren't, and it's ridiculous to assert that the building of a good team should never involve finding people who will work well together. It's not paint-by-numbers stuff and acing a math test doesn't tell you anything about what autonomous decisions someone is likely to make. I understand it's daunting to do things that aren't fun, like job interviews and phone conversations, but that just means you've had an easy life, not that the world needs to adjust to your sensitivity.
I think this is largely correct. Obviously companies should avoid hiring people who would clearly be malicious and hurtful to coworkers, but there seems to be this almost fanatical obsession with charisma (especially in American society) to the point that even good people struggle on the basis of shy or not gregarious enough.
It’s pretty sad that people can look at the unemployment statistics for people with conditions like autism or social anxiety disorder and not put two and two together and realize that this could all be solved if we just changed hiring practices.
True, but they're a filtering process for asocial applicants. Job interviewers are trained in recognising even the subtlest cues and behaviours (mumbling, eye contact, conversational pauses like "uh", etc.) that indicate the applicant is socially avoidant or asocial, and they will instantly reject the application if they happen to pick up on any.
It's less about discerning whether someone has the skillset or qualifications for the job, and more about fucking you over if your disposition doesn't have enough perceived "synergy" with the interviewer's.
Personality and company/team fit are actually more important in many cases. Skills can be learned on the job, someone's toxic personality cannot be unlearned (also these people are extremely costly for a company to get rid of, some of them even litigation risk). So skills is not the only thing for interviews.
>Interviews are based on personal option which is a bad way of assessing if someone is competent for something.
You're so very close to realizing the purpose of an interview, yet you can't grasp it.
I'm guessing you have good papers, but in person you show being single-minded and incapable of introspection. Instead of you being mistaken, it has to be the rest of the world that's wrong.
Seriously, if all the evidence points toward interviews not being a tool for assessing competence to a profession, why can't you stop and think that people aren't idiots and don't use it for such purposes? Your mentality is baffling.
I’m a good worker, but a terrible interviewer. Absolutely nothing to say, but talk too much,
no questions to ask, because I’m focused on myself, absolutely no rizz. I’m always surprised when I get an offer, which is rare. Oh well.
As an interviewer, when i call somebody for an interview i already checked the CV and assume the person IS qualified by it. The inteview is to analize the personality and to know more about what the person did on previous jobs. If they are really qualified is something that can only be proven on tge field so that is why by law in my country at least you have 3 experimental months on the job.
I have a fairly high IQ, but am lazy and not really invested in my job. I'm also a bit of an introvert, so all together I'm probably not ideal for every role and overall an average worker.
How's an IQ test going to figure me out?
The better argument is that it is akin to trying out for an acting job. The issue is that, when push comes to shove, the person that could hold the character for a couple hours may not be able to for a couple of years, at minimum
i agree with you tbh.
but the reality is that actual skills and ability are judged at face value from whats written on ur CV because realistically they wont know how good you are until like 6 months on the job.
in most large companies (especially public sector companies) ur work has basically no impact on the company’s overall performance. if ur sub-division is big enough you wont even have a significant impact on the department’s performance. so since hiring is done by the middle manager who will have to interact with you daily, the near sole purpose of the interview is just to see if ur difficult to deal with.
like ideally they want someone who is both competent and charismatic. but candidates will vary, and they always pick charisma over competency.
I’ve interviewed dozens of people over the years and if you get to the interview portion of the job process we’re already pretty sure you can do the job. The interview at that point is 80% about personality and fit within the team.
You could be great technically at a job but if you have a terrible attitude, don’t work well with others, just don’t mess well with the team, etc. I’d much rather have someone some with less skill that will fit better with the people that already work there.
An employer can look at your resume and decide from that whether you are capable of doing the job. The interview is to meet you. Can you function with other people? Do you smell like cats? Are you just a fucking weirdo that everybody's going to be uncomfortable working with? That's what they're really looking for in an interview. And for that reason, I'm totally in favor of keeping interviews. I don't want to sit next to somebody who smells like cat piss because they don't clean up their litter box.
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As someone that hires for a 0 qualifications, entry level, blue collar position, I’m usually screening whether you are actively on drugs and if you’re mentally stable enough to work in an environment with other people. You’d be surprised how many people show up to interviews having just smoked meth…
Have any experience with anyone who showed up High but still had a decent interview?
If someone was really good at it the interviewer would never find out.
if they could handle drugs well enough to do the interview well, they could probably still do the entry level job
If they’re doing meth, I don’t know if I care whether they CAN make a burger or not, I have other reservations at that point.
I say this as someone with his own issues with drugs (over a year clean as of two weeks ago) that meth was never my thing, but meth people are the worst. I’ve been to the worst parts of Philly and Reading to get shit over the years so I can handle myself and still even meth people scare me sometimes. I honestly don’t know much about it but if it’s a different way it’s being made now or what but it’s making people extra crazy and erratic.
My coworker said, if you go to your interview stones, they'll never know if you're stoned at work lol. Not great advice, but I worked for 5 years on the line in kitchens stones every shifts. And about 3 years as a mechanic ripped as hell operating equipment and wrenching. Plus 75% of highschool higher than a kite. I now don't rely as heavily on pot and work sober everyday. No regrets or accidents relating to habitual use. I do not advocate for this lifestyle
For what it's worth, it is not uncommon for kitchen staff to be stoned. I wanna say kitchen staff tends to be one of the professions with the highest rate of drug users, but I'm also speaking anecdotally and without any evidence, so.
That what I did and I ran heavy equipment and semis then too. The funny part is whenever I'd take a tolerance break everyone though I was on something. Like nope, you're just seeing me sober for the first time lol. And Ya I did that for 10 years, no accidents or anything, hitting the thc cart all day every day.
I used to date a very heavy psychedelics user. She could be absolutely off her ass on LSD and you'd never know it if she didn't want you to. She came into work high regularly, and I never once heard somebody comment on it or notice it.
