There's one important question I haven't seen on here that's saved me on more than one occasion.
"Are there any concerns you may have that I can address that may lead you to believe I'm not the right candidate?"
I've been able to address: lack of previous experience, lack of a degree, time in between jobs, time spent at the last job, all thanks to this question.
Personally I agree with the other reply that advises against asking this.
Everything in a job interview should be to frame you in a positive light.
I see way too many candidates try and play the humble route, and all it does is sell them short. There’s a fine line between too humble and too full of yourself , and neither side is good to find yourself on. This particular question seems to me to be too humble.
Questions like this may seem like it makes the candidate seem humble and open to feedback, but in actuality whenever someone has asked something like this it has made them appear insecure and planted more seeds of doubt in the interviewers mind since they now have to think about their shortcomings.
Maybe phrasing it a better way would help:
“What qualities are you looking for, for this role?”
“Are there things you think i should brush up on , assuming I get this role?”
“Where do you see me best being able to contribute in this role?”
Those questions give you the same data points, leaving you to infer where you may be lacking. It leaves the interviewer with a sense of your confidence without seeming too full of yourself, and generally the wording makes them consider you as if you’re in the role, versus not in it.
Again, a job interview is a sales pitch. People should be honest while balancing keeping the tone positive.
You wouldn’t sell a car by pointing out its flaws. Don’t sell yourself the same way.
I don't agree that asking this question is taking the humble route. Asking if they have any concerns doesn't mean you think that they should. In fact there's an obvious subtext that if they do have concerns then you can address them, so they're not really valid. That's almost the opposite of being humble!
Personally I don't think it sounds either arrogant or humble overall, plus it shows a willingness to discuss difficult things in a polite manner (at least the question as stated above was polite) which is also a plus for a candidate.
Agreed. It's also engaging well with the meta game.
Related - Once viewing a house to buy I asked the seller, is there anything you think I should know about this house that I haven't asked about. Their reply turned out to be a deal breaker (at the time - maybe it would have been fine but the point is we got a lot more information! )
The best sales technique for a candidate is for the candidate to do research and/or ask enough questions to find out what the problems the company is having. Then the candidate explains how he's going to fix those problems.
This works because that's the reason why the company is interviewing people - they have a problem they need to solve. Be that solution.
Good point. I'm not applying to work at a car dealership. When I'm on the other side of the table, I'm deliberately trying to avoid hiring a car salesmen. As a hiring manager, I may give a bit of a canned response to the question. But I'm not going to hold it against a candidate.
If this question turns a company off, both the company and candidate have obtained a critical piece of information.
Yeah but I do point out a car's flaws when I sell it. I don't want anyone being annoyed thinking they've been ripped off and I definitely don't want a guilty conscience if anything safety critical goes wrong.
The fact that anyone would be surprised by that is a sad indictment on our culture.
It’s not about penalizing humility. I think you missed the point I’m making. It’s that there's a human factor to interviews, and part of that is presenting yourself in the best light.
It’s a subconscious thing, but you really don’t want people to start thinking negatively about you, because it can cause that negativity to linger and affect your assessment. You especially don’t want someone to end an interview on the negative note. Do it in the middle if you have to but make sure you start and end positively
Again, there’s a fine line between too much humility and too much hubris. Humility is fine in moderation , but you have to keep from being excessive or you do a disservice to yourself as much as overselling yourself.
Ok actually I do like your second rephrasing of that question, but if that's your point I think you are overstating it with the car analogy. I did recently miss a job I thought I wanted, possibly by being too honest - who knows but if that was indeed the reason maybe I dodged a bullet there.
Also though I agree with quietbritishjim's take, from the other side of the table I would actually read the question as confident. I'm British as well. Cultural thing maybe.
Oh no, I get it: you want me to fool you, and once I see how you work, I'm more than happy to do so, or, more likely, work for someone with more realistic expectations.
