What's Going on Here, With This Human? - Graham Duncan Blog

I also try to stick to the default assumption that “everyone is an A player at something.” It’s a more effective and more dynamic way to approach an interview

I now consider in-person references with someone who knows the candidate well 5x more valuable than an interview

Try to unburden the interview of too many assumptions you have about the role. I like asking up-front, “So what criteria would you use if you were the one hiring someone for this role?

I write down each question and sometimes respond with “I’ll answer, but first I’m curious, why did you ask that?” I’m looking for the felt sense of a “hungry mind” based on the way their questions flow. That’s very hard to fake.

also helps to have the candidate you’re trying to see clearly ask you questions. Questions have very high signal value compared to most anything else you can get from a candidate

Questions like “what are you compulsive about?” can sometimes reveal the other person’s elephant. Or: “Where have you experienced a moment of ignition, when you saw some older person doing an activity and you intuited that they were wired the same way you were, and you said to yourself ‘I want to be that’?” Or: “How would your spouse/sibling/parent... See more

One way that I’ve tried to help myself see the reflections in the window is by using personality assessments. I’ve taken well over thirty different personality assessments over the years to try to glimpse my own strengths and weaknesses and to try to see other people more clearly.

what most people think of as the hard parts of hiring—asking just the right question that catches the candidate off guard, defining the role correctly, assessing the person’s skills—are less important than a more basic task: how do you see someone, including yourself, clearly?

A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is going on. Not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending the situation