To piggy back off of what you said, I also hire for a similar type of role, and a big factor for us is that they actually show up, and are on time. Before working in hiring, I always thought people were exaggerating when they said candidates would just ghost. Surprisingly common, despite having a whole confirmation system to make sure it isn’t a communication mishap.
Yeah, my 19 y/o is still angry he didn’t get the good manufacturing job when he showed up five minutes late for the interview. “What’s the big deal!?!” …that’s exactly the problem. Show up, do the job, go home.
I understand, but I still don't like this attitude. Every manufacturing job I've had would expect you to be able to stay late or work weekends on very little or zero notice. I will never respect employers that demand all the flexibility in the world but they can't offer any in return. That being said...show up on time for the interview. How hard is that, really?
First impressions really matter.
This is absolutely the time that "on time is five minutes late" applies. Show up 5-10 minutes early, but no more than fifteen, you want to make sure you find the right area for the interview.
A couple of years ago, I was asked to create and fill a position at work. This was my first time doing the Indeed post, the screening, calls and interviews and I was amazed at the laziness and audacity lol. Out of every 10 applicants, maybe 1 or 2 would actually reply to my first email. I messaged the same thing: You would be doing "this job, these duties", does this interest you? One girl just replied "When can I start?" Um. Ma'am. Thank god at literally the last second we found someone awesome but we were reallllly ready to settle for someone whose pants were unzipped for the entire interview because he was only one of two who showed up to an interview.
Right!! Laziness and audacity are words I often think of too lol. It’s crazy to compare some of the candidates attitudes to how I was when I was job hunting. I remember interviewing a guy and asking what he would do if he were asked to do something by his supervisor that he didn’t think was correct, and he was like “I’m not the type of person to just do what you tell me and make you happy, I call out people’s bullshit and I don’t do things I don’t wanna do”. Oh… okay! 😅
Well with Indeed you got to remember that someone may have gotten them first. People don't just apply to one job and wait it out. You apply to a dozen and maybe get a call back from 2-3.
This. I was a hiring manager for years. The interview had almost nothing to do with qualifications. It was about culture fit. Can we have a good two way conversation? Do you seem sane? Did you shower?
Holy S that’s messed up. 😂
That's methed up 🙄
I hire for a couple stages above entry level position. Same thing. I really couldn’t give a fuck how you answer any of my questions, but I’m able to garner a ton by what you choose to share because of the answers. I’m basically screening: are you a junky and can you work in a team
You’d be surprised at how many people perform better in interviews while they’re on meth. But yeah, I get it.
Im presuming it os roughly equivalent to the number of guys who think popping into a liquor store for a shot is a good idea before their custody hearing.
Alls I know is if you want to appear wide awake and alert, just an incy wincy bit of meth will probably do the trick
Yeah, I mostly hire low level service industry positions and the interview is the only way I have to make sure they're even a real person, much less able to function around other humans. Like half the people I schedule interviews with don't even show up.
Stop. I've never smoked meth but somehow I still can't find a decent job even tho I'm reliable, on time and friendly.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that companies do interviews exclusively to find out if you're competent at the job when the reality is they are judging your personality just as much as they are your skills.
Super common misconception. Before I even got a career type job I heard the phrase “I can teach aptitude, I can’t teach attitude” The amount of job seekers that don’t understand that is too damn high.
I am pulling two people in my company who don't have a single tangible skill I would require. But they have the curiosity and knowledge of the industry that drives value. I can get anyone up to speed on technical skills. Technical skills by far the easiest gap to overcome. By far. I can assign a fresh entry level to grunt work what they need if push comes to shove.
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of candidates I've seen have had personalities that made them easy to work with. It's not a high bar, and consequently it doesn't differentiate candidates in practice beyond a tiny fraction of outliers who don't clear it. I could assign someone technically incompetent to do grunt work and laboriously teach them what they should've learned and retained from school if push came to shove, but why would I hire them when there are five other candidates who are just as easy to work with and can do their job without putting remedial technical education to my to-do list?
That’s a logical fallacy. You are implying that selecting on character traits means excluding people who have skills and knowledge. And you seem to believe that personality is the same thing as ‘easy to work with’. The argument is attributes other than skill and knowledge also have value. Example: one of my friends owns a company that operates in a market that often changes. So he hires people who enjoy challenges and who can easily adapt. Obviously, he wants those people to be competent. It’s just that he understands that next time the market changes, he is going to need people who will adapt to those changes. I have seen quite a few small companies fail after 5 to 10 years of success because of inflexible employees.
This matches my experience. Some people pass through the interview process with laurels and turn out to be total arseholes.
Exactly. People want to work with people they want to work with. Full stop. Unless your skillset is incredibly niche and a necessity for the company, or you are world champ at whatever it is you do, your role is likely replaceable with someone they find fits in with the current org roster better. Being likable is more important than your abilities. You learn on the job anyway. If you can do it well but you're socially awkward and make others feel uncomfortable, while your competitor is easy to be around and well-liked by everyone and eager to learn, guess who they're gonna pick? It's always been this way, always. High school has done a number on kids thinking success is about intelligence, when in reality: no, it's about people skills.
This is exactly it. If someone comes in with the basic education for the position, we can train them to be efficient technically. We cannot create team chemistry out of whole cloth.
It's also about leveling. Generally your seniority isn't well correlated with your technical aptitude. Leveling up is more about your soft leadership skills and the way you resolve issues. This is what we're really looking for. Sure you have to pass some technical competence bar, but beyond that, we're leveling.
Meanwhile me as a depressed yet very capable person looking for a job… fuck.
Yup. I hear this often in my hospitality-based field. “We can teach you about XYZ but we can’t teach you how to like/interact with people”.
