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http://www.scribd.com/doc/7087479/What-Do-Job-Interviews-Really-Tell-Us
Nolan Myers grew up in Houston, the elder
of two boys in a middle- class family. He went to Houston's High School for the
Performing and Visual Arts and then Harvard, where he intended to major in
History and Science. After discovering the joys of writing code, though, he
switched to computer science. "Programming is one of those things you get
involved in, and you just can't stop until you finish," Myers says.
"You get involved in it, and all of a sudden you look at your watch and
it's four in the morning! I love the elegance of it." Myers is short and
slightly stocky and has pale-blue eyes. He smiles easily, and when he speaks he
moves his hands and torso for emphasis. He plays in a klezmer band called the
Charvard Chai Notes. He talks to his parents a lot. He gets B's and B-pluses.
This spring, in the last stretch of his
senior year, Myers spent a lot of time interviewing for jobs with technology
companies. He talked to a company named Trilogy, down in Texas, but he didn't
think he would fit in. "One of Tril-ogy's subsidiaries put ads out in the
paper saying that they were looking for the top tech students, and that they'd
give them two hundred thousand dollars and a BMW," Myers said, shaking his
head in disbelief. In another of his interviews, a recruiter asked him to solve
a programming problem, and he made a stupid mistake and the recruiter pushed
the answer back across the table to him, saying that his "solution"
accomplished nothing. As he remembers the moment, Myers blushes. "I was so
nervous. I thought, Hmm, that sucks!" The way he says that, though, makes
it hard to believe that he really was nervous, or maybe what Nolan Myers calls
nervous the rest of us call a tiny flutter in the stomach. Myers doesn't seem
like the sort to get flustered. He's the kind of person you would call the
night before the big test in seventh grade, when nothing made sense and you had
begun to panic. I like Nolan Myers. He will, I am convinced, be very good at
whatever career he chooses. I say those two things even though I have spent no
more than ninety minutes in his presence. We met only once, on a sunny
afternoon in April at the Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. He was wearing
sneakers and khakis and a polo shirt, in a dark-green pattern. He had a big
backpack, which he plopped on the floor beneath the table. I bought him an
orange juice. He fished around in his wallet and came up with a dollar to try
and repay me, which I refused. We sat by the window. Previously, we had talked
for perhaps three minutes on the phone, setting up the interview. Then I
E-mailed him, asking him how I would recognize him at Au Bon Pain. He sent me
the following message, with what I'm convinced--again, on the basis of almost
no evidence--to be typical Myers panache: "22ish, five foot seven,
straight brown hair, very good-looking.:)." I have never talked to his
father, his mother, or his little brother, or any of his professors. I have
never seen him ecstatic or angry or depressed. I know nothing of his personal
habits, his tastes, or his quirks. I cannot even tell you why I feel the way I
do about him. He's good-looking and smart and articulate and funny, but notso
good-looking and smart and articulate and funny that there is some obvious
explanation for the conclusions I've drawn about him. I just like him, and I'm
impressed by him, and if I were an employer looking for bright young college
graduates, I'd hire him in a heartbeat. I heard about Nolan Myers from Hadi
Partovi, an executive with Tellme, a highly touted Silicon Valley startup
offering Internet access through the telephone. If you were a computer-science
major at M.I.T., Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, or the University of Waterloo this
spring, looking for a job in software, Tellme was probably at the top of your
list. Partovi and I talked in the conference room at Tellme's offices, just off
the soaring, open floor where all the firm's programmers and marketers and
executives sit, some of them with bunk beds built over their desks. (Tellme
recently moved into an old printing plant--a low- slung office building with a
huge warehouse attached--and, in accordance with new-economy logic, promptly
turned the old offices into a warehouse and the old warehouse into offices.)
Partovi is a handsome man of twenty-seven, with olive skin and short curly
black hair, and throughout our entire interview he sat with his chair tilted
precariously at a forty-five-degree angle. At the end of a long riff about how hard
it is to find high-quality people, he blurted out one name: Nolan Myers. Then,
from memory, he rattled off Myers's telephone number. He very much wanted Myers
to come to Tellme.
Partovi
had met Myers in January, during a recruiting trip to Harvard. "It was a
heinous day," Partovi remembers. "I started at seven and went until
nine. I'd walk one person out and walk the other in." The first fifteen
minutes of every interview he spent talking about Tellme--its strategy, its
goals, and its business. Then he gave everyone a short programming puzzle. For
the rest of the hour-long meeting, Partovi asked questions. He remembers that
Myers did well on the programming test, and after talking to him for thirty to
forty minutes he became convinced that Myers had, as he puts it, "the
right stuff." Partovi spent even less time with Myers than I did. He
didn't talk to Myers's family, or see him ecstatic or angry or depressed,
either. He knew that Myers had spent last summer as an intern at Microsoft and
was about to graduate from an Ivy League school. But virtually everyone
recruited by a place like Tellme has graduated from an elite university, and
the Microsoft summer-internship program has more than six hundred people in it.
