I won’t be the only one on the call so I can’t just give him an impossible interview. we’re planning the interview together today. how do I make sure we can’t hire him?
luckily his background doesn’t line up with what our team does, at least from his resume – god it’s the worst to read from the formatting alone. so maybe I can just lean into that? my team is part of a software infrastructure group and we’re tasked with making the rest of the org stop sucking ass at software development – secrets don’t go in git repos type of stuff. so people skills and writing little bits of code that ensure the culture changes over time. his background is in operations and maybe a little software dev.
I need suggestions for questions that will make him a no go. I can’t take someone who worked for Palantir, for nearly a decade no less, seriously.
just push him when he inevitably gives wishy washy answers to stuff that he doesn’t look good on/is a bad fit for
that’s all I got. make him dig his own grave as much as possible.
Make him write a sorting algorithm with log(n) time complexity
If you want to go hard, are comfortable with it, and can weaponize your personal experience or identity, take notes of how he doesn’t seem to listen to or respect you and afterwards say, “as a [X], he made me uncomfortable”.
You might not even have to lie, candidates often do that shit. Especially to femmes. I’ve helped with interviews and watched candidates listen to a question from a femme interviewer and then proceed to address a masc interviewer as if they had asked it. That kind of stuff.
If you’re allowed to ask non-technical questions, you can also ask about how they would resolve an office conflict, or when they’ve had one in the past. Dudes regularly flunk that question or at least distinguish themselves as less thoughtful than other candidates through their responses. It’s actually just a good thing to ask during an interview in general.
For the technical portion, highlight that gulf between what you all are doing and what he’s done. Pick out things that the other candidates have that he doesn’t and ask questions about it, ideally hard ones that would require experience doing the task. This is not really a particularly unfair way to weed out candidates anyways. Sometimes they might surprise you and give a good answer despite their resume. You’d be banking on them not doing that. At minimum, you’re setting up a scenario where if you ask the same questions of all candidates, you’ll be able to quantify how much better your choices performed. A particularly good style of question for this is to ask them to demo a design or spec based on a problem description. People with relevant experience will list things they’ve done before and go into reasonable detail. A candidate that is winging it will usually take longer to come up with a plan and therefore present one that’s less fleshed out. IMO this is not a good interview question in general but it’s great for biasing against a candidate.
ask him to describe some project. either from a prompt you give “name a difficult project and how you overcame difficulties and conflicts with teammates” or pick one from his resume
then just keep drilling him on the technical details deeper and deeper. e.g. “why did you pick this database schema over this other option?” “why did you decide to index the tables this way?” “why did you pick this db over another one? could you explain all the pros and cons?” “you only considered the amount of features? have you considered i/o speeds at all?”
If your company emphasizes DEI, ask him what he has done at palantir to foster a pro-DEI workplace and how he has helped boost underrepresented minority groups at the company. High chance he hasn’t at all
“The company has decided to fundraise for charity. You’ve been asked to participate on the committee to decide on a charity, which one would you choose?”
Give the libertarian rope to hang himself with. Also gives you an excuse to pry into his politics.
oooh this is brilliant
If I was in your shoes - I’d google them and see what comes up. You probably won’t find anything incriminating but you’ll never know if you don’t at least spend a few minutes poking around.
Everybody lies on their resumé. How much is too much is up to debate. I think the average person lies a little but people can get addicted to padding the information to the point they are easily caught lying to the point of termination. And of course - there’s a world beyond their business life.
If I found something incriminating - I would “leak” it to my company via email. I’ll say it for the thread that if anybody ever does this - cover your tracks carefully. Also - time it well. I would be neutral in the interview. Sometime later (days or weeks?) I’d send the email.
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I bet if you google, search reddit or google reddit you can fin some (very) good ideas: petty revenge, r/PettyRevenge, etc.
Almost everyone. Some of us didn’t realize this and took forever ro get jobs… (also was raised in a religion that heavily hated lying. I’m no longer in that religion but my lying skills still suck).
if you learn manager/business speak for describing what you’ve done, you can make your resume more impressive to HR/hiring managers without actually lying. it’s effectively embellishing but that’s because you literally can’t use the dialect without embellishing.
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I’ll give it a shot. I might not know how to find this kind of info cause I usually don’t get much beyond socials. do you just trawl their socials looking for dirt?
I’ve been lucky in my life that I’ve never needed to do something like this. If you’re willing to buy their credit report (whatever those cost) - that would be the easiest starting point. Other than that I think starting from zero with a google search like
how to get personal dirtwould be the way to go.thanks!
It’s nice when technology can be used for good instead of evil for once.
“I will draw you, Saruman, as poison is drawn from a wound.”
Keep insisting he smells unwashed
wake up honey, new zoom feature just dropped
You’re the one doing the interviews, just make up that he said something racist or whatever verbally during the interview or whatever else that could ‘make you feel uncomfortable’. If you’re the one doing interviews they probably already trust your judgment, that’s why you’re being paid to make one. Unless it’s for something really specific and he’s the only qualified applicant then ‘his resume looks great but he creeper me the hell out’ works just fine.
there’s a second interviewer in there with me and the team eventually meets to make a collective decision, so no, I can’t just make stuff up. and as one of the only women on the team, I’m nervous about using something like “he creeped me out” because it’s going to be read in a gendered way. I’ll keep it in my backpocket for if I can’t find a more direct way to get the team to no. oh also, he’s in the UK so I dunno if HR has to tell him why he was rejected legally there. I know some countries mandate that kind of disclosure.
Damn, that’s a whole thing. I’m tired all the time and make no money working in a kitchen but we have a very strict no chuds policy and resumes are posted on a clipboard openly in a kitchen so any of us can lurk them online or whatever and if there’s obvious red flags that resume goes in the dang trash.
yeah, my boss is Bernie Sanders lib so anything directly fash would go in the trash but he screened this person and didn’t think Palantir was a red flag
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the team makes a decision together so they’ll ask for reasons. so no, I can’t just veto, just sandbag. candidate is also in the UK, so idk what HR is legally required to disclose to them.