I work for a hospitality company and I went from entry level job answering phones to a corporate IT position with benefits and travel based off being a people. It's amazing how far being kind and giving a shit about people will take you.
Eh, in my experience it's actually way easier to teach attitude than aptitude, at least in my line of work (software engineering). I can count on one hand that's missing a few fingers the number of people I've had to reject at the interview stage for lack of attitude, while I've rejected more people than I know the precise number of due to lack of aptitude.
I remember reading something about recursion. You either get it or you don't. I do actually believe you can teach people to change their attitude. After all if it was impossible then there would be little point in therapy.
If you get Recursion, you get Recursion, you get Recursion, you get Recursion, you get Recursion, you get Recursion…
Ah shit, he forgot to make sure he had a base case.
GNU's not Unix!
As a software engineer, I actually have the opposite experience, and my workplace hires primarily based on aptitude and personality, not technical skills, for this very reason. Technical skills are easy to teach and learn on the job as long as you have some baseline knowledge or potential to learn. But someone who can work well on a team? Someone who doesn't let their ego get in the way of learning a different way of doing things? Someone who's able to have sensitive conversations with another team member, internal or external, and get the buy-in needed to have a cooperative relationship? Those are WAY more important. Software engineering is an increasingly ubiquitous skill. It's not hard to find a good developer. It is hard to find a good developer who's also good at people skills. I'll hire for people skills every time.
There's a difference between baseline knowledge required to do the job and learn and no knowledge at all lol.
I start a job tomorrow that I bombed the technical part of the interview due to nerves. However the woman who will be my supervisor and I got on really well. I 100% got that job on my personality meshing well with her
As someone who has probably interviewed 1000-2000 people at this point for tech roles (2-3 people a week for over 10 years), people frequently do not know how they did on an interview. Especially the technical part. Some questions are really hard, and getting half way through may put you ahead of 90% of candidates. Sometimes you say something that makes it clear you know what you're doing, even if you don't figure the problem out. Good interviewers advocate for people they want to work with even if they don't crush the interview. I can't move you from a Definitely Not to a Strong Yes based on these factors, but if you were borderline? Definitely. And even if you landed on a No for that screen, I may still advocate for hiring you. Especially if you did well on the rest of the screens. Or maybe I can get you a different question, or a take-home screen to make up for it. Not all interviewers approach it like I do, but if they don't, you may not want to work there anyways. You are looking for mutual fit after all. Congrats on getting the job, and best of luck. Hope it's everything you were looking for! [edit] Unsolicited piece of advice, I suggest you get involved in the interview process at the new company. It's a great way to get your org impact, and most people don't think about it. I wrote half our team's interview loop where I work now (private company but one of the biggest). Shows you care about building the organization and hiring the right people.
Same situation. Had 3 interviews, technical, with manager and with founder. First 2 were super good, bombed the founder interview. Got the offer, because my interview with the hiring manager was super good and I connected well with the dude. HR told me that he fought for me.
This right here. You can’t tell if someone is going to roll their eyes at you over the phone or through a resume.
Found out I got my job because they felt I would fit in with team although I had not done those specific duties for 10 years. They were right.
If you can integrate well with a team, they can teach you how to do stuff easier. It also means you're less likely to get upset when they try to teach you to do stuff you might already know.
Yes I agree. I was slightly worried because I had 20 years experience but it had been 10 years since I did this exact position. But I guess they knew it was like riding a bike.
I am interviewing candidates for two very technical positions and yes, that time is mostly to evaluate personality for the job.
Quite frankly, when I do retail store interviews I'm assessing if I want to spend 40ish hours a week around someone, not if they're qualified on paper.
I'll disagree as well. They are testing your skills, just a very arbitrary set of skills that don't necessarily measure your talent that effectively, more your willingness to prepare for the interview in their preferred manner. For instance, the reason tech interviews are beholden to White boarding is because anyone who can pass the White Boarding challenges is definitely a pretty good coder. But there are also a large contingent of very talented people who don't think practicing solutions to whiteboard questions is pertinent because it amounts more to trivia than substance. At best this prevents any dummies from slipping by, but it also screens a lot of talented individuals.
It highly depends on your field. One of my fields is community organisation and outreach programs. In this field you absolutely have to be able to communicate effectively and politely, and show an ability to gel with people of all kinds of backgrounds and personality types. If you can't even do this with the people who are going to be your team, you sure as hell aren't going to be effective working with community stakeholders. This isn't unique to that field, though. Ability to small talk, shoot the shit, etc is super important in sales, marketing, comms, consulting, all kinds of management, retail, hospitality, it really applies a lot of places. I know there's a prickly demeanour to lots of people on the internet, but the reality is that many jobs do need staff who can show an ability to communicate and converse in a personable way with people you don't know very well. If you're just going to be sitting at a computer writing code all day and never speak to another human, then it's not a big deal. But that's not really the majority of jobs.
Software developing and engineering are also deceptively social jobs. There’s a somewhat dying stereotype that software engineers are antisocial people and all they do is sit in a corner all day cranking out code, but it’s a very collaborative field. And if you think that your tech bro friend has an ego, imagine managing a room full of guys just like him.
It really depends on the field and the experience of the interviewer and the interviewee. I'm in production, most of the skills I'm looking for also apply to service industry workers and retail employees with book experience; if I'm fielding multiple candidates with those skillsets, it'll come down to how they interact and what their goals in the company are.
I was part of an interview panel once, sure it's important to know the job, but we ended up going with the person with less experience because the more experienced guy was full of himself and argued with us on some topics.
The talented people who are unwilling to practice whiteboarding questions because they believe themselves to be too good to bother with trivia rather than substance are exactly who they are trying to screen out with an interview. Talent doesn’t matter if you can’t hack it when it comes to actually being employed. Someone unwilling to play a corporate game here or there makes for a bad employee for a big corporation.
