A few years ago, Google was celebrated for pioneering a new tactic with their prospective candidates. During the interview process, they would pose some insanely difficult question like some of the samples below:
- How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?
- How many times a day does a clock's hands overlap?
- Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew
The basic idea was that the pressure of the interview revealed the thought process of individual candidates and how they might come to a creative solution.
It turns out that those assumptions were not true. In a recent interview with the NY Times, Laszlo Bock,
Google's senior VP of people operations admitted:
“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” he said. “How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
What does work?
Bock explained that the company is finding greater success with structured, behavioral interviews that offer some consistency in regards to how candidates are assessed.
“Behavioral interviewing also works – where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, ‘Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem,’” he added.
“The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”
Here are the links to some supporting articles:
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