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It is much easier to train someone to have greater level of technical proficiency if you find they are deficient somewhere after the fact (after hiring), than it is to get your new office Eyore to not be a sad, crabby complainer who is constantly murdering your organization/office/team's morale.
There are lots of people around for most jobs with fairly equivalent and sufficient technical skills for any given position. Therefore, behavioral traits, evaluating emotional intelligence, and hiring a workforce which is happy, positive, and easy to work with are going to continue to become more and more important to hiring managers and receive increasing amounts of attention in the interview and evaluation process.
You keep missing the point that I NEVER SAID BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS SHOULD NOT BE ASKED. I just said it weighs too much for an engineer position, if half of the interviewing process is occupied by such questions.
Those behavioral questions can be trained too. Trust me I know they want to see: leadership, teamwork, risk taking, innovation, customer-orientation, anger management, pressure control.... I can fake answers to all those questions.
It could be that they are asking many questions because they are directed to from HR. I know that many managers are given a list of questions that they must/can ask. I know that many of them aren't necessarily on point or relevant to the actual position. This is done for many reasons, but largely because HR doesn't always understand what the interviewers/managers NEED in an employee (although they think they do,) and to make sure that there is some consistency in the hiring process.
Basically there is a manufactured industry which has created itself by telling companies that it will save them tons of money on "hiring the best fit", but what it really does is it costs them a mountain of money just to bring in a new employee. So they've actually driven up the cost of hiring so high that they justify their existence by claiming that they save companies money because of the high cost of hiring. It's like a doctor selling you a disease, then selling you the cure.
I can understand having multiple rounds of hiring and 6 interviews for senior management, or in environments where there are multiple locations around the country or globe, and the person needs to be involved with all of them. Once the rounds have gotten to the top candidates--or likely by that time, candidate--companies will invest any amount of money.
But the shenanigans that go into hiring rank and file employees are a total waste of time. The only thing that they do, is prove that a person is smart enough to take some practice tests or do a bit of research on how to answer pre-employment personality test questions, or regurgitate good responses to stupid interview questions. All of those tests are easy to figure out, and interview questions are easy to outsmart.
Also I've had multiple candidates come in, do ok to great on the technical part of the interview, then reveal themselves to be jerks and end up getting recommended as 'do not hire'.
The multiple rounds is also important, we've had candidates do fine for 3/4 rounds then the fourth interviewer is a woman and the candidate spends the first five minutes assuming she's somebody's secretary, that was a very quick turnaround from 'I'm ok hiring this guy' to 'supreme nopery."
Also I've had multiple candidates come in, do ok to great on the technical part of the interview, then reveal themselves to be jerks and end up getting recommended as 'do not hire'.
The multiple rounds is also important, we've had candidates do fine for 3/4 rounds then the fourth interviewer is a woman and the candidate spends the first five minutes assuming she's somebody's secretary, that was a very quick turnaround from 'I'm ok hiring this guy' to 'supreme nopery."
Do you get this information from references or how they act in an interview? Wouldn't a phone screen have done all that hard work for you if you observed these things during an in-person?
Also, would you rather hire the jerk over the quiet person? Which is seen as worse to you?
You keep missing the point that I NEVER SAID BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS SHOULD NOT BE ASKED. I just said it weighs too much for an engineer position, if half of the interviewing process is occupied by such questions.
Those behavioral questions can be trained too. Trust me I know they want to see: leadership, teamwork, risk taking, innovation, customer-orientation, anger management, pressure control.... I can fake answers to all those questions.
You think it's too many, they think it's the right amount in order to get the right amount of information they need to make a hiring decision.
Also I've had multiple candidates come in, do ok to great on the technical part of the interview, then reveal themselves to be jerks and end up getting recommended as 'do not hire'.
The multiple rounds is also important, we've had candidates do fine for 3/4 rounds then the fourth interviewer is a woman and the candidate spends the first five minutes assuming she's somebody's secretary, that was a very quick turnaround from 'I'm ok hiring this guy' to 'supreme nopery."
There's a flaw upstream in your hiring process somewhere.
I just had a job interview for an engineer/researcher position. I talked to 7 interviewers and at least half of the questions were like "tell me about a time... " Is it really necessary/useful? How can you tell the difference between a person who is good at making up stories and a person who really knows the math and techniques?
Especially, only one of the interviewers is American, and all the others are Indians and Eastern Europeans. Why do they still emphasize the cultural match?
I just find the whole thing does not make sense.
I would imagine that asking alot of questions helps to weed out the riff-raff.
If I were hiring people, and wanted to waste their time with irrelevant questions, I would ask them to quote Shakespeare and Kipling. I would ask them to tell me a prime number with a certain number of digits. I would ask them the lattitude and longitude of the interview and of where they went to school. Lots of questions like that. And after every answer, I would write something in a notebook. Then, after doing this kind of questioning for about 20 minutes, I would ask them to tell me about themselves. And if they asked me what I wanted to know about them, I would write something else in my notebook. I would keep harassing them with that kind of questioning and notebook writing until they got upset. Because, getting them upset is the most important part of a job interview. Before you hire them, you have to know how upset they can be before they will punch you in the face.
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I find this is usually what they want from in person interviews. They already vetted you for your skills.