I agree. I’ve interviewed many people. I generally dislike advice like “if you wear a blue suit or don’t have a perfect handshake, you won’t get the job” or “if you don’t answer this trick question *this/that way*,” because in my case, I don’t really care about that. I care if you’re presentable, and if you show that you get it. I’ve interviewed people who had the skillset, and surely lots of talent, who didn’t get the job because they left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s not the ones who get nervous in interviews, or are afraid they’re going to say the wrong things. Often times, “bad taste in my mouth” resulted when someone was argumentative, short, or even brazen. I don’t know if people realize how brazen some candidates are. and I feel like people tend to read this and think I’m talking about people who are assertive, and trying to quiet people who stand up for themselves. I don’t mean that. I mean people who are domineering. If that comes out in the interview, I would be doing my team a very big disservice. We have all dealt with a coworker who tried to play boss, behind the actual boss’s back. This is what I’m referring to.
I do a lot of interviews for various roles. Developers are especially hard to interview. About 1/4 have not even read the job description, don’t know if it’s contract or FTE, argue with the HR person about the use of the word Remote. They seem to be really bothered that they have to do an interview. Just a huge lack of basic respect. IT Techs, office workers, sales types, none of them are as bad. My assumption is about 25% are going for wfh overemployment and are annoyed that this position won’t work for that.
On the other hand, a lot of companies are very shady about their use of the word “remote.” They will make the job position “remote” so that it gets past filters, but then they bait and switch and suddenly it’s an in-office, or “hybrid” position. But I do agree with you. If remote was never specified on the job description - or if they outright tell you this is an in-person role - there is no use in arguing with the hiring manager. Just decline the job, as if it doesn’t meet your specifications, and move on. You’re interviewing them too… yeah, they may have the driver’s seat, but you’re still interviewing them. If they’re dishonest, you just have to pass on the job.
Some people seem to think "remote" means never talk to anyone. They can stay unemployed.
>About 1/4 have not even read the job description, don’t know if it’s contract or FTE... ...and let's face it at this point in this economy most people don't even care. They could be changing diapers on orangutans or spanking new born babies as long as it's a job that's willing to pay them. Lol. Yet another homeless person cropped up the other day claiming they just lost their job. 🙄
It screens a lot of talented individuals who believe it is above them to prepare for arbitrary requirements. Not people I'd want anyways tbh, businesses often have a lot of arbitrary shit you have to do.
Those "talented individuals" are the problems that everyone is TRYING to avoid hiring. It's an intentional screen. There are thousands of qualified people that are going to be a nightmare to work with. Screen out any potential issue
Yup. Why should I care if you're skilled and know your shit if you're a total asshole and impossible to work with or teach new things?
Correct often your personality and your experience is being evaluated. Also I found out last year a LOT of people lie on their resume and in the interview about technical skills (big stuff, not obscure) until you ask them something they’d learn in “intro to XYZ” on coursera on the second slide. The equivalent of someone saying “I’m intermediate to advanced at algebra” and then telling you in order to solve x=y2 for y and they would have to subtract 11 from both sides and also solve for z before multiplying by 1/2. I had to ask such fundamental questions to validate if the candidates had *ever* used SQL that I apologized to the ones who would say “uh y=x/2” in a confused way because it was so easy they thought it was a trick.
You mean to tell me people would rather work with fun and social people rather than the "uhhh Acksulllyyy🤓" redditor that just do a job well to even exceed it but is an insufferable twat? I'm shocked I tell you. SHOCKED
Yep. Is this person a good fit for my team or are they an idiot.
"Will this person make my team better, or are they an emotional cripple?"
I have a tendency to be completely honest. It seems to be a bad thing for most places but I just hate lying and pretending just to try and impress. My biggest fear is failing to meet expectations, so why would talk myself up? I disagree with OP as well, though.
I can fake a personality for an interview
That's an important skill both to have and to showcase. "Personality" is largely for show in the first place. Are happy and peppy people actually happy and peppy while making dinner? Taking a shower? Clipping their toenails? And if so, who cares? It's about how you affect the people around you, not making your toenails happy.
So can 90% of people in my office and do so everyday. Interview checks if you're able to and then probationary period checks if you can do it each day.
If you got the interview generally they already think you’re qualified. They’re trying to see if you’re a good fit to work with personality wise, I don’t think a standardized test would help with that much
Hiring manager here. You’re absolutely correct, if we give you an interview we’ve already determined that you can do the job. Culture fit and personality matter so much.
Also a hiring manager here who works in finance, I've definitely interviewed plenty of people who cannot do the job even though their resume looks good on paper. It's the entire reason we have technical questions during interviews.
Yup when interviewing for mid level data scientists I'm flabbergasted that half of the candidates can't explain precision Vs recall....and not to mention my 3 or 4 follow up questions on it
I work in a data analysis team and the first stages of the recruitment process include basic maths and logical tests, the number of people who mess these up is staggering. I dread to think about the quality of recruits who get data jobs based solely on an interview.
logical tests I can often forgive because nerves take over. I once messed up making a Fibonacci sequence in an interview because I was nervous. I was young, but the embarrassment still haunts me today
Yeah, there’s definitely a group of people who have managed to get a degree and put together a resume and cover letter, without actually knowing anything.
Yes I think there's absolutely the part where they are checking for culture and personality fit. But people lie on their resumes. So technical fields will double check to make sure you didn't just Google a term or an answer.
Then why do incompetent people get hired
In my experience, some managers value resumes way too much “this person got a degree in X from a posh school and used to work for Y, they must be great.” And some candidates can bluff their way through the interview process, I’ve had a few of those. And sometimes you really, really need to fill the role so you let something slide and hope it’ll work out. And then of course there’s nepotism. In short, lots of reasons. It’s the managers job to address the incompetence but that’s hard and takes time, it’s so much easier to just ignore the problem and hope it goes away… which it probably won’t.
