Re: What\'s in YOUR resume?
I think I'd even have trouble interviewing with some of those questions. Types of report sections?. . hehehe, I don't think I've committed those to memory yet. I've been writing this stuff since before it was OneWorld too!
I guess if you have to root out the imposters you have to start at this level. That 'increment a number' question is so elementary that 'add 1 to it' is too obvious an answer (am I right? Do I get the job?). It's no wonder the guy went for something more complicated like 'next number' which is a number ‘incrementor’.
As for interviewing, for 2 years I was the last tier of technical interviewer for a consulting company and I've been called on to interview candidates for several former clients. I rarely ask the kind of canned question/answer you have illustrated here. I do have a set of general questions to warm up the conversation, but I try to get away from the atmosphere that inspires 'give the answer the interviewer wants to hear.' There's always some of that, but I try to get away from there. Certainly, you need to know if they meet the minimum qualifications, but there’s much more beyond those.
I typically aim for 45 minutes to an hour for an interview. If it falls short of that I would consider it a bad interview. There are a lot of reasons I have for that, but typically an interviewee falls short if they obviously don't have the experience, they can't talk to their successful work, they can't describe their work, or they have no initiative to drive a conversation. I want that interviewee to be excited to brag about all the challenging work they've done. It will be very clear if they don’t have anything to talk about.
Let me step back a bit too. You first need to know what type of employee you want to hire. When it comes to consultants I'm looking for motivated people who can stand in front of a client and speak clearly, truthfully, and be able to offer solutions with confidence. Often times, those solutions are not in any manual. So, my consultant hires really need to be top notch. They have to know the product and how to problem solve. They're operating in the unknown after all, and are sent out alone sometimes. You can't send a mouse to a client alone. Even at JDE I was almost always sent to clients alone. I learned quickly to stop talking like a geek and talk in short sentences to management.
Now, the flip side of this is the worker bee. Some companies are looking for the quiet type to sit in a cube and go on cruise control. Putting ambitious people in this role will mean they'll leave fairly quickly. I have seen some places look for the 'outside the box' thinkers. I don't generally interview the worker bees, they’re easy to find.
So, this is how I do an interview (it’s actually very loose and free form): First I get the preliminary stuff out of the way if it hasn't been done by someone else. What tools have you used, etc? I don't ask if they know what a loop is. If someone asked me that I’d wonder just how low in the organization this job really is. In fact, I’d probably ask if they were joking.
Then I follow this up with asking about what they've done with the tools. Which tools have you used? What types of projects have you worked on? What was your role? How many were on your team? What specifically did you do? They must be specific. It’s possible they only did Voucher Match for 3 years. That’s ok, but just how rounded is their knowledge? Can they demonstrate an ability to learn? Did they stretch themselves somewhere in there and go for unique solutions?
Now, these questions are geared towards getting them to start talking. I want them to talk and I want to hear the pride they should have in having done a good job. Now, what they say actually drives my questions. I have some goals, mind you. I want to know what they liked, and what they hated, and what they did about it. I want to hear about turmoil with others and problems they encountered. I certainly want to hear them criticize the product. E1 tools are a big pain in the butt sometimes, so you know they have used the tools when they tell you about the terrible work-arounds they had to use. You will also get a good feel about the ‘types’ of jobs they did.
This is where the good technical people can shine. They demonstrate that they’ve exhausted the tool and had to devise a solution outside of it. For instance, one guy got hold of free-ware encryption software and created a checksum solution to test whether transmitted files had been received already. This was critical because outside orders sometimes got transmitted to HQ twice. His description was actually kind of interesting. That had to happen in a C++ program outside of E1.
You can see where this leads, and that’s what I want. I want the interview to lead me somewhere. If they can’t be specific and can’t describe what they did in great detail and with some energy then they probably didn’t do much. This whole process will reveal how articulate they are and can go down some interesting tangents. You may discover tools you didn’t know could be used, find yourself asking for examples of their written documents, or just bored dumb as the conversation peters out after 10 minutes. As all of this unfolds you can steer the conversation to important parts of the job like: ”what did you do about the procrastinator on your team.” You know, get to the interpersonal skills if that’s important to the position. Take notes as they talk and then back them up to go down another road. Obviously, if you need to you can go way back to the beginning and try to get them to talk to specific areas if their first answers aren’t going where you want.
And that’s how I interview someone; I want to see energy, pride in good work, personality, and determination. I also want to hear some good stories of hard solutions. The technical ability will shake out when you get them to talk in a conversation. Canned questions serve their purpose, but they don’t get to the heart of the person you’re talking to, nor do they really reveal where the person has been and in what context.
Oops a book! Is anyone out there a publisher