I have a slightly different motivation for asking that question. It's not (false) humility. Instead, I want to avoid a situation where the interviewer thinks "Obviously, he wouldn't know about that" and either doesn't ask at all or the conversation moves along before we talk much about it.
For example, I talked to someone on Friday about a bioinformatics job. In passing, the manager remarked, "So you probably don't have any experience analyzing gene networks...." While that's true, I have done other graph theory/network analysis work that uses the same mathematical tools, so we talked about that for a bit. Without that offhand comment, though, I'm not sure how I would have gone about making my case.
Always being positive or never showing a negative seems to make people seem shifty, overly political and sometimes just dishonest. Interviews are as much about buying as selling - you are picking your next employer as much as they are picking you. Most bad hires I've made have been people who oversold themselves in the interview.
However, I'd carve out an exception. In an interview where you have, without a doubt, not done well and there's greater than a 80% chance that you feel you won't proceed, this question may potentially be a good hail mary, for salvaging the interview.
But, I've never used the technique before. And unless you have alot of interview experience, it will also be difficult to make judgement calls on how well or bad an interview has gone.
You close sales pitches. Asking if there's any way you haven't shown you meet the criteria either leads in to the close or allows you to address an unstated objection.
Any sales person that does their pitch then just goes "welp, see ya later" at the end has no business being in sales.
I guess this is very subjective but personally I wouldn't ask this question, especially in a technical interview. First, it may embarrass the interviewer. They may not be willing to answer this question. Second, after you know the answer, you won't be able to fix anything. You don't want to start arguing that lacking a degree is not a big deal.
It's akin to asking someone in a date "any reason why you wouldn't like me?". It feels like lacking confidence and anticipating rejection.
This question could make sense if you don't get an offer. If you get a chance to talk to the recruiter, you can ask them if there are particular things you could try to improve if you were to interview again at their company.
> You don't want to start arguing that lacking a degree is not a big deal.
If 'having a degree' is a 'big deal' for the company, it's probably not the best place to work anyway.
But what that question might uncover is that the interviewer is concerned that because you lack a degree, you might lack some CS background. That's a valid concern that you could refute by talking about how you've learned a lot on your own.
I was watching "Roadkill" the other day. On the show a couple of mechanics try to pass themselves off as bumpkin mechanics muddling through fixing cars. But every once in a while they'll slip up. For example, one of them said the engine was behaving in an adiabatic way. This is a term one only learns taking a college level thermodynamics course.
It's hard to fake having an engineering education, and if you have one it should show in an interview whether or not you have the degree.
I watch hot rod shows and read hot rod magazines and books. (What can I say, I'm a motorhead.) Not once before have I ever seen any reference to thermodynamic jargon, which is why that word jumped out at me.
Out of curiosity, do you recall any more context around referring to an engine (combustion engine?) in terms of adiabatic process? I'm just a bit puzzled how this might come up in relation to a car.
It was in the context of the radiator being clogged and unable to dump the heat.
"An adiabatic process occurs without transferring heat or mass between a thermodynamic system and its surroundings. Unlike an isothermal process, an adiabatic process transfers energy to the surroundings only as work."
Wasn't looking for the definition, having studied thermodynamics as an undergrad, just surprised that a nonfunctional cooling system might be cast in such terms. Like, you don't start by noticing the engine's increased thermal efficiency as a stepping stone to realizing the radiator isn't getting hot or the water pump is failing to pump.
> You don't want to start arguing that lacking a degree is not a big deal.
True. What I usually do is point out the amount of hours it would take to get a PhD on average, and compare it to the number of hours I've spent furthering my education and honing my craft. It is in fact more time spent than it would take to obtain a PhD.
Most of the time, if the interviewer formed these concerns, you’re just opening yourself up to give them space for confirmation bias to take over. What might have been one bad interview session out of six, which might not rule you out, now becomes a crater of destruction that will absolutely be a big talking point in the debrief and feedback.
