Impossible Interviews

By coincidence another thread led me last evening to the obituary of Sir Alan Pullinger. I didn’t know him, but I worked closely with several people who did and who sought to perpetuate the values that had passed down through several generations to him. I have edited down and highlighted.

 
Pullinger liked to describe himself as "just a plumber", but the company which he led from 1961 to 1979 grew to be an international leader in heating and ventilation systems. A man of great vitality and determination, always on the front foot, Alan Pullinger thrived in a crisis and had no time for pomposity. He was a demanding leader, yet personally modest and scrupulously polite. As a manager he believed in finding the right person for the job: the best test of a man's capacity, he said, was to put him in charge of a contract in Iran. "If he gets the job done and gets paid by the Persians, then he's worth watching."

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

 

Apologies for typos in the last paragraph - lunch appeared as I was writing it so I posted it before it got lost

Andy,

The 'paper exercise' is definitely a civil service system, it is how they demonstrate that 'due process' has been followed. An interview session 'has' to be held anyway and if a few other staff want to have their applications rejected, so be it! The desired candidate has probably been doing the job for a year 'on substitution' anyway so will get all the bonus points for experience too! As an internal candidate the trick is to find the 'real' vacancies.


The danger of being smarter than the boss is that they can be very resentful, really, really resentful. Even if one is lucky to have a sensible boss one can then be trapped in the job. Why would the boss promote the best worker out of the job? How does the lower-skilled boss know the relative ranking of the junior against others with that skill? I think these are valid questions for a 'junior' to consider, get out while the going is good. Our management guru thought that a manager should do the jobs that the staff would do if they had the time, i.e. thinking ahead or devising better ways of doing things. If you are busy draining the cellar it is the boss' job to turn off the tap! I'm not sure that I completely buy into the continous development model that the delegation tree is based on. Some people are just better at some things than other people and those other people might be better at doing other jobs. When I first started working we had a very good group leader. However in the laboratory, which was a small part of his domain, there was a graveyard of in-house designed equipment that didn't work. Being curious I had a look at this stuff. It was clearly designed by a total incompetent and would never have worked. (It used open-collector logic, before it had been invented, logic gates had their outputs joined together and sort of fought it out). As you might have guessed the 'designer' was our group leader - he had been promoted beyond his level of incompetence - lousy designer, great leader. Thinking back that was a very good company with lots of very good ways of doing things. I caught it at its best but didn't like living in that area so moved 400 miles. Technology suddenly changed. US legislation broke up the parent group. The new owner was a rising star that went super-nova, burnt out and then went bust. (Every place that I have worked at closed down after I left!).

Hi James,


Interesting post! A couple of quick thoughts:

Why would the boss promote the best worker out of the job?

Because if that worker wants to be promoted then they will leave if they are not promoted internally - then you've completely lost their skills from the organisation. That said, that's not a reason to promote them if you think that they are very good in their present role but maybe don't have the attributes for another. In which case maybe you can make them happier in their present role somehow.

And occasionally the Dunning-Kruger effect creeps in to people's beliefs that they should be promoted (and, indeed that they are invaluable to the organisation), which I think is summarised neatly in the title of their original study:

"Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".

- Kruger and Dunning 1999

(The full study is great fun, basically saying that the more incompetent you are the more competent you think you are! Which does occasionally worry me about the very small number of areas where I think I'm competent  )

 

How does the lower-skilled boss know the relative ranking of the junior against others with that skill?

Because the boss may be lower skilled in how to do they job, but (hopefully) they will be able to judge the output - quality, quantity and timeliness. It does take experience and education - one thing that frustrates me is that it is often seen that management is easier than engineering, and then people complain about the huge number of bad engineering managers around! I'd say it took me about 7-8 years experience and a Master's level education to become a reasonably competent manager.

 

As you might have guessed the 'designer' was our group leader - he had been promoted beyond his level of incompetence - lousy designer, great leader.

Absolutely. It is not sensible to assume that a good engineer will become a good manager, or a bad engineer will become a bad manager, or a good manager will become a good leader, or a bad manager will become a bad leader (ditto engineer and leader). They are all to some extent orthogonal - they're different skill sets.  This is why I don't enjoy organisations with a linear hierarchical progression, "good" organisations (organisations which I enjoy working with and which seem to be pretty successful) appreciate that some people will go up one route, some another, and most definitely without necessarily going through all the stages. But in that case it does need to be clear that there are multiple routes to higher "status" (I really don't like the rather ill-defined word "status" but I can't think of a better one at the moment). So that a senior engineer can be seen to be treated with the same "respect" (another not very useful word) as, say, a senior project manager. This is a very, very complex area!!!!!


P.S. For the difference between leaders and managers (and engineers, the "producers") my favourite quote is:

You can quickly grasp the important difference between the two if you envision a group of producers cutting their way through the jungle with machetes.  They’re the producers, the problem solvers.  They’re cutting through the undergrowth, clearing it out.


