I have to conduct a job interview on Wednesday (my first ever). Halp!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Not only that, but I have to ring a couple of people who applied for a different job in our company, and ‘sell’ our position to them.

I’m not overly worried or overly nervous about it, just a bit, and I’ll probably get more nervous as the day/time approaches.

I would appreciate some pointers from SDMB’s seasoned interviewers (I’m sure there are many)
I’m not doing the interviews on my own, but my boss (who’ll sit in) is a notorious silent man. He will happily say zip and let you uncomfortably keep the conversation alive (lazy? sly tactic?) So I’ll probably be doing most of the interviewing myself.

2

I’ve never conducted an interview, but I’ve been on the other end plenty of times, so I’ll just beg you to avoid the “What is your greatest weakness?” question. There is no good, non-bullshitty answer to that question, and it sends the interviewee’s stress level through the roof.

3

I may not be the most tactful person. And I may be inexperienced. But I’m quite sure I would never ask such a thing.

I like to think that in general conversation I tend to concentrate on stroking/inflating the ego of the person I’m talking to, and I would probably be like that in the interview, albeit nervously.

4

That is the absolute wrong attitude to bring to an interview. You need to test their knowledge: the more technically-oriented the job is, the more you need to test. As you do more interviewing, you will be amazed at how much “expertise” people claim but don’t really have.

What kind of job skills are required for this job?

5

**Lobsang ** - stop. Try this:

  • Decide if you are interviewing to confirm they can do the job, or selling the job (either because you have been told to sell, and/or you know that other folks are doing the hard check on skills). If selling, sell and be happy - but it ain’t an interview, per se…

  • if you are truly interviewing, then decide on the 3 things you think a person would be good at the job needs to do. These can be content-specific (e.g., performing surgery, or managing a large team, or navigating government regulations, or dealing with difficult customers, etc…). You get the idea - if you were stopped cold and had no time to think, what 3 things would they need to do well? It is helpful if at least one of these involved making decisions in a way specific to the job - meaning under pressure that the position includes, or requiring expertise to make the decision that the position requires.

  • first - ask them what 3 things THEY think the job requires - and more importantly, why. See how close you two are in your thinking - they don’t have to get your exact three things, but you want to hear in their “why” explanations whether they get the basic requirements of the position.

  • then, from the combo of your 3 things and their 3 things (esp. if you like their ideas), ask them for specific examples of when they have demonstrated the ability to do those things - and have them cite examples off their resume. Obviously, if they have held a similar position, they should do fine - things get interesting if their resume is a leap away from the new role - how effectively can they relate their experience to what the new role requires?

This is called behavior-based interviewing to my knowledge - whatever it is called, I find it very insightful.

WordMan - I have interviewed more people than I care to try to count, including more Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg and other MBA’s than I could count if I wanted to…

6

We need more info on your interview process. Does the candidate go from person to person, or are you (and your boss) it? Are you looking for specific skills, or personality traits?

I second WordMan’s advocacy of behavioral interviewing. You need to ask open-ended questions, ones without a yes or no answer. For instance, when I interview someone for a software job, I ask them about the worst bug they created and how they found it.

Now as for selling the job, the best thing you can do is to be enthusiastic. You need to sound like you love the place as well as say it. I’ve done a lot of pre-screening, since this saves a lot of time, and before you sell you need to ask a few basic questions on background to make sure the person on the other end of the phone is someone you want to bring in. They can put a skill on their resume which is from a one week class project where you are looking for a few years of experience.
But sell from your perspective or a neutral one. You can say why you love the job, or how the job is important. You won’t know what makes the person tick well enough to really sell to him or her based on his hot buttons.

And of course, prepare!

7

As a technical question, ask them to spell out and explain any acronyms or fancy words they use in their resume. An answer of “tell you the truch I’m not sure what the acronym stands for but it means this” would be fine in my book - but I’ve seen guys who claimed to be experts in (fake example) baking and who couldn’t define “cake”.

8

My response to **WordMan’s ** post is “Word!”

Get a good understanding of the purpose of the interviews overall and your piece of it in particular. In general the two pieces are selection and selling. Selection breaks down into skills and fit. For example, maybe your role is to do a little selling and check for how the person would fit with the team. You might ask something like “describe how you work with a team at your last/current position and what your formal and informal roles are on the team.” You can break that into more conversational chunks “What’s the sales team like at Acme?” “What was your role on that team?” “Besides your formal role in QC, did you have any other roles on the team, even informal?” Somewhere in the interview process, someone needs to be asking the hard questions about skill, or you’ll all be sorry.

Be careful with selling too hard. Learn what you can about how your opportunity actually compares with others out there. Good advice for selling anything is to spend more time listening than talking. Find out what they want in the job, and when it’s something you can offer, speak up with confidence.

