In “Are job interviews a farce?”, Can Duruk describes how the job interview process is not the deterministic talent filter you’d like it to be. 

Hiring decisions are not rational, and they just cannot be. They are, if anything, like returns on the stock market. Any individual hiring decision is a random toss-up, and at scale they are mostly determined by both skill and luck. This doesn’t mean there’s no objectivity in the system . There is. But whatever the tiny bit of objectivity, you can only observe it in aggregate

The whole post is worth a read and I can’t help but agree. I would’ve been earning much more if this wasn’t the case. Painful facts Jokes aside, the post rings deeply true. I’ve have some experience with interviews and from both sides of the table. The mapping of interview performance to hiring decision is often fuzzy. I often can’t tell if an interview will get me hired . On the other side of the table, after interviewing someone, I can scarcely say if they’ll make the team.

Knowledge workers vs sports-stars

Lets start from a near ideal scenario: Sports. Messi and Ronaldo don’t have to give interviews when switching clubs. Their performance and performance characteristics are visible to all . Even here, desired outcomes are a function of multiple factors - individual skill, team characteristics/environment and luck. Yet there’s enough information for market participants to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Knowledge work differs from sports along multiple lines:

• Lack of visibility 

• Individual skill: No one can see spec I wrote or the code I pushed or for that matter how I rude I am or how late I show up to meetings. 

• Environment: Someone coasting in a performant team at Google can claim credit for a lot while someone busting their balls and at a smaller company will still have much lesser to show. 

• Inconsistent game formats 

• Practices: Some software teams are heavy on TDD+automation, some rely on manual QA. Some companies want designers to also do front end coding, some don’t care . Some places expect PMs to own project management, others have project managers. Some teams are agile & customer-driven, some are dancing to exec whims.

• Culture: Company & team culture defines the power equations, nature of information sharing, etc. which are material inputs that determine how you work, and thus make the nature of work differ. Amazon is run by business people while engineers dominate Google, the same job role at the two companies can feel entirely different. Knowledge workers are all playing different invisible games. So performances are invisible and incomparable. So come transfer season job switch time, every club  recruiter has to acquire information about the player candidate from scratch . And thus is born the interview.

There is one class of knowledge workers who benefit from being exactly like sports player. Stock traders. The game format is standardised by the stock market rules . Their outcomes are measurable and their performance is visible (indirectly through their bank balances!). Team interaction is low and outcomes are a mix of luck and skill.

So how do we solve this?

The inconsistency of game formats is harder to solve. Companies and teams are, and will remain, idiosyncratic; and that’s perfectly fine. The world benefits from people and organisations taking different approaches towards solving problems. “Hey Apple! Stop giving giving your designers so much power . It makes hiring Apple engineers complicated” doesn’t seem like a conversation we want to have. So industry-wide consistency is neither feasible nor desired.

Though there is one way companies make the game consistent: Work samples/Internships. Which is equivalent to saying “Come play with us for a while and we’ll take it from there”. But this doesn’t for work 90% of folks . Few, save for college kids and Jack Dorsey, can afford to work at another company.

The visibility part seems like a much nicer attack surface. Though we’re well short of people live streaming their entire work lives, there’s a lot happening on this front. 
Behance and Dribble allow designers to share their entire previous work. Developers can use Stackoverflow and Github to showcase their knowledge and skills. Maybe one day, sharing well-written products specs will be a thing . And videos of smoothly flowing Trello boards and JIRA backlogs will showcase project manager effectiveness. Until, then thought-leadership on Twitter and Medium (and now Substack) is the way to go.

Side-note: A personal ritual I do, is update my resume annually regardless of whether I’m looking for a new job. This automatically makes me reflect on whether I’m making career progress and communicate my work well.  Much work can’t be exposed due to the need for company confidentiality and  none of these come even close to capturing the complexity of everyday work. But they’re better than nothing . Blog posts can get you hired and I expect more of this to happen.

Interviews are not going away anytime soon. There’s lot of things we can do there too. The problem with interview process is the human. All subjectivity stems from there . Standarised tests are unidimensional and cruel, and should not be the only thing used to judge a person. but they are fair.

Some ideas there:

• Using AIs as interviewers during video interviews and and phone screens.  They can executing pre-programmed flows like chat bots (See “Worlds first AI presenter”) 
• Modify gender/caste/age in resumes to neutralise bias
• Common interview process (like TripleByte and TopTal do)

The interview game

If a candidate is a product, then interviewing is the marketing/distribution mechanism. Like many real world processes, that distribution mechanism is riddled with chaos that stems from logistical constraints, cognitive biases, timing issues, human insecurities and more.   Ceteris paribus, good candidates would do better but interviewing processes are the opposite of standardised. In some ways, this is a game . You have to figure out the rules and play it.

First the basics. Be professional, arrive (or start the call) on time, research the company and role, etc.  Beyond that, I don’t even view the interview process as a skills contest. My goal is to hack System 1 so it overrides whatever failings the System 2 might bring up  (see Two Systems) . I want to take my interviewer to a place where they’re emotionally sold on me. Once that is done that the nature of conversation inverts, the interviewer goes from a default no to a default yes.

In my view, most interviewers begin conversations with a default no mindset and want reasons to say pass over the candidate. The interviewer comes in thinking “So what’s so special about you?” and the onus is on the candidate to prove otherwise. If you’re able build familiarity and comfort with your interviewer, the rules of the game flip 180°. Now that they are sold on you, their mindset flips to default yes and you just have to play along . The only thing you have to do now is avoid egregious mistakes that might trigger System 2 again.

Word of caution: What I’ve suggested seems to be work for me but the success of this strategy depends on my frame. I’m a hyper-credentialed tall, fair tech nerd; the effectively possessing multiple forms of privilege . If you’re an interview candidate from disadvantaged group, the interviewers System 1 is deeply biased against you. They might have a hard time connecting with you . So it might be a better idea to move the conversation towards System 2 which is more objective and evidence-based.