We both find during interviews that “downtime-revealed preferences” are more interesting than “stories about your prior jobs.” So for instance, “What subreddits or blogs do you read?” usually is better than “What did you do at your previous job?” We very much like the title of the research paper by Mohammed Khwaja and Aleksandar Matic, “Personality

As you present your questions and listen to the candidate’s stories in response, note whether the interviewee uses unusual expressions, seems to be coining their own phrases, explains basic concepts in a way different from what you might hear in the mainstream, speaks as if they are developing useful memes, has unusual rhythmic patterns to their sp

Is this person so good that you would happily work for them? 2. Can this person get you where you need to be way faster than any reasonable person could? 3. When this person disagrees with you, do you think it will be as likely you are wrong as they are wrong?

So if you ask a woman this question, the answer you receive may well be affected by some measure of social inhibition in addition to a sense of ambition, and that may render the answer correspondingly noisier in terms of information. Be aware of this potential distortion. The same problem may exist with some minority and immigrant groups, again, a

“How do you think this interview is going?”

In that same data set, if you are considering what does explain who becomes a doctor or a lawyer, parental education (and not IQ) is the main explanatory variable, accounting for 39 and 52 percent of those career decisions, respectively.

“We have all committed mistakes in the workplace, as have I. What is an example of a mistake you have committed but did not come to regret for a long time?”

Daniel recalls that he first learned from Tyler this question for prospective hires: “What is it you do to practice that is analogous to how a pianist practices scales?”

In essence there is a scarcity of talented labor relative to capital, as evidenced by the relative plenty of venture capital and what economists call “the savings glut.”