I attended “The Interviewers” tonight and got to drink beer, meet some interesting people and hear a few ten-minute musings about zen and the art of the interview. My rundown of the proceedings is as follows:
- Elisabeth M. De Morentin - In design research, immerse yourself yet be objective.
- Jason Severs - We do as much research as a doctoral student on aderol in order to optimize the interaction you’ll have with the object we design for you.
- Clive Thompson - Don’t focus on the end result, focus on the process and past failures that led to that result. I am also very enthusiastic.
- Gary Hustwit - Don’t ask questions, have a conversation.
One of my closest friends works within the design consultancy world and does the kind of stuff that Jason spoke about in his talk, so I can’t say I haven’t been exposed to these ideas before. Therefore, I got kind of bored midway through. Luckily, the abysmally short length of the talks constrained the speakers to go on only long enough to spark a conversation. They also didn’t take direct raise-your-hand questions afterwards, which was nice.
I had the opportunity to propose a question to both Jason and Clive that involved an activity I perform on a weekly basis: interviewing engineering candidates. I asked both of them how the methods discussed tonight could interleave with the standard whiteboard interview, and I was somewhat disappointed in the answers. Clive was honest and said that he really didn’t know, and Jason described a few methods that he uses to evaluate potential candidates at Frog Design, but prefaced it with the fact that a person will normally meet around 20 people when interviewing.
This begs the question of how we should be evaluating talent properly given how archaic the current system is. You build your résumé, dress up, shake hands firmly. All this bullshit that gives a glimpse that you know how to play the game up to that point, and then it’s basically a crapshoot. People have their canonical interview questions that they deem The Metric for evaluating talent while others simply give feedback based on how they’re feeling that day. There has got to be even a slightly better way to evaluate whether an employee can succeed at a company, even if it’s not 100% accurate (which it never will be).
