Hey 2+2,

I'm tasked with interviewing someone for a high level position at my company who would be my manager if hired. the VP gave us explicit creative license to ask whatever we want, technical or otherwise.

I really want to bust out a deck of cards, announce we are playing 7-card stud, and see how well the candidate responds to a game of heads-up limit poker (with fake chips, not money).

Thoughts?

I expect most people are peripherally familiar with poker. I don't expect them to outplay me, but I do hope to see someone who can pick up the basics and hold a conversation while playing. Im not much of a Stud player myself, figured it would be an interesting pick up game to assess someone's ability to strategize and reason.

Are you going to be judging him for the job based on how well the candidate responds to a game of heads up poker?

How would that possibly dictate how well he would do at the position in question if he's never played cards before?

If you were a guitar player would you judge someone who's never played guitar by handing him a guitar during a job interview and ask him to finger pick Genesis by Jorma Kaukonen?

I'm just trying to save your job before you get fired.

ibl

I suggest that you not do that w/ someone who's going to be your manager.

I don't see how this is related to his eventual job duties, even if he's going to work in a poker room.

Partially. I would expect someone to be able to play a casual game with me. Especially someone I will be working closely with. I should feel confident that we will get along in a social setting.

This is a little tricky. I expect the average person here knows poker hand rankings. I would obviously expect much less from someone who is very unfamiliar with the game. Still, I believe someone's approach to adapting to a new challenge will generally be apparent or not.

Quite alright. I'm quite capable of looking after my own job though.

This is partially the point. My history of interviewing people is fairly awkward. I'm in software. Software questions are either trite or completely miss the mark, and wind up with the person out of there element. I've been a part of more than one interview where a technical question was asked and I learned absolutely nothing of relevance about that candidate's software skill.

Last interview I did, I recycled a question I was asked at my interview here. A math question about distance between circles. The candidate got flustered and could not get it right at all even with tons of prodding. We still hired them and they are fine, so I'm just looking for something different at this point. Poker is actually a facet of my life where I apply my understanding of behavioral psychology to people well, and its a game Im comfortable with. -shrug-

How many hours do you think it'll take to get a decent sample size?

What's good about this approach is that you make the candidate uncomfortable and sees how he reacts under stress. Some people will be amused and others will be angry. Some will flat out refuse to answer what they perceive to be stupid questions. It's an insight into their personality.

What's mediocre about this approach is that you can generally find a question which is both relevant and accomplishes the goal of making people uncomfortable. Here's a generic one: "What's the biggest avoidable mistake you made in your life and why didn't you avoid it?" Typically, if I am interviewing someone in my field, I'll grill them about something technical. I get both a technical read and a personality read at the same time.

What's terrible about this approach is that people way way way way way overinterpret answers to their little pet questions. Someone calls down a weak hand and it's tempting to attribute that to them having a passive personality in every aspect of life. The reality is that you're not going to get a big sample size so it's hard to compare how he does with someone else his age or someone else equally smart or someone else who's watched equally much poker on TV.

There is a popular blog called Ask A Manager where the author receives and responds to letters from both sides of the table. There is no shortage of content, in part because there is no shortage of interviewers who think they have come up with a cute twist on interviewing. You should write your question to the author and see if your letter gets published.

What you need to understand is that interviewing is exhausting and costly upfront. Candidates are often following multiple leads, often going through the application, first contact, scheduling, phone screening, and follow-up stages before meeting you in person, and even then they don't know how many candidates there are or where they are ranked among them or even if they are being considered seriously for the role.

They take time off from their current jobs or make arrangements for their kids to be picked up. They rehearse and dress up. They confirm their routes and show up way too early because they planned for the upper end of travel times. They pay for parking because they didn't want to be presumptuous. They do all this and they get "You are not the right fit at this time", and they do it all again, and they get "Best of luck in your search", and they do it all again.

Imagine you are one of them and your interviewer busts out a deck of cards and announces the game. Now imagine being rejected, not being good enough for the company that broke out a poker game in an interview. You better be confident that you will be making this candidate an offer, and if you are, then you better be damn sure it doesn't sour his or her experience.

I work in an industry that is considered "young" and "fun", and your idea would be met with a collective and deafening groan. It's not 2006 anymore. We grew up and put the games away. Companies and their interview processes are being judged by how they respect candidates and their time.