Also, your HR folks if you have them should be offering some basic legal training to anyone involved in interviewing. Avoid putting the company at legal risks by not asking about age, disability, etc. Don’t be like the lady interviewing me who, finding I was from Minnesota, starts out “Oh, are you Lutheran?” No harm no foul in that case, but I got the sense she’d spent more time listening to Garrison Keillor than interviewing people.

9

Some good general questions (IMHO, as an interviewee, and never an interviewer):

Tell me about yourself.
How did you get involved in this field? (assuming some prior experience)
Why do you want the job?
How did you hear about our firm/office?
Where do you see yourself in 5 years? (an oldie but a goodie)
What questions do you have for us? (good at the end; ideally, they’ve done some research and have some salient, non-obvious queries)

10

Word up on that too!

I have done my share of interviews, of both the technical “grill 'em on the skillset” and managerial “fit and finish” types. In the latter case, I’ve found it useful to ask this pair of questions, which I think would work just as well for non-technical interviews:

  1. Tell me about something you’ve done or accomplished that you feel especially proud of. After a few warm-up chit-chat type of questions or comments, this is a good way to get the candidate talking about themselves. It also serves to tell you something about the way they work.

Some people will pick the most grandiose sounding project on their resume and start talking about its scope, how long it took, the impact it had, etc., but never mention what their personal role was in it until I actually interrupt them and say, “OK, but what were you proud of doing as a part of this?” And in some of these cases, they are hard put to say what it is they contributed to this great project – draw what inference you will from this.

Other people will come in from the opposite end, and talk from a very technically low-level angle (“there was this server that needed to talk to these two other processes to do this and that, in such-and-such a time window…”), in which case my follow-up question is to ask why this contribution was something to be proud of. Was the person thinking in terms of the contribution or impact his/her work had on the firm, or just in terms of how clever they had managed to be (or thought they’d been)?

There are also people who launch into a jargon or buzzword laden narrative, in which case I make a point of picking up a couple of them and asking them to explain to me (a) what something like “Just-In-Time compilation” or “data object warehousing” means, and (b) why it was critical or relevant to this particular project. If they can’t explain it, they’re bullshtting with words; if they can’t tie the explanation to their narrative, they’re bullshtting with concepts they haven’t really used or don’t understand from a practical perspective. (And sometimes, they can in fact fully explain and justify, they’re just used to throwing around jargon terms.)

I’ve actually had more than one person sit there and say, “I’ve really not done anything worth mentioning.” In most cases this came from nervous kids right out of (or still in) college, in which case I had to prod them a bit and suggest that telling me about a school project, paper or even particularly nasty homework problem was OK; the idea is really to see what excites and motivates them, and to some extent to see how much of a bullsh*t artist they may be. (And in another memorable case, it came from someone with 5+ years of industry experience. Whoo.)

  1. It is said that “experience is the best teacher”. So tell me about a mistake you’ve made or been a part of that you’ve learned from, something that you’d make sure to do differently if you had the chance.

Then, after they describe a “learning experience”, probe a bit further to see what they did in fact do “on the job” to make things better subsequently. Did they go back and fix it? Did they ensure safeguards against a similar problem happening in the future? Or did they silently walk away from the problem? If it’s a kid out of school, and they’re talking about a project, homework or even time management problem, was the lesson they learned from their mistake a general one, or only a very specific one?

In addition to serving as a good complement to the first question, the answer may give you some insight into what it’s like to work with this person. Some people expect or hope that other people will clean up their messes; and yet others are too arrogant to admit they’ve made anything more than trivial errors in their careers (which was my interpretation when I’ve gotten this answer from some seasoned technology candidates).

11

Oh, and since the OP mentions being a first-time interviewer: remember that the purpose of the interview is to allow you to come away with a judgment call on whether or not the person you interviewed is a fit for the position. It should not take the form of a random conversation, or vague questions that allow the candidate to talk a lot without saying anything. You are in control of the interview, not the interviewee.

Prepare your questions beforehand, and make sure you yourself understand what the purpose of each question is. Don’t hesitate to interrupt the candidate if you feel they’re going off topic or into too much detail (in which case, make a mental note to make the question less vague and more specific in the future).

Also, part of your job is to represent the firm and “sell” the position they’re interviewing. It doesn’t look good if you sit down and start reading over their resume in front of them, or end each question with an awkward pause as you fish for the next question; it makes it seem like they’re not being seriously considered as a candidate, or (possibly worse) that your firm as an organization is a poorly run, seat-of-the-pants operation.

And make it clear at some point who you are in relation to the position(s) they are interviewing for. Are you likely to be someone they’ll work alongside, work for, or neither?

12

I do too and I know it’s what would make me a lousy interviewer. I am a people pleaser and want them to think well of me, and that’s wrong too.

