Get Candidates Telling Stories About Themselves Rather than Reciting Facts or Canned Answers

“What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?”

It is different if you are from the middle or bottom tiers of your sector. In that case, not everyone will want to work with you, and perhaps most people won’t want to work with you, as they will be hoping for something better, whether realistically or not. If you are in this position, as many of us are, you need to think especially carefully about

Finally, here is another useful question used by Peter Thiel: “How successful do you want to be?” Or this variant favored by Tyler: “How ambitious are you?”

the idea of hiring conscientious or hardworking individuals is hardly a novel one, so if there are any qualities that are reflected in the going market wage for an individual, you would expect conscientiousness and being a hard worker to be among them. Conscientiousness, in essence, is too easily and uniformly valued in the marketplace.

Here are some questions that not only will elicit stories but also might yield relatively interesting answers: “How did you spend your morning today?” “What’s the farthest you’ve ever been from another human?” “What’s something weird or unusual you did early on in life?” “What’s a story one of your references might tell me when I call them?” “If I

Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could?

The bureaucratic approach, as we define it, seeks to minimize error and loss, and it prizes consensus above all else.

But there is yet another use of personality psychology: namely, as a way of developing a common language so that you and your team can discuss and evaluate claims about personality. We suggest using Five Factor theory in this manner.