Impossible Interviews

A few thoughts on the excellent points above...


Internal interviews and "pole positions": from the other side of the fence I have several times held interviews where we had a suspicion as to who would get the position, I would say we were probably correct about 50% of the time. The reason why this can change, and hence the value of these interviews, could be because a "dark horse" candidate, sometimes from another company division, appeared who turned out to be the better candidate. Or sometimes the interview process revealed previously hidden issues with the "preferred" candidate, which meant they were perfectly good at their current job, but were not ready for the next level up. One issue we struggled with was how many candidates to interview for internal positions, I used to work under a Director whose principle was that all internal candidates should receive an interview, not just out of courtesy but also because it gave them a chance to show what else they might be able to do. In theory a really nice and supportive idea. Unfortunately it did inevitably lead to some candidates applying for every position going, and then getting more and more demotivated the more they got turned down - even though (and this is quite important) such candidates, due to their clear interest in doing new things, were generally given training and development opportunities so that they could become successful at moving role. It's a real problem, if you get turned down for a job, even if you know there were 200 other applicants who also got turned down, it's really hard not to take it personally.


On interviews being "paper" exercises: Generally (given the caveats from the above) this won't happen - interviews are very time consuming things for the interviewer and nobody does them unless they think there is going to be a useful result or unless they absolutely have to. However unfortunately there will be a few cases where this happens, in my experience generally around the public sector. But interviews are all about attitude, you've got to always go in and (as far as possible) stay in with the attitude that you can offer something to that organisation - even if it's not for the job you're being interviewed for. As is often said, it is not unusual to go into an interview for one job only to be offered another. For many years now I think this has happened to me almost every time I've been interviewed for a job (except dramatically at two mentioned below). Most embarrassing was where I was offered the job - in the interview - of one of the interview panel members, which was a complete surprise to him! I didn't accept that one.


On stages of delegation: This is generally stated as moving from the Manager telling the staff member exactly what to do, through to the Manager being completely "hands off" and the staff member working completely independently. So slightly different, at the higher stages the manager may or may not know how to do the subordinates job, but it really doesn't matter as they're not telling them what to do and how to do it anyway. What they are likely to be doing is setting the project targets and arbitrating on which project to prioritise. For most of my engineering management career most of my staff knew far more than me about how to do their specific jobs - my role was largely to make sure they were working on the right job at the right time!


On "stretch" questions: one senior manager I was involved with insisted on sitting in on interviews for every candidate for his extensive team, and would always ask the question "how many drain covers per square kilometre do you think there are in Stockholm?" He thought this showed creative thinking, we never found it showed anything much at all - other than whether candidates could cope with this (rather difficult) manager! There's a lovely example in "Parkinson's Law":

Given a choice between two candidates, both equally acceptable by birth, a member of the Board would ask suddenly, "What was the number of the taxi you came in?" The candidate who said "I came by bus" was then thrown out. The candidate who said, truthfully, "I don't know," was rejected, and the candidate who said "Number 2351" (lying) was promptly admitted to the service as a boy with initiative. This method often produced excellent results.

On recruitment agencies: Generally yes, they will only put forward your CV if it is a perfect match (irrespective of whether you fit what is actually wanted), but not always - so beware! I had two identical occasions a few years back where recruiters phoned me up very excitedly saying they had put my CV forward and a company really wanted to see me to head up a railway signalling design team. I was a bit surprised - and, the second time, very suspicious - but was assured that the companies were fully aware of my background but wanted new ideas and leadership. Two completely pointless interviews and considerable wasted time all around, both started with an interviewer saying "your CV doesn't show any railway signalling system design experience, but the recruiter assures us that you have lots, can we ask what it is?". We then had a nice chat about how recruiters will say anything to try and optimistically get a candidate to interview - which in the end just makes the recruiter look like a hustler. (For the record I am not, never have been, and have never claimed to be a signalling systems designer. That's a strange world all of it's own.) In the end most  recruiters will say anything to anybody to get around six candidates to an interview: never take on trust anything they say about anything.


On structured questions: totally agree with Roy's description of standard questions with supplementary questions as required. I've seen and tried many different techniques and this is by a long way the least worst I have found. The only thing that can go wrong is that sometimes the questions can reveal a useful attribute of one candidate and you think "I wish we'd asked the other candidate's if they knew about / could do that to!". Generally I would use a structured first interview with, typically, two technical interviewers and maybe an HR presence (although I was pretty much half HR myself anyway), with a practical test if necessary for the role. For example I regularly recruited CAD operators or heavily CAD based engineers and we'd get them to do a very simple drawing, actually in a few seconds we could tell if they could cope with a (generally unfamiliar) CAD system. We would then second interview the candidate we were expecting to give a job offer to, show them around and introduce them to the whole team, which gave everyone - including the candidate - a chance to feel whether this was a good fit. If they dropped out we'd second interview the first reserve and so on.


