After 1,000 Interviews, Here Are Two Common Ways Candidates Failed

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

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I've conducted well over 1000 interviews between Amazon and Facebook. One thing I've repeatedly said to people is that being good at a job is not necessarily related to being good at interviewing for that same job.

Doing a job is a skill. Interviewing for a job is a skill. There is some overlap, to be sure. But interviewing is still a massive hurdle that trips up the very best performers. And some people are better at interviewing than doing the job. So it can be unfair in both directions.

After doing so many interviews, I've found some extremely common failure patterns. Beyond the obvious of, "Totally incompetent person not suited for this job in the slightest," there are other patterns of poor interviewing that show up regularly.

For example, there's a person that came close to being my first engineering hire of my career.

My team didn't exactly know what we were doing, but we did our best to ask engineering questions. We talked through some problems we'd encountered recently, and the engineer did a decent job of showing us that he knew what he was talking about.

I was excited that he seemed like someone we'd really like on the team. As I walked him to the front door, I was mentally going through the process of talking to my manager and the recruiting team about the next steps to extend an offer.

Then he paused at the door. "Hey, do you want to come hang out? The day is almost over, and I was going to hang out at that nearby bar."

I thought that was a little casual of him, but also friendly.

"No thanks! I appreciate the offer, though."

He nodded and shrugged. "I'm going to call that recruiter, though, and see if she wants to go. She's so hot, right? I totally want to tap that." And then he waved and walked out.

Wow. Yeah, that was the hardest pivot from "yes, let's hire" to "holy crap, no way" I've ever had. In the final 3 feet in front of the door he managed to lose a job offer.

Most people's failures are not that obvious and dramatic. Let's get into a couple of them.

Common Interview Mistake - Running your mouth.

In an interview going a bit long.

Me: “I understand your job responsibilities, I don’t need to know more about them. I would just like to know a different questio-”

Candidate: “Yeah, but after 6 months my responsibilities changed! After that point I was-”

Me: “I appreciate all the information, but we do have limited time. I wanted to know-”

Candidate: “Yes, I understand, we need to hurry. Let me finish quickly. So after my manager stepped down I took over..”

This wasn't a one time thing. I've had a similar conversation dozens of times. There are many candidates who seem absolutely unable to let the interviewer ask questions. They're stuck on what they want to communicate, rather than listen to what I want to know about.

Understanding interviews.

At most companies, interviews are generally organized into competencies. A competency is a list of topics that each interviewer needs to assess. It's a way of spreading out the short list of critical skills or personality traits they're looking for, and ensuring that someone in the loop asks about each one.

For example, when I interviewed at Facebook, a tech Director asked me questions about operational management of my systems. Then an HR Director asked me questions about my people management philosophy. Later, a product Director asked me to talk through how I would approach building a new ad product.

In each case, they had very specific topics they wanted to assess. In most interview loops, each interviewer needs to cover their critical topics, or they might leave their interview not knowing if the candidate meets the job requirements.

I assure you that the default answer is always no hire if the interviewer was unable to finish their assessments.

What does that mean? It's that it's absolutely in your best interest to ensure that the interviewer can get their answers.