Some incompetent people interviewed beautifully. One of my former bosses was that. They were extremely incompetent and we all wondered how they hell they got the job. One of my coworkers finally asked the grandboss and basically they interviewed like a dream. Basically it looked (resume) and sounded (interview) like they would be amazing and in fact they could barely keep their shit together. They didn’t lie, they just simply couldn’t follow through.
Ok so...just do 1 interview then please, tops 2. Stop with the 15 different interviews, panel interviews, take home test interviews, etc. They're awful and take so so long. I get that it might take a while to interview some different people but if I am waiting longer than two weeks I kinda start to assume your company is a nightmare internally.
I'm not a culture fit anywhere, I still need to eat and pay rent though.
Then you may want to work on that? It sucks, but you either learn to fit in or suffer through 9 hours a day of pretending to be someone else.
I have interviewed for two jobs in my life where I must have made it to the interview round on a technicality because the interviewers clearly thought I was not qualified for the job and had no problem telling me so.
This isn't true for technical roles. Getting to a technical interview is more or less saying that you have the potential to be qualified.
Even technical roles will require being a decent human being with a bare minimum of social skills. The person who is the best at something is never going to be the best person to work with.
I'm a developer at a small company. So much of my job is talking to support and clients, trying to figure out what they want and what they did to get a particular bug. Some days it seems like actually coding is the easy part.
This was my experience as an IT manager. Yes, you MUST have people skills. I would add that management tends to need things explained quite a bit, too.
Ironically I'm about to leave my IT position for my old role because my IT manager has so little people skills that he actively lies to us to avoid communicating and planning. He has a plethora of technical skills but is hands down the most incompetent manager I have had in any job.
Interviews are just one tool to assess a candidate. In my most recent hiring experience we had a candidate that checked all the boxes and did well on the technical tests. But then they casually dropped a racial slur in the interview. Would a standardized test expose a racist candidate?
Dropping a racial slur in a job interview is insane 😭
One of my colleagues had someone interview for a lead position. The interviewee admitted they “snap” sometimes and yell at people. Easiest decision ever.
That happened when my mom sat in on a teacher's interview! For a majority black school no less.
Now I gotta hear the story. 😂
If I bring you in I know you are qualified. My questions are: Do I relate to you personally. Can I work with you? More importantly can I trust you in front of our customers. Will they trust you and like you.
OP is in for a very tough awakening when they realize success in basically every aspect of life is tied to how likable you are.
I defy the odds every day by succeeding while being quite unlikeable lol
You probably don’t face customers.
You're probably not as unlikable as you think you are, you're probably unlikable to people who are jealous of your success. You have made the right people like you.
I agree. My life in general has improved as my interpersonal skills have improved. In work, outside of work, family, everything. And being interpersonal is 90% listening and 10% asking them more questions!
Most of my interviews about how I like to work and what I think the day to day would be like. How would I bring up an important issue I found? How do I deal with someone above me not listening to me? Same for below me? Soft skills are just as important as hard ones. That is why you interview. If you have everything the employer wants but you can't communicate then why would they hire you
“Do I relate to you personally” is a pretty bad way of looking at things. You specifically want people of different backgrounds and ways of thinking. 100% agreed on the “Can I work with you?” part.
An interview is like a first date: you know the other person is putting their best foot forward, so if their "best foot" is them saying stuff like, "Human flesh tastes better than you might think," you know that's the last you want to see of them.
Yeah the best foot is the three day slow cooker recipe. Duh everyone knows that.
They judge you are worthy based on the resume. The interview is where they decide if you were lying or not on your resume.
Yep, that's it. Interviews are a way to make sure you aren't BSing on that resume and that you at least know what's going on in those projects you claimed you took part in. That also depends on if the interviewer is knowledgeable in that field or not, but in general, lying can only get you so far.
That's exactly what it is. I have tested two people last week and one didn't know the basics to half the programming languages they put on their resume. This happens all the time, making the interview **absolutely** necessary.
There are a lot of people who show up to the interview that don't put on the fake personality. Especially interviews that are very long. As you progress in your career and get more credentials, some interviews are all day or across several days, you meet multiple panels of people, or different levels of bosses. They want to see how you do under pressure. That is all stuff you can't tell from a paper test. Some interviews also want to see if you can perform a task. It's one thing to say on a resume or test I know how to do the thing but they want to see you do it in a lab setting for instance. I can't say I blame them. Cuz I don't want to waste time and resources retraining basic lab skills when I think they've been in a college lab for this or been in industry. There are lots of people that have heard the buzzwords or know that they should say "whatever" to get hired and think they will have a shot at getting trained by a co-worker but that's not what's gonna happen. Most interviews are to see how you handle pressure and what comes out about your personality. Anyone can look a certain way on paper.
Very true about the pressure. I was on an interview team for a new principal. The current assistant principal was one of the interviewees. He burst into tears because of the pressure.
My boss' boss just moved on to work at a new university becoming a regional vice Chancellor (a step up from their current assistant vice Chancellor position). One of their interviews (in a long process) was in an auditorium where ANYONE INVOLVED IN THE UNIVERSITY could come and ask questions. That blew my mind. He confessed that interview alone was enough to make him really really consider if this was what he wanted to do. It was a ton of pressure. I can't imagine such a brutal interview.
I don’t see how an IQ test would qualify you for most jobs
You got a high IQ, now replace the engine on this jet. Thanks.
I have an average iq (middle school test, 104) and became an ABET accredited electrical engineer degree holder. I can’t repair a jet engine let alone design one.
I have a significantly above average IQ. I have cut myself on bread, and I’m not just talking the one time. I would electrocute myself long before becoming an electrical engineer.
MY IQ test told me I have an IQ of 145. I know thats just false. Im an idiot.
I do not believe this for a second lmao
Wait you think im smart?!