On a new point - the wrong candidate: From the above process I have, on occasion, recruited the wrong person for the role (mind you, possibly still the best of the candidates we looked at). What I hopefully have learnt from this is to trust my instincts - every time this has happened the candidate has behaved as I thought they might but hoped they wouldn't! Recruiting managers with more sense than me would recruit no candidates at this point and re-advertise. Now as a candidate there's a point here - if you see a job which you have applied for re-advertised it may be that you will be rejected immediately if you reapply (because they didn't like any of the original candidates) BUT it could also be that the first (or even, say, first three) choices decided not to take the job up, in which case it is worth re-applying. So if in doubt reapply.


On managers moving: Of the three managers that interviewed me for my current role, two left the company in the following twelve months, and the other moved divisions so is now unconnected to me. However I would like to put on record that I like and get on with both my current managers - and neither of them are IET members and will not see this so I didn't have to say that


On candidates potentially leaving due to childcare: I used to work for a company where our division had very strong Swedish connections. Our Swedish colleagues seemed to have this sorted - there would be no point asking just female candidates this question (even if it was legal to do so) as male candidates are equally likely to have 6 months or more off! Unfortunately even though this question must not be asked in a UK interview there will be a number of (male and female) interviewers who will be thinking it - I've heard the watercooler conversations. And quite seriously I think that it's only by adopting the Scandinavian approach to childcare that we'll break that. (Plus everything else aligned to just getting more women into engineering, and into more senior positions in engineering.) But that's definitely for another thread.


On Countdown: I'm getting better at it since I've been largely working from home and catch a bit over afternoon tea. I actually think the numbers game is pretty good for practicing juggling numerical concepts against the clock, I'm starting to get better at the letters game too - oddly I'm pretty good at anagrams in crosswords but had struggled with Countdown in the past. And at my age I need to keep practicing these things to keep the brain connections active! But I wouldn't use exercises like this in interviews, it is all about practice of that particular type of puzzle and doesn't neccessarily correlate with anything else. (IQ tests are the same, you can improve your IQ score by practicing the types of tests that are used.) There's a funny example about this, not from an interview but forom a management training excercise I was on once: we were set the challenge of building the tallest tower possible from a pile of Lego. The idea was to foster teamwork and to combine our skills - but because at the time I was doing a lot of voluntary work in schools, including a lot of Lego activities, and I because like the stuff anyway, we agreed that the rest of my team would go and have a cup of tea while I built the tower (which was the tallest by a considerable way). A fine example of not making sure making sure that the objectives you set met the intention of the excercise!!!


Cheers,


Andy

 

A few thoughts on the excellent points above...


Internal interviews and "pole positions": from the other side of the fence I have several times held interviews where we had a suspicion as to who would get the position, I would say we were probably correct about 50% of the time. The reason why this can change, and hence the value of these interviews, could be because a "dark horse" candidate, sometimes from another company division, appeared who turned out to be the better candidate. Or sometimes the interview process revealed previously hidden issues with the "preferred" candidate, which meant they were perfectly good at their current job, but were not ready for the next level up. One issue we struggled with was how many candidates to interview for internal positions, I used to work under a Director whose principle was that all internal candidates should receive an interview, not just out of courtesy but also because it gave them a chance to show what else they might be able to do. In theory a really nice and supportive idea. Unfortunately it did inevitably lead to some candidates applying for every position going, and then getting more and more demotivated the more they got turned down - even though (and this is quite important) such candidates, due to their clear interest in doing new things, were generally given training and development opportunities so that they could become successful at moving role. It's a real problem, if you get turned down for a job, even if you know there were 200 other applicants who also got turned down, it's really hard not to take it personally.


On interviews being "paper" exercises: Generally (given the caveats from the above) this won't happen - interviews are very time consuming things for the interviewer and nobody does them unless they think there is going to be a useful result or unless they absolutely have to. However unfortunately there will be a few cases where this happens, in my experience generally around the public sector. But interviews are all about attitude, you've got to always go in and (as far as possible) stay in with the attitude that you can offer something to that organisation - even if it's not for the job you're being interviewed for. As is often said, it is not unusual to go into an interview for one job only to be offered another. For many years now I think this has happened to me almost every time I've been interviewed for a job (except dramatically at two mentioned below). Most embarrassing was where I was offered the job - in the interview - of one of the interview panel members, which was a complete surprise to him! I didn't accept that one.


On stages of delegation: This is generally stated as moving from the Manager telling the staff member exactly what to do, through to the Manager being completely "hands off" and the staff member working completely independently. So slightly different, at the higher stages the manager may or may not know how to do the subordinates job, but it really doesn't matter as they're not telling them what to do and how to do it anyway. What they are likely to be doing is setting the project targets and arbitrating on which project to prioritise. For most of my engineering management career most of my staff knew far more than me about how to do their specific jobs - my role was largely to make sure they were working on the right job at the right time!


