-------------------------------------------- Social skills vs. Technically correct 2018.05.04 22:03:10 CEST -------------------------------------------- This week I was in an interesting discussion about interview questions and processes: many companies have recruitment teams whi are responsible for conducting phone screens to verify minimal knowledge requirements. These phone screens usually follow a pre- prepared script, questions and expected answers, which a recruiter even if unknowledgeable on the subject, can use. Now suppose there is a multiple-choice question which has a somewhat-correct answer almost everyone believes to be correct, but specialists know to be not-completely-correct. How should these specialists answer the question? If I were ever in this position, my answer would be along the line of: "I think you are looking for answer X, but that might not be correct under this, this and that situation". This gives the recruiter the answer they are expecting, but still allows me to ad more information and provide a truly correct answer. The downside of this way out is it requires extra skills on the specialist side: to be able to detect the "expected answer" and differentiate from the "correct answer"; then social skills to provide the answer in a way that won't cause disagreements. The counter argument is this interview method is adding burden onto people who are more knowledgeable and this seems unfair. We ran out of time for our discussion and I haven't had time to go through the arguments again and think the problem out. I hope to d so this week.