The Interview!

 Richie Hecker May 29, 2008

So someone applied for a job and you need to interview them. What do you ask? In general asking random questions about a persons resume or past usually gets you canned responses. I have a couple of tricks I use to dig into peoples minds’

1) Ask people, what are their dreams and goals? If they give clearly canned answers, just keep prodding the question.

2) Ask them what they think is the biggest flaw in your strategy? Make them think critically of the company they are trying to work for. It will definitely get an awkward reaction as they likely will not want to criticize you. Think about the intelligence and integrity of their answer.

3) Ask them to pretend they are the CEO and you are the investor and ask them to pitch you on your business.

4) Ask them to give you 3 ideas to help grow the business. This is true even if they are a technical person, 3 ideas could be simple technical or design suggestions.

5) Ask them about their biggest failure and biggest weakness.

6) Ask what is the least rewarding thing they’ve done.

7) Ask them what their ideal hours are and what they do for fun.

Those questions should give enough info to evaluate the candidate and get some true info about their intelligence.

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One Response to “The Interview!”

  1. Alberto Says:
    June 1st, 2008 at 7:34 pm

    Great startups are made of great people so interviewing is critical. Very interesting subject, you always find opinions on how to raise money, sell stuff and plan for an IPO, but how do you actually hire good people?

    I agree with strategies 1,2,3 and 4. I think they put both the interviewer and the candidate in a position to criticize each other positions, which is a great way to put ego on the side and come up with intelligent observations (or not!). Conflict resolution will show A) how the candidate behaves when emotionally challenged and B) the way she/he reasons.

    On a more technical side, I like to ask design solutions for a well understood problem, like software for an elevator system or an airport controller. Most important I try to focus on the candidate potential, rather then current knowledge. That of course rules out any c++ or java “guru” kind of question.

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