A caveat to the above is if you have foreknowledge of the candidate's interest in poker. I would love it if an interviewer broke out a poker game without warning, but I have an interest in poker, and I would just assume he or she learned of my interest beforehand.

Your culture doesn't have to be old. Consider the difference between "And now as part of your interview, we will play foosball" and "You said you enjoy foosball. Would you like to break for a quick match?"

There's a world of difference between the two.

I hate dropping into a thread just to say something is terrible, but this is terrible. I'd imagine you came here for positive responses when other people in your real life have responded with a very apprehensive "um....I don't know...".


Don't do this.

I'm with him^^

Don't do this. If your interviewing someone that has never played poker before I would expect them to have zero clue about anything. You would spend 5 minutes just trying to teach them when they can bet and how much they can bet. Another 5 minutes explaining that they can fold and don't have to call and also can check. You're giving ppl with zero knowledge of poker too much credit.

The best questions to ask in an interview are those that test one's common sense and real time problem solving. The ones that excel in this area are much more desirable even if they are lacking in experience. These are your fast learners and improvement idea ppl.

Sure, but what are those questions?

The ones that people commonly use like "estimate the number of barbers in Chicago" are bad precisely because they are commonly used. You're not just testing common sense and real time problem solving but how many times they've heard the question before.

A while ago I think it was Google that openly renounced this type of interviewing. They just weren't seeing the correlation they had hoped.

What does this have to do with common sense? Is it common to know how many barbers there may be in a particular city?

Um, you're missing the point. The whole point is to estimate the number from whatever you know. You might guess the population and then assume a certain percentage are barbers, or estimate the total number of haircuts and divide by the number of haircuts per day, or estimate the number of barbers on a block and the number of blocks, etc.

It doesn't matter whether the answer is right or wrong. The point is to see their thought process.

It doesn't, it has to do with problem solving, the other thing you mentioned.

Case questions like this don't really care what answer you come up with, they want to see your problem solving skills at work. How many people in chicago do you estimate? how many times per year does each person get their hair cut? how many haircuts per day can a barber perform on average?

IMO this is a bad idea for a couple of reasons:

1. I have no reason to believe this will help ID a good hire any better than more conventional techniques.

2. You're hiring a future supervisor. There's a very low likelihood this reflect meaningfully well on you. Much more likely case is that your future supervisor thinks you're a gambling degen or dilletange. Of course most likely case is that It is neutral, but all downside and no upside.

I think the main reason you think this is a good idea is that you like poker. But think about it from someone else's perspective. How would you feel if you went to an interview and they tried to get you to play the piano or golf or some other unrelated task? It wouldn't feel like a fair evaluation unless you were otherwise good at the task which is just dumb luck.

I hope he dismissively tells you limit games are solved, jots down a “bad reg” note on you during the interview and then follows up by canning you once hired.

Less farfetched is your VP saying “that’s not what I meant” after your idiotic interview and keeping you on the short list of ****-ups who need to go during the next “right-sizing.”


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**** me it never ceases to amaze me how bad hiring practices actually are. Somehow I always end up wanting to fire the person in charge of hiring me. Seriously are these people so horrible at their job so the applicant can prove they can deal with being made resentful?

Am I the only one wondering why you're interviewing your potential boss in the first place?

Nope ... I had the pleasure of 'training' my boss in one job, but I certainly wasn't in on the hiring process. I had moved into a branch that didn't have any managers and I knew I was going to be the assistant manager going into it. I had to work with a manager from the next region over for almost a year before they actually hired my 'in-house' boss. GL

Just in case anyone in any C-suite is going to be reading this, this is a super bad way to run a company.

Everyone who will report to a new hire should interview them. If executives gonna executive at least pretend to gather input and ignore it behind closed doors.

I've interviewed both my prospective bosses as well as bosses' bosses. I was not asked to fill out the standard forms but was asked in person how it went and whether I could see myself reporting to him/her.

Maybe Tom can elaborate on his question.

Probably not, but I've done it several times.

Mostly it was the hiring person (my 2nd leverl manager) wanting to get a feel for how we peons would interact with the new boss. Our interactions weren't necessarily the deciding factor, but they were definitely a factor.

I can understand a manager sitting down and having meetings with employees from a get-to-know-you standpoint and getting input from the peons if you will - after the hire - but outright interviewing someone for placement in a position that directly controls your job doesn't sound right to me. Maybe I've been out of the corporate world for too long.