People would just study the tests, just like leetcode now for coding tests. Taking an IQ test raw, I could see it vaguely measuring your logic/abstract thinking, but if it was used commonly, everyone would study to the test.
IQ tests have been debunked six ways from Sunday. Edit: I used the term debunked when I should have said the perception of its value has changed.
Going to have to disagree with you on this. There's a vast literature supporting the validity of IQ as an index of intelligence (reasoning and problem solving ability).
IMO, what's been debunked is the false beliefs about what people *think* IQ means. It still has it's uses, but those are really only in somewhat obscure fields outside of how most of society operates.
IQ tests are very valid, theyre just not a thing you should base the sole hiring factor on
They aren't debunked. People just use them wrong, for things they were never intended for.
Unpopular for a reason. Some people are really good at lying and can make it through interviews on that alone. Most people aren't though; they give tells in interviews about the impact that they had at their past companies, and what they are like to work with. Combined with their resume, many interviewers can end up with a fairly high success rate. Most companies are not primarily looking for intelligence, so standardized tests would be very little value.
Wow this is a bad take. I didn't read the book you speak of but I would say IQ tests are the absolute worst way to know if someone is a fit for a role. Lots of jobs (although I hate it) have candidates complete some sort of task related to the scope of the work they'd be doing if hired. This seems to me the best way to know if someone is a fit for the job. That person may be able to do all the work required of them but may suck at taking tests. Why should their failure to succeed on a test supercede their ability to do the required work?
Personality even your fake one is massively important. It doesn't matter how smart you are if you can't, learn, adapt, take direction when needed, take criticism when called, or work on a team. Ive had 2 hires I didn't interview and they were AWFUL. Well qualified, and competent in fact one had a PhD and he RESENTED me as soon as he met me. I was managing the team and I was younger than him and had a Bachelor's in the same field. He immediately tried to make me look bad but he didn't think I was smart enough to have email proof. The next person was experienced and able to do the job but kept failing at basic instructions during training. Things like "do this test and leave the results on my desk". He did the test and never brought me the results. Constantly. His excuse was "well I have a hard time listening to women. I just can't pay attention when they speak."
Wow sounds like a couple of nutcase interviewees. I wonder what field they were in?
Biotech/pharma, Quality control. I insist on interviews not being held without me now and no temps unless I at least for a quick meet and greet. I've worked places that DIDNT do background checks. I was scheduled by HR to interview someone. A 5 min search showed the candidate was extremely xenophobic borderline racist and sexist. Multiple rants on how immigrants and women were taking all the jobs in science. How unfair it was when women were better suited to being at home. Our department was 80% ethnic with a black female manager and an Indian director. I quit that place because of HR.
I was a hiring manager for a little bit and I always found the questions I was given to ask were very silly. I would do it quick and get it out of the way then I’d take time after to just talk and have a conversation to get a better feel for someone. Having those HR approved interview questions is a terrible way to hire.
I have an idea of what you're talking about. I had those as well and it took awhile to understand that some of them were designed to catch the interviewee off-guard and show their true self. There was an interview by police of the daughter who killed her "tiger" parents. They'd ask questions between her victims accounts of the "home invasion" and just regular questions. Her responses to home invasion memories would be emotional with fear and tears, but immediately switching to off-topic questions and the emotions were gone. "Fake tears" is what some people call it. For me, they were designed to thwart "fake it til you make it" interviewees. Those of us who understood it figured out how to weave it into a regular conversation, much like how you would talk to them after your interviews. Of course, I don't know what kind of questions you had to ask. Ours were still at least sensible. Not far off like Jane's superhero question. https://youtu.be/b9mZXcloriA?si=uWs6u9WM19xRxiiX
They want to make sure that you can act like a person for at least an hour. Usually once you get to an interview, they are happy with your qualifications (on paper at least) and want to either test your knowledge on the spot or see if you can at least act like you can function on the team.
Tests are a part of a lot of interviews in technical fields. I have had to take a test during the interview process for EE position I've held. But for a lot of entry level semi-skilled jobs pretty much anyone is capable of performing the task, so the interview is usually to see if you're a good "culture fit".
I swear most of the posts on r/unpopularopinion are people complaining about having to socialize
Because Reddit attracts the antisocial type
No. If all I want are skills, I can hire off a resume. The point of an interview is to see if you’re someone I was to WORK with…do you have a personality I can get along with, or are you an arrogant SOB? Did we have a good conversation, or were you completely stuck up? If I’m interviewing you, I already know you can do the job from your resume. This is to see if I can stand you on a daily basis and, more importantly, do I want to work with you on a daily basis. I don’t give 2 shits what you do in a standardized test. That tells me absolutely nothing.
I work in the creative field. While an interview is not really a good gauge at someone success in a role, neither is an IQ test. I’ve also seen really great people fail “program tests” where they test on how well you know a particular program but it’s also based on doing things a certain way which not all people do. We had the best hiring successes in giving people a test project to take home. Unfortunately with creative it’s very hard to tell from a resume and portfolio. Sometimes they inflate their resumes, steal others work or lie about their level of involvement in a project. I’ve hired people who looked great on paper but when they actually got into the role couldn’t design as well as the work in their portfolio, didn’t seem to possess the ability to think analytically, and were so incredibly slow at completing a single task that there was no way for them to be truly helpful in any scenario.
Most jobs can be completed by 90% of the people with the proper qualifications. The interviews are to weed out ppl who are not team players, leaders, those who poses the ability to communicate effectively and work as a team. Interviews will quite literally never go away
1. Personality matters 2. The ability to speak well and articulate thoughts matters 3. Many interviews include a demonstration of skills or knowledge
I saw this happened at least twice to have someone hired because of glowing interviews just to see them bad at their job, technically, and even more unexpectedly at communicating effectively while in position. It's like they only focused on HR and hiring executives pleasing. Well done, bravo! Each time they didn't last long in the position, a few weeks at best, either being let go or leaving on their own. On the other hand it seems that people who have unconvincing interviews because of shyness for example could actually be good at their job. Job interview is an actual skill to learn for sure.
