The base assumption is that you can tell anything reliable at all about a person from their body language, speech patterns, or appearance. So many people think they have an intuition for such things but pretty much every study of such things comes to the same conclusion: You can't.

The reason why it doesn't work is because the world is full of a diverse set of cultures, genetics, and subtle medical conditions. You may be able to attain something like 60% accuracy for certain personality traits from an interview if the person being interviewed was born and raised in the same type of environment/culture (and is the same sex) as you. Anything else is pretty much a guarantee that you're going to get it wrong.

That's why you should only ask interviewees empirical questions that can identify whether or not they have the requisite knowledge to do the job. For example, if you're hiring an electrical engineer ask them how they would lay out a circuit board. Or if hiring a sales person ask them questions about how they would try to sell your specific product. Or if you're hiring a union-busting expert person ask them how they sleep at night.

[–] snooggums@midwest.social 12 points 5 months ago

But all the other questions are to find out if they are a good fit for the office culture.

You know, if they are also white middle class dude bros.

[–] Bertuccio@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I've just started doing practical interviews. I basically get really young people with little overall experience and I just want to know if they can do common technical tasks.

So one question is to literally have them explain how to tighten a bolt. One person failed.

[–] riskable@programming.dev 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

To be fair, that's a very open ended question. I mean, what kind of bolt are we talking about? A standard lag bolt? If so you don't tighten it! That'd be a trick question! You tighten the nut. Same thing applies with car wheel bolts. Tricky tricky!

Is it a hex bolt that also has a cross head? How tight are we talking?

I'm just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Not really in a bolt tightenning domain, but I have done technical interviews for a lot of devs including junior ones, and them asking all those questions about the task is something I would consider a very good thing.

At least in my domain the first step of doing a good job is figuring out exactly what needs to be done and in what conditions, so somebody who claims to have some experience who when faced with a somewhat open ended question like this just jumps into the How without first trying to figure out the details of the What is actually a bad sign (or they might just be nervous, so this by itself is not an absolute pass or fail thing).

[–] Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 5 months ago

I’m just going to assume bolts of lightning and Usain Bolt are off the table.

The only thing I know about the procedure for tightening Usain Bolt is that I am not part of performing it.

[–] Bertuccio@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I did actually make the mistake of asking just "which way do you turn a screw" once and the person had the sense to ask "to tighten or loosen it?"

[–] Malfeasant@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Would you have accepted "righty tighty lefty loosely"?

[–] Bertuccio@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

Yeah but if they don't show which is which I ask them to show too.

Almost everyone gets screw turning right, it just weeds out a few people who say the right things in emails.