> > You can't even judge a person's competence reliably during an > interview, > much less abstract characteristics such as ambition, or personality, > or the > reasons why they made certain career choices in the past. And > certainly > much less if all you have to go on is pre-interview papers, such as > resume > and cover letter. > > If anybody is hiring on the criteria of judging the ambition of their > candidates, I think the interviewer needs to be less ambitious. ;-) > In a > really very much improved optimistic world better than we live in, > you might > succeed at judging the candidates' core competency and fitness for a > particular task. You certainly can't count on succeeding in judging > your > candidates more deeply than that. (Plus, if you try, you have to be > careful > about legal issues or discrimination.) >
Yeah...we once hired a guy who had all the right answers.... ended with, system administration is not my career plan, but if hired I will do the job. (He did also list knowing the right keywords to find answers using google as a skill.) But, once hired....system administration is not my career plan, so I refuse to learn anything further about it and can't/won't do these things you keep assigning me. Since the manager didn't write goals for the the new hire, he couldn't review him out before the 6-month probationary period ended. Later when his roommate was hired for an opening....manager made sure to write goals so that he could be, if necessary....but he turned out to be the only good person of the 4 roommates that worked here.... 3 of them now all work for the same webhosting company now. OTOH, I'm told that apparently I bombed my interview and they didn't think I was qualified to do much of anything....and now I'm the only person that knows how to run those things. However, we did once interview a candidate that had many more years of experience than we needed, willing to relocate him and his family at his own expense to come out for a low position here. And, he got the recommendation from the search committee to be hired. But, one administrator didn't like the fact that he wasn't currently working.....and made it his mission to trash him to be not hired. So, we ended up not hiring him...and that administrator ended up leaving us anyways. I had kind of hoped that if the person was still looking that he wouldn't be afraid to apply again. Because it certainly hasn't stopped the people that wouldn't be hired from reapplying. He even pursued legal action against one of his own references, because the reference commented that he wasn't aware that he had been listed as a reference and didn't know why....but would only say confirm that the individual did work there. The search committee inferred lots of negativity from that.... He had also pursued legal action for his dismissal from our group many years earlier. And, had previously used the tactic to try to come back. I found out that its the office of affirmative action that says we can't test candidates... Had noticed lately that the few approved 'technical' questions, were more of to gauge a person's problem solving mindset than whether he actually knows stuff. And, the rest are about the person's personality and fit.... _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