I’m afraid I don’t have much in the way of good advice since I was always the softball thrower in group interviews!

13

Our firm is particularly bad about telling candidates what position they are being interviewed for. I generally set the tone by telling them about me, how I fit in to the company, what we do, and then ask them to tell me about the things in their background that are relevant to that. I tell them that I already have their resume, so I do not really need to be walked through that, I just want the highlights that they thing are the most relevant or to perhaps talk about things that are not in their general purpose resume that might be of interest. I then offer to answer any questions that they have.

I get a lot of positive feedback from candidates, some of which never knew what position they were actually talking about before I told them. I also tend to find out a lot more than my colleagues that ask the “greatest strength / greatest weakness / why type of tree would you be” kinds of questions. I have had a few people tell me lately that they were ready to write-off our firm before they talked to me because they felt interrogated instead of interviewed by the others.

I think you are right to view yourself as selling as much as you are there to be sold. Keep in mind that an interview is a two-way exchange of information. You will do well.

14

Prepare a standard list of questions you will ask each candidate. You can ask additional questions as they occur to you, but having standard questions will help with showing a lack of bias in your hiring decision–you can compare apples to apples.

Include both technical and behavioral questions, all open-ended. I’ll include my interview questions for entry-level computer operator as an example:

*What have you done in the last 1 year that would prepare you for this postion?

What motivates you?

When you find yourself bored, what do you do?

Describe a time when you had to respond to a deadline that you knew you couldn’t meet? How did it effect you?

What leadership style best suites your approach to work?

How would you rate your organizational skills?

From a troubleshooting standpoint, what skills and/or experiences do you believe you posses that will carry-over to this position?

What sorts of things upset or annoy you?

How much PC experience do you have? What operating system/word processing, etc.?

Do you have mainframe experience? What operating systems? What type of experience (end user, operations, administration)?

What, if any, has been your experience with Unix? What flavors (aix, hp-ux, linux, etc.) Give an example of some of the commands you use most frequently and a description of what they do.

What kind of experience do you have with networking? What kinds of equipment have you worked with? What are some common problems and their resolutions?

Have you worked with NT 4.0/Windows 2000/2003 servers? What about Outlook/Exchange? Any Active Directory experience?

Do you have any operations experience? What about customer service? Are you more the type who likes to work alone, or with a team?

Are you flexible about the hours you work? Will working different shifts on the weekends be an issue? Would you be available at all during the week if the opportunity presented itself?*

The more you can get them to talk, the more you’ll learn. Take notes, and use constructive silence to allow them more time to elaborate. Be enthusiastic and confident.

Be prepared to answer their questions as well, to the best of your ability. And for God’s sake, make sure you set an expectation of when they’ll hear your decision, and actually let them know if they’re not the Chosen One.

15

Yes, please! The only good thing about that is I wouldn’t have wanted to work for someone who couldn’t let me know I wasn’t chosen.

16

When John Cleese was making industrials, he made one on interviewing which I saw. One of the points was to not be afraid of asking hard questions about gaps in the resume and experience. I’ve caught some people who put down skills it was clear they didn’t have. The time to find out is during the interview, not after hiring someone.

17

This doesn’t help Lobsang any, but maybe others… I’ve been the interviewee many times, and have been so nervous I’d rather just say [forget] it and draw unemployment, or go homeless or something.

Just the thought that the interviewer might be just as nervous, gives me a whole new perspective. :slight_smile:

18

I hate these two, because I don’t seem to understand them correctly.

For the first one, my response starts with “well, I’m an engineer, I’m from (place)…” For some reason many HR people find it fascinating that the first thing I say is that I’m an engineer, but they’ve never told me why it’s so fascinating/funny/unusual. What should I start with, my name? They already should know it!

And for the second, I say that it depends on whether I get the position they’re offering or not and then explain. Apparently, I should see myself as, say, worldwide QM manager in their company whether I get a job in that company or not :confused:
Most of the people who’ve interviewed me seemed to need to be able to tell their carefully-prepared speech and go through their carefully-prepared list of questions completely before getting to the carefully-prepared “do you have any questions?” Unless I can take notes, which I’m told is a no-no, I don’t remember questions five minutes after thinking of them, at least not if I’ve been paying attention to another person. Being able to take questions as you go is more difficult but also more similar to a normal conversation; the jobs where my interviewer did this were two of my best.

Prepare your answers to obvious counterquestions. When someone asks me whether I’m willing to work weekends, my answer is “yes, if it’s absolutely necessary in order to get the job done, although I prefer not to” and my counter-answer is about compensation and frequency. Does the company prefer time-back, pay overtime? How often will I be working overtime? Is overtime expected to take place after regular hours or can it be taken before?