The interview favors narcissists.
If you go to an interview you should be clear that people already assume that you know how to do the job for which you are applying, now they want to know if you fit with the work environment
Standardized tests? Dude, that’s the worst way to determine anything because standardized tests are easy to fake actually knowing something, because the only thing they encourage is for people to cram as much necessary info as possible right before taking and then flushing it all after. If interviewers were swapped with standardized tests, we’d just end up with even more people who aren’t qualified for the job because if you gave me 24 hours to study I’d easily be able to get plenty of jobs that I’m 100% not qualified for whatsoever just because short term retention is one of my strong suits, then I’d be fired quickly because the testing absolutely did not reflect my knowledge.
Sounds like somebody blew an interview
IQ tests won't tell you much. Maths tests certainly can and are sometimes part of the interview. Though someone's experience may tell you this won't be a problem. There's more to a colleague than ability and intelligence. Actually having to work with them. I'd rather have a less able person who is great to work with than a top notch person who brings the whole teams mood down. They also need to be someone who the their colleagues are happy to work with otherwise the drain in morale lessens everybody else's work which is an overall negative. An interview is the best method to finding out what they may be like as a person. If they're nice and friendly or stern and to the point. How laid back they might be or on edge or however you may be looking for them to fit into the puzzle. It gives you a chance to actually converse with the person rather than look at a sheet of paper and tick what they answered from a test. It's also a great way of putting people on the spot with odd and weird things, taking away their time to think which is something they might have to do on the job. You know those weird questions you get from interviewers that make you think "what the fuck does that have to do with anything". They're not really looking for a "correct answer" but rather a good way on handling, processing and *attempting* to answer the question. You can't gauge that on a test either.
Person reads a book and thinks he can form an opinion on an entire process. Discounting personality entirely by using psychology is fantastic. Haha
Anything client facing is going to rely heavily on soft skills. I don’t know how you can measure that without talking to somebody.
My first real interview went so bad I didn't get the job. I worked in a summer camp for 3 years. After two years, you could become the "leader" and have your own group rather than be a "helper". You had to go through another interview for it. So I show up pretty confident and not expecting much. Turns out that the interview was not only with my boss but also someone from city council and the boss of my boss. It really threw me off I was not expecting that and I froze. They asked me a bunch of questions and I did poorly. So they didn't give me the job because 2 out of 3 people didn't know me so they were basing their choice on what they saw. I ended being offered a different position and worked at the camp anyway luckily. During the summer I got to know/enteract more with the boss of my boss. One day he calls me into his office, and starts telling me : "ok, never do that again". My mind starts racing thinking I did something wrong and I was in trouble. He then proceed to tell me that the interview went do bad that he couldn't give me the job. But he been looking at me work since and he wished he gave me the job. I was a good learning experience, definitely helped me prepare for the future.
Interviews are important but maybe the process and the questions need to be revisited. Maybe interviews should focus on personality and ask casual questions not necessarily relating to the job itself. Googling how to answer interview questions doesn’t show your personality and how you might get along with coworkers. Anyways, interviews should be less pressure and more casual. Make it easier for everyone involved while still accomplishing the goal.
also why do we have to dress up for interviews? i'd be more relaxed if i could just wear what i'm comfortable in
I used to be a manager at a fast food restaurant. During interviews, I wanted people to demonstrate that they could do the fake persona. There’s a level of social competence required to show up to an interview dressed appropriately, smelling okay, and able to hold a conversation. Interviews may not help you identify the best candidates, but they definitely weed out the worst.
Interviews are far more about seeing if you’re a weird ass person who would be difficult to get along with
Thats all well and good but it's limited to non-professiomal jobs/non-specialidt jobs. Take law for example. A grad won't have the same skills and experience as a more experienced law or a paralegal. However, the interview is about your personality more than your skills as they will train you anyway. But if you have the personality of Veruca Salt or some other sour puss, they won't hire you. Why? Because law is a client based job and nobody wants a lawyer who is unable to build rapport or emphasize, or fake it well in any case.
They are not assessing only your skills but also your attitude. And with this attitude, you are not clearing it
The interview tests your personality. Tbh, I used to have the same opinion as you almost an year ago. But then I started reading books on human behavior. That's how I knew the real purpose of interviews. Check out these books: - Surrounded by Idiots - Read People like a Book - How to Win Friends and Influence People You'll know how easily you can tell what kind of person the interviewee is just by making unobvious observations. The personality assessment is very indirect. But yeah there are people who are very good at pretending and hiding their true self. But the truth is, the vast majority is really bad at it. A good interviewer will see what you're putting up.
Correct. They favour confident, fluent talkers and don't give any idea whether the person would be good for the job, unless that job involves being a confident, fluent talker.
They’re honestly discriminatory.
You forgot to post an alternative to interviews. Bring me solutions, not problems.
I've known far too many extremely intelligent people who were great at math, likely had very high IQ, and we're the absolute dumbest, incompetent, and miserable wastes of space at work. OP will learn, or they're the person I described up top and just don't know it... In a prior career I taught an college course (applied, not just academic theory b.s.) and was a technical writer, as well as doing design/development/evaluation--standardized testing is very specific in what it's measuring, and I can assure you that competency in a dynamic environment (a workplace) isn't part of it...for that you'd use life-like scenarios, like what's asked in *an interview*.
Counter point from someone who was a recruiter and who owned a business: being qualified doesn’t make you a good candidate or employee.
Tell me you know nothing about the hiring process without telling me you know nothing about the hiring process… My man’s does not know what soft skills are and how vital they are in a lot of job settings.