On "stretch" questions: one senior manager I was involved with insisted on sitting in on interviews for every candidate for his extensive team, and would always ask the question "how many drain covers per square kilometre do you think there are in Stockholm?" He thought this showed creative thinking, we never found it showed anything much at all - other than whether candidates could cope with this (rather difficult) manager! There's a lovely example in "Parkinson's Law":

Given a choice between two candidates, both equally acceptable by birth, a member of the Board would ask suddenly, "What was the number of the taxi you came in?" The candidate who said "I came by bus" was then thrown out. The candidate who said, truthfully, "I don't know," was rejected, and the candidate who said "Number 2351" (lying) was promptly admitted to the service as a boy with initiative. This method often produced excellent results.

On recruitment agencies: Generally yes, they will only put forward your CV if it is a perfect match (irrespective of whether you fit what is actually wanted), but not always - so beware! I had two identical occasions a few years back where recruiters phoned me up very excitedly saying they had put my CV forward and a company really wanted to see me to head up a railway signalling design team. I was a bit surprised - and, the second time, very suspicious - but was assured that the companies were fully aware of my background but wanted new ideas and leadership. Two completely pointless interviews and considerable wasted time all around, both started with an interviewer saying "your CV doesn't show any railway signalling system design experience, but the recruiter assures us that you have lots, can we ask what it is?". We then had a nice chat about how recruiters will say anything to try and optimistically get a candidate to interview - which in the end just makes the recruiter look like a hustler. (For the record I am not, never have been, and have never claimed to be a signalling systems designer. That's a strange world all of it's own.) In the end most  recruiters will say anything to anybody to get around six candidates to an interview: never take on trust anything they say about anything.


On structured questions: totally agree with Roy's description of standard questions with supplementary questions as required. I've seen and tried many different techniques and this is by a long way the least worst I have found. The only thing that can go wrong is that sometimes the questions can reveal a useful attribute of one candidate and you think "I wish we'd asked the other candidate's if they knew about / could do that to!". Generally I would use a structured first interview with, typically, two technical interviewers and maybe an HR presence (although I was pretty much half HR myself anyway), with a practical test if necessary for the role. For example I regularly recruited CAD operators or heavily CAD based engineers and we'd get them to do a very simple drawing, actually in a few seconds we could tell if they could cope with a (generally unfamiliar) CAD system. We would then second interview the candidate we were expecting to give a job offer to, show them around and introduce them to the whole team, which gave everyone - including the candidate - a chance to feel whether this was a good fit. If they dropped out we'd second interview the first reserve and so on.


On a new point - the wrong candidate: From the above process I have, on occasion, recruited the wrong person for the role (mind you, possibly still the best of the candidates we looked at). What I hopefully have learnt from this is to trust my instincts - every time this has happened the candidate has behaved as I thought they might but hoped they wouldn't! Recruiting managers with more sense than me would recruit no candidates at this point and re-advertise. Now as a candidate there's a point here - if you see a job which you have applied for re-advertised it may be that you will be rejected immediately if you reapply (because they didn't like any of the original candidates) BUT it could also be that the first (or even, say, first three) choices decided not to take the job up, in which case it is worth re-applying. So if in doubt reapply.


On managers moving: Of the three managers that interviewed me for my current role, two left the company in the following twelve months, and the other moved divisions so is now unconnected to me. However I would like to put on record that I like and get on with both my current managers - and neither of them are IET members and will not see this so I didn't have to say that


On candidates potentially leaving due to childcare: I used to work for a company where our division had very strong Swedish connections. Our Swedish colleagues seemed to have this sorted - there would be no point asking just female candidates this question (even if it was legal to do so) as male candidates are equally likely to have 6 months or more off! Unfortunately even though this question must not be asked in a UK interview there will be a number of (male and female) interviewers who will be thinking it - I've heard the watercooler conversations. And quite seriously I think that it's only by adopting the Scandinavian approach to childcare that we'll break that. (Plus everything else aligned to just getting more women into engineering, and into more senior positions in engineering.) But that's definitely for another thread.


On Countdown: I'm getting better at it since I've been largely working from home and catch a bit over afternoon tea. I actually think the numbers game is pretty good for practicing juggling numerical concepts against the clock, I'm starting to get better at the letters game too - oddly I'm pretty good at anagrams in crosswords but had struggled with Countdown in the past. And at my age I need to keep practicing these things to keep the brain connections active! But I wouldn't use exercises like this in interviews, it is all about practice of that particular type of puzzle and doesn't neccessarily correlate with anything else. (IQ tests are the same, you can improve your IQ score by practicing the types of tests that are used.) There's a funny example about this, not from an interview but forom a management training excercise I was on once: we were set the challenge of building the tallest tower possible from a pile of Lego. The idea was to foster teamwork and to combine our skills - but because at the time I was doing a lot of voluntary work in schools, including a lot of Lego activities, and I because like the stuff anyway, we agreed that the rest of my team would go and have a cup of tea while I built the tower (which was the tallest by a considerable way). A fine example of not making sure making sure that the objectives you set met the intention of the excercise!!!


Cheers,


Andy