With so many applicants chasing so few posts, it's reportedly getting more common to encounter the kind of extreme interview questions, previously widespread only in Silicon Valley.
.
Such as: You're shrunk to the size of a 10p piece and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?
.
Or: How would you market ping pong balls if ping pong itself became obsolete?
.
We've entered an interview arms race.
.
The new breed of questions arose because traditional ones were so bad at identifying the best candidates: it was easy to get good at interviews without being best for the job, or vice versa.
.
Now several books enable you to get good at the new questions, too, thus rendering them useless.
.
Google's next move should be to stun applicants with something unexpectedly retro: Where do you see yourself in five years' time?
.
Hint: the answer doesn't involve being trapped in a blender.
.
But the interview conundrum will probably never be solved, because it's an archetypal case of the mental quirk that psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls answering an easier question.
.
Faced with a cognitively demanding question, involving uncertainty – Will this person do the job well if hired? – interviewers unconsciously substitute an easier question, and answer that one instead:
.
Did this person impress me in the interview?
.
We all do it, all the time.
.
Watch any news discussion programme – questions such as Who'll win the next election? are often answered as if Which party's most popular now? had been asked..
.
In one classic experiment, students were asked, How happy are you these days? then How many dates did you have last month?
.
There wasn't much correlation, suggesting that dating wasn't the major factor in their lives.
.
But when the questions were switched, the correlation was strong.
.
Why?
.
Because, Kahneman argues, when people hear, How happy are you these days?, the question they answer is, What's your current mood?
.
The dating question made students feel happy or sad, and they answered the next one accordingly.
.
As the philosophy blog Less Wrong noted recently, all sorts of cognitive biases follow this pattern.
.
We ask ourselves, How scared should I be of a terrorist attack?
.
But we answer, How scary did it look last time I saw a terrorist attack on television? I'd go further: this substitution principle governs whole swaths of our lives.
.
You ask how you can minimise your impact on the environment, but the question you answer is, How can I feel like I'm doing my bit?
.
Which helps explain the phenomenon known as moral licencing, whereby people who use canvas bags at the supermarket feel entitled to take long-haul flights.
.
Or you ask if you had a productive day, but what you answer is, Did today feel unpleasant and/or effortful? which isn't the same at all.
.
So how can we get rid of this eccentricity?
.
Sadly, it's probably too deep-rooted, so let's answer an easier question instead.
.
What can we do about it?
.
Stay aware.
.
Next time you're trying to solve a problem, remember to check that the problem you're solving is the problem you've actually got.
.
Oliver Burkeman
No comments:
Post a Comment