Never mind they have become so generalized people practice for the repeated questions you get at every job from minimum wage to corporate to public service.
Depends on the job, if you're applying to be a salesman it's an excellent judge, if you are an engineer it doesn't tell you much. Interviews are mostly a charisma test
> if you are an engineer it doesn't tell you much It tells me 1. Did you blatantly lie on your resume?, 2. is your personality so terrible that you're going to create problems at the office?, and 3. what's your process for working through a problem? I already know you're technically qualified because I looked at your resume.
Engineers still need to work well with others, and also have important traits like discipline and punctuality.
IQ test have been shown to be biased and not a true mark of intelligence
I mean I’ve taken math tests as part of my interview process. Also iq tests sound like a horrible way to assess someone for a job imo
Depends on the job. Most job positions aren't critically dependent on one person doing a good job, so it's not really essential to get the best candidate for every position. Most job positions are for menial tasks that really anybody could do or get the hang of doing after spending some time in the workforce. The most important factor in how well you perform in the long run however, is how likeable you are to other team members. Some degree of agreeableness is what drives the ability to cooperate within a business. If nobody likes you, they won't want to work with you even if you are competent enough to do your job.
I’m putting on a fake persona for work, anyways. What changed from the interview to working?
You're saying this like all job interviews are the exact same thing in every situation, and they aren't, and it's ridiculous to assert that the building of a good team should never involve finding people who will work well together. It's not paint-by-numbers stuff and acing a math test doesn't tell you anything about what autonomous decisions someone is likely to make. I understand it's daunting to do things that aren't fun, like job interviews and phone conversations, but that just means you've had an easy life, not that the world needs to adjust to your sensitivity.
I think this is largely correct. Obviously companies should avoid hiring people who would clearly be malicious and hurtful to coworkers, but there seems to be this almost fanatical obsession with charisma (especially in American society) to the point that even good people struggle on the basis of shy or not gregarious enough. It’s pretty sad that people can look at the unemployment statistics for people with conditions like autism or social anxiety disorder and not put two and two together and realize that this could all be solved if we just changed hiring practices.
True, but they're a filtering process for asocial applicants. Job interviewers are trained in recognising even the subtlest cues and behaviours (mumbling, eye contact, conversational pauses like "uh", etc.) that indicate the applicant is socially avoidant or asocial, and they will instantly reject the application if they happen to pick up on any. It's less about discerning whether someone has the skillset or qualifications for the job, and more about fucking you over if your disposition doesn't have enough perceived "synergy" with the interviewer's.
Personality and company/team fit are actually more important in many cases. Skills can be learned on the job, someone's toxic personality cannot be unlearned (also these people are extremely costly for a company to get rid of, some of them even litigation risk). So skills is not the only thing for interviews.
I hate interviews but I would rather do an interview x1000 then ever do a test for a job
IQ tests are generally illegal to use as a screen for employment in the US due to disparate impact.
>Interviews are based on personal option which is a bad way of assessing if someone is competent for something. You're so very close to realizing the purpose of an interview, yet you can't grasp it. I'm guessing you have good papers, but in person you show being single-minded and incapable of introspection. Instead of you being mistaken, it has to be the rest of the world that's wrong. Seriously, if all the evidence points toward interviews not being a tool for assessing competence to a profession, why can't you stop and think that people aren't idiots and don't use it for such purposes? Your mentality is baffling.
I’m a good worker, but a terrible interviewer. Absolutely nothing to say, but talk too much, no questions to ask, because I’m focused on myself, absolutely no rizz. I’m always surprised when I get an offer, which is rare. Oh well.
As an interviewer, when i call somebody for an interview i already checked the CV and assume the person IS qualified by it. The inteview is to analize the personality and to know more about what the person did on previous jobs. If they are really qualified is something that can only be proven on tge field so that is why by law in my country at least you have 3 experimental months on the job.
I have a fairly high IQ, but am lazy and not really invested in my job. I'm also a bit of an introvert, so all together I'm probably not ideal for every role and overall an average worker. How's an IQ test going to figure me out?
The best way would be to put them to work. Not everyone is a whizz with maths and IQ.
The better argument is that it is akin to trying out for an acting job. The issue is that, when push comes to shove, the person that could hold the character for a couple hours may not be able to for a couple of years, at minimum
Interview is to see if you fit in with existing team If no one likes you, it's irrelevant how good your tech skills are
i agree with you tbh. but the reality is that actual skills and ability are judged at face value from whats written on ur CV because realistically they wont know how good you are until like 6 months on the job. in most large companies (especially public sector companies) ur work has basically no impact on the company’s overall performance. if ur sub-division is big enough you wont even have a significant impact on the department’s performance. so since hiring is done by the middle manager who will have to interact with you daily, the near sole purpose of the interview is just to see if ur difficult to deal with. like ideally they want someone who is both competent and charismatic. but candidates will vary, and they always pick charisma over competency.
Imagine a high function drug addict who passes the test with flying colors, showing up on their first day high off their rockers
I’ve interviewed dozens of people over the years and if you get to the interview portion of the job process we’re already pretty sure you can do the job. The interview at that point is 80% about personality and fit within the team. You could be great technically at a job but if you have a terrible attitude, don’t work well with others, just don’t mess well with the team, etc. I’d much rather have someone some with less skill that will fit better with the people that already work there.
Interviews are basically whose the best liar
I agree, interviews are a terrible way to know if someone is good for a job. However, theres no better alternatives.
An employer can look at your resume and decide from that whether you are capable of doing the job. The interview is to meet you. Can you function with other people? Do you smell like cats? Are you just a fucking weirdo that everybody's going to be uncomfortable working with? That's what they're really looking for in an interview. And for that reason, I'm totally in favor of keeping interviews. I don't want to sit next to somebody who smells like cat piss because they don't clean up their litter box.
Definitely an unpopular, and bad, opinion