Partovi didn't even know why he liked Myers so much. He just did. "It was very
much a gut call," he says.
This
wasn't so very different from the experience Nolan Myers had with Steve
Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft. Earlier this year, Myers attended a party for
former Microsoft interns called Gradbash. Ballmer gave a speech there, and at
the end of his remarks Myers raised his hand. "He was talking a lot about
aligning the company in certain directions," Myers told me, "and I
asked him about how that influences his ability to make bets on other
directions. Are they still going to make small bets?" Afterward, a Microsoft
recruiter came up to Myers and said, "Steve wants your E-mail
address." Myers gave it to him, and soon he and Ballmer were E-mailing.
Ballmer, it seems, badly wanted Myers to come to Microsoft. "He did
research on me," Myers says. "He knew which group I was interviewing
with, and knew a lot about me personally. He sent me an E-mail saying that he'd
love to have me come to Microsoft, and if I had any questions I should contact
him. So I sent him a response, saying thank you. After I visited Tellme, I sent
him an E-mail saying I was interested in Tellme, here were the reasons, that I
wasn't sure yet, and if he had anything to say I said I'd love to talk to him.
I gave him my number. So he called, and after playing phone tag we
talked--about career trajectory, how Microsoft would influence my career, what
he thought of Tellme. I was extremely impressed with him, and he seemed very
genuinely interested in me."
What
convinced Ballmer he wanted Myers? A glimpse! He caught a little slice of Nolan
Myers in action and--just like that--the C.E.O. of a
four-hundred-billion-dollar company was calling a college senior in his dorm
room. Ballmer somehow knew he liked Myers, the same way Hadi Partovi knew, and
the same way I knew after our little chat at Au Bon Pain. But what did we know?
What could we know? By any reasonable measure, surely none of us knew Nolan
Myers at all. It is a truism of the new economy that the ultimate success of
any enterprise lies with the quality of the people it hires. At many technology
companies, employees are asked to all but live at the office, in conditions of
intimacy that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. The artifacts of
the prototypical Silicon Valley office--the videogames, the espresso bar, the
bunk beds, the basketball hoops--are the elements of the rec room, not the
workplace. And in the rec room you want to play only with your friends. But how
do you find out who your friends are?Today, recruiters canvas the country for
resumes. They analyze employment histories and their competitors' staff
listings. They call references, and then do what I did with Nolan Myers: sit
down with a perfect stranger for an hour and a half and attempt to draw
conclusions about that stranger's intelligence and personality. The job
interview has become one of the central conventions of the modern economy. But
what, exactly, can you know about a stranger after sitting down and talking with
him for an hour?
2.
Some years ago, an experimental psychologist at Harvard University, Nalini
Ambady, together with Robert Rosenthal, set out to examine the nonverbal
aspects of good teaching. As the basis of her research, she used videotapes of
teaching fellows which had been made during a training program at Harvard. Her
plan was to have outside observers look at the tapes with the sound off and rate
the effectiveness of the teachers by their expressions and physical cues.
Ambady wanted to have at least a minute of film to work with. When she looked
at the tapes, though, there was really only about ten seconds when the teachers
were shown apart from the students. "I didn't want students in the frame, because
obviously it would bias the ratings," Ambady says. "So I went to my
adviser, and I said, 'This isn't going to work.'"
But
it did. The observers, presented with a ten-second silent video clip, had no
difficulty rating the teachers on a fifteen- item checklist of personality
traits. In fact, when Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, the ratings
were the same. They were even the same when she showed her raters just two
seconds of videotape. That sounds unbelievable unless you actually watch
Ambady's teacher clips, as I did, and realize that the eight seconds that
distinguish the longest clips from the shortest are superfluous: anything beyond
the first flash of insight is unnecessary. When we make a snap judgment, it is made
in a snap. It's also, very clearly, a judgment:we get a feeling that we have no
difficulty articulating.
Ambady's
next step led to an even more remarkable conclusion. She compared those snap judgments
of teacher effectiveness with evaluations made, after a full semester of
classes, by students of the same teachers. The correlation between the two, she
found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip
of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that
teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the
teacher's class for an entire semester. Recently, a comparable experiment was
conducted by Frank Bernieri, a psychologist at the University of Toledo.