The managers are behind them, sharpening their machetes, writing policy and procedure manuals, holding muscle development programs, bringing in improved technologies and setting up working schedules and compensation programs for machete wielders.


The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, “Wrong jungle!”


– Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, page 101

There have been many times when I have had to stop my team cutting a path through the "wrong jungle", often they really didn't like it - "but we were getting on so well!" 


Cheers,


Andy

Another thought (back on the original subject of this thread) - I'm surprised no-one's brought up the infamous question "Where do you see yourself in five years' time?" (Apologies if someone did and I missed it!!!) This is actually a really, really good question provided the interviewer and interviewee approach it sensibly - although personally I tended to use "three years' time". For some jobs you want someone ambitious and for other jobs you don't, and sometimes - typically when you are recruiting 2-3 staff at once - you don't care which attitude an individual has but you do want a good mix in the group you recruit. Personally I think it's best answering this very honestly (but then personally I think it's worth answering all interview questions very honestly!) If you're looking at this job as a stepping stone to higher things then it's best to say so otherwise you could very bored and frustrated, and if you're looking at this job as a way of funding your evenings in the pubs playing darts you may not want the stress of additional responsibility being thrust on you after a year or so - and yes I am thinking of a real person I worked with many many years ago here! From the recruiters' side you will - if you're any good - be planning into the future, and either be looking for people who will take on additional responsibilites or move into new technical areas, or, sometimes, be looking for someone who can provide solid expertise in a single area way into the future.


So if you're not asked this question, it might be worth asking them "where do you see this position going in three years' time?" But, of course be prepared for them to turn it right back as "where would you like it to go?"  


My favourite example is of a friend of mine, Lee. Lee's answer to this question was to ask the interviewer "well, what do you do?" When the interviewing manager told him what he did Lee replied "that sounds good, in five years I'd like to be doing that job!" Not only did Lee get the job he was being interviewed for, he did indeed get the interviewing managers' job several years later. Which 24 years after that interview he is still doing, very successfully.


Cheers,


Andy

I know what I would like to reply: "so that I don't have to work for someone who asks questions like that just to show how clever they are!" But I absolutely wouldn't (partly because with any luck you would end up reporting to someone else, and partly because it's always completely unhelpful to respond to smugness with smugness). To be fair, the aim could be to see how you cope under pressure, given that you probably wouldn't have prepared for this question, but it's not a very realistic sort of pressure.


Some people would say "don't hire me if you want your business to fail". Sounds clever, actually it's a silly answer as there will be other potential employees who could also make the business succeed. Sadly some recruiters - maybe the sort that would ask this question - like answers like these. They say it show spirit and drive - and forget the fact it also shows a complete absence of self-awareness!


Personally I would try and somehow turn this around to a positive: "let's start by looking at the reasons I think it would be good for your business to hire me..." With any luck, if you can make the list long enough you can get far enough away from the question that they won't mind that you haven't answered it.


It's a good rule for interviews, whatever the question try to carry it on a positive note - important for questions such as the much more common "what's been your biggest mistake?"


Cheers,


Andy

I told my daughter about this one (last summer she was going through her first experience of "proper" interviews after graduation) and she came up with a lovely answer: "well, let's be honest, there will be lots of other candidates who will have the same skills and abilities that I have - and some will be stronger in some areas. But the reason I would really like this job is..." and then show how you are genuinly interested in it and would be someone they'd want on their team. Which, as I understand it, was pretty much how she got her PhD opportunity which she is now following.


Sometimes I feel my children are out-evolving me


Cheers,


Andy

Coming across this thread again, I remembered reading a number of years ago (in "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe) about the first NASA selection for Astronaut training. One of the questions (from a psychologist) was 'impossible' as it involved handing the candidate a blank sheet of white paper and saying "What do you see?"  Of course a literal answer ("nothing" or "a sheet of paper") resulted in the assessment of "No imagination" while a comment such as "a snowstorm" would be about right (as long as they didn't then expand on their imagination - lost in the blizzard, freezing to death, etc.  My favourite response from the candidates was from Scott Carpenter, who became one of the seven Mercury astronauts, who replied "But its upside-down!"  The psychologist actually took the paper back to look before he realised........

Alasdair

Alasdair, that's a great story. I think Scott Carpenter must have had a good sense of humour. While he's famous for the saying "Godspeed, John Glenn," as Glenn's vehicle rose off the launch pad to begin his first U.S. orbital mission in 1962. Carpenter, as John Glenn's backup pilot for that mission,  has been reported to have also said "Remember, John, this was built by the low bidder!" 


Anyway, getting back to the subject of this thread, The Independent has a good article "The 20 toughest job interview questions in the world" complied from user contributions to Glassdoor, a site where people anonymously review companies and employers.  Some of these questions could keep the Savoy Place Virtual Club stimulated for many months.