Radio show and Lessons in Interviewing

I mostly listen to the FM radio on my drive to and from the office. I don’t really have a long drive – so I don’t get a lot of time to do that and more so because I also use that time a lot to speak to friends and relatives on the phone. But something that interested me, a couple of days back, was a show that was aired on the radio while I was driving to the office – where this host was giving away free movie tickets to the callers giving “wrong answers” to the questions being asked. Interesting because I was also trying to answer the questions being asked and it didn’t seem that easy to me as it appeared when I first found out the rules. The questions were so trivial that you will automatically come up with the right answer. So, giving a wrong answer would actually take more time than the right ones and that would only limit the number of free tickets that you could have won.

As soon as I started to walk towards the elevator – I was thinking if the same logic can be applied in other things – including interviewing candidates for a job. You see that I am always thinking about different ways to spot the right talent for Tekriti. Let me take an example here.

One of the things that I have started doing recently more and more while interviewing candidates is to first describe to them a scenario / problem that they would have no idea about and then ask follow-up questions. As an interviewer, the thing that I do is to try to get the right answers from the interviewee – and would give them a few choices to begin with, when they are stuck, that would lead them to the final answer. So, something that I focus a lot in the process is to describe why a choice is the ‘right answer’. But something that I haven’t tried is to let the guys try out ‘reaching to the solution using elimination techniques’. So, instead of telling them the right answer and then explain the reason for it – it might be a better idea to lead them to the solution by helping them find the wrong answers first. This logic is something that is highly useful in solving multiple choice questions in a lot of examinations – and I, personally, have used it a lot.

But now, it may be worth a try to use the same approach during the next few interviews – I just need to organize my thoughts a bit more to be able to do a good job at this and be fair to the next person.