Bernieri, working with one of his graduate students, Neha Gada-Jain, selected
two people to act as interviewers, and trained them for six weeks in the proper
procedures and techniques of giving an effective job interview. The two then interviewed
ninety-eight volunteers, of various ages and backgrounds. The interviews lasted
between fifteen and twenty minutes, and afterward each interviewer filled out a
six-page, five-part evaluation of the person he'd just talked to. Originally,
the intention of the study was to find out whether applicants who had been
coached in certain nonverbal behaviors designed to ingratiate themselves with
their interviewers--like mimicking the interviewers' physical gestures or
posture--would get better ratings than applicants who behaved normally. As it
turns out, they didn't. But then another of Bernieri's students, an undergraduate
named Tricia Prickett, decided that she wanted to use the interview videotapes
and the evaluations that had been collected to test out the adage that
"the handshake is everything."
"She
took fifteen seconds of videotape showing the applicant as he or she knocks on
the door, comes in, shakes the hand of the interviewer, sits down, and the
interviewer welcomes the person," Bernieri explained. Then, like Ambady,
Prickett got a series of strangers to rate the applicants based on the
handshake clip, using the same criteria that the interviewers had used. Once
more, against all expectations, the ratings were very similar to those of the
interviewers. "On nine out of the eleven traits the applicants were being
judged on, the observers significantly predicted the outcome of the
interview," Bernieri says. "The strength of the correlations was
extraordinary."
This
research takes Ambady's conclusions one step further. In the Toledo experiment,
the interviewers were trained in the art of interviewing. They weren't dashing
off a teacher evaluation on their way out the door. They were filling out a
formal, detailed questionnaire, of the sort designed to give the most thorough
and unbiased account of an interview. And still their ratings weren't all that
different from those of people off the street who saw just the greeting.
This
is why Hadi Partovi, Steve Ballmer, and I all agreed on Nolan Myers.
Apparently, human beings don't need to know someone in order to believe that
they know someone. Nor does it make that much difference, apparently, that
Partovi reached his conclusion after putting Myers through the wringer for an
hour, I reached mine after ninety minutes of amiable conversation at Au Bon
Pain, and Ballmer reached his after watching and listening as Myers asked a
question.
Bernieri
and Ambady believe that the power of first impressions suggests that human beings
have a particular kind of prerational ability for making searching judgments
about others. In Ambady's teacher experiments, when she asked her observers to
perform a potentially distracting cognitive task--like memorizing a set of
numbers--while watching the tapes, their judgments of teacher effectiveness
were unchanged. But when she instructed her observers to think hard about their
ratings before they made them, their accuracy suffered substantially. Thinking
only gets in the way. "The brain structures that are involved here are
very primitive," Ambady speculates. "All of these affective reactions
are probably governed by the lower brain structures." What we are picking
up in that first instant would seem to be something quite basic about a
person's character, because what we conclude after two seconds is pretty much
the same as what we conclude after twenty minutes or, indeed, an entire
semester. "Maybe you can tell immediately whether someone is extroverted,
or gauge the person's ability to communicate,"Bernieri says. "Maybe
these clues or cues are immediately accessible and apparent." Bernieri and
Ambady are talking about the existence of a powerful form of human intuition.
In a way, that's comforting, because it suggests that we can meet a perfect
stranger and immediately pick up on something important about him. It means that
I shouldn't be concerned that I can't explain why I like Nolan Myers, because,
if such judgments are made without thinking, then surely they defy explanation.
But
there's a troubling suggestion here as well. I believe that Nolan Myers is an accomplished
and likable person. But I have no idea from our brief encounter how honest he
is, or whether he is self-centered, or whether he works best by himself or in a
group, or any number of other fundamental traits. That people who simply see
the handshake arrive at the same conclusions as people who conduct a full
interview also implies, perhaps, that those initial impressions matter too
much--that they color all the other impressions that we gather over time.
For
example, I asked Myers if he felt nervous about the prospect of leaving school
for the workplace, which seemed like a reasonable question, since I remember
how anxious I was before my first job. Would the hours scare him? Oh no, he
replied, he was already working between eighty and a hundred hours a week at
school. "Are there things that you think you aren't good at, which make
you worry?" I continued.
His
reply was sharp: "Are there things that I'm not good at, or things that I
can't learn? I think that's the real question. There are a lot of things I
don't know anything about, but I feel comfortable that given the right
environment and the right encouragement I can do well at." In my notes,
next to that reply, I wrote "Great answer!" and I can remember at the
time feeling the little thrill you experience as an interviewer when someone's
behavior conforms with your expectations. Because I had decided, right off,
that I liked him, what I heard in his answer was toughness and confidence. Had
I decided early on that I didn't like Nolan Myers, I would have heard in that
reply arrogance and bluster. The first impression becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy: we hear what we expect to hear. The interview is hopelessly biased in
favor of the nice.
3.
When Ballmer and Partovi and I met Nolan Myers, we made a prediction. We looked
at the way he behaved in our presence--at the way he talked and acted and seemed
to think--and drew conclusions about how he would behave in other situations. I
had decided, remember, that Myers was the kind of person you called the night
before the big test in seventh grade. Was I right to make that kind of
generalization?
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