Additionally it comes off as insecure. Like you can’t tolerate the idea that you might actually have made mistakes or lacked skills or fluffed your resume or communicated badly, and you deserve a chance to debate your way out of it.
Finally it also seems like fishing for negative feedback you can disagree with later. You likely won’t get significant feedback after the interviews are over since companies don’t reveal it for legal reasons, so you’re trying to get interviewers off-guard to get that feedback and later act like it’s unfair.
As an interviewer I would strictly reply that I need to write down my notes from the interview, review and analyze them, and compare notes in the debrief session before I will develop any type of feedback, positive or negative. The interview itself is a place for information exchange, and trying to form opinions about positives / negatives on the spot amplifies the likelihood of bias or lack of context.
It sounds like you are hiring for a bureaucratic corporate borg and parent poster wants to work for a human team striving to achieve something. Different strokes.
I’m not saying anything about how I prefer to hire, apart from the fact I refuse to formulate concrete opinions inside an interview session and must take time after to ruminate on it and analyze details.
The rest of it is just simply the facts of interviewing pretty much anywhere. I’ve seen it happen much more strongly in young startups than big corporations, but it’s extremely common everywhere.
Small startups usually have fewer formalized practices in recruiting and less standardized HR practices, which leads to more bias and unfair judgment calls in recruiting compared with larger companies, not less.
> As an interviewer I would strictly reply that I need to write down my notes from the interview, review and analyze them, and compare notes in the debrief session before I will develop any type of feedback, positive or negative.
And everybody will know that you either seriously lack substance or that you are clearly lying.
Nobody except bitter / insecure people would think that. Everybody knows this is just how the hiring world works and random individual interviewers are not free to choose moralistic ideals about feedback.
That’s not being unmoralistic. That’s severely lacking social skills.
You can say whatever you want to the interviewee because if that goes to court it’s their word against yours. That works both ways of course, but at least allows people to say whatever they really mean rather than keeping someone in ignorant bliss.
That being said it only applies to countries where recording someone against their will is illegal.
This will put the interviewer in a very awkward position. Imagine the interviewer thinks you have a problem in area X, and they spell it out right there, "I think your expertise in X might be lacking," and then for all they know, they're walking into a discussion on whether X should be considered necessary for the job, with the very person they need to assess - a potential minefield.
Sure, you may be a reasonable person and have a reasonable answer for their concern, but they don't know it.
Surely it is the person/company doing the hiring who has the say in what is and isn't required for the position? Assuming the interviewer isn't doing something that's blatantly illegal ("Do you plan on having children in the next x years?", "I think you're too old for this position" etc.) I don,t think an interviewee is really in a position to argue this as surely they'd almost always have very limited knowledge of what the position actually entails compared to the person doing the hiring.
Exactly, no interviewer would want to have such a discussion with the interviewee. So their best course of action would be to smile and say "I don't have any concerns, thanks for asking."
As an interviewer at a FAANG, this gets an immediate "I may not answer that" and a little disappointment in my mind. We do not assess resumes, only performance at the interviews. Resumes are only for screening. But this may be a good question at small companies that don't have a streamlined process. Take into account who you're talking to.
"Resumes are only for screening" -- yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person, at every point in the interview process you end up having to repeat yourself and almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume. it's as if your entire history of being alive and working doesn't matter, only that you can operate as a DS&A robot that doesn't ask too many questions. "I may not answer that" - Borg
> yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person […] almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume
I feel like I’m missing your point here... you are correct - when I’m doing a coding interview, I don’t care if you’re black or white, male or female, university educated or self-taught, the only thing I care about is whether or not you can code[1]. You seem to be suggesting that that’s a bad thing?
[1] Of course any major red flags like muttering racist curses when you get frustrated would also be noted; it’s not like I ignore the human side of things, I’m just not actively looking for that~
What interviewer isn't going to dig into their concerns anyway? I mean, if you can read the person and they seem like they'd be down for "let's get down to brass tacks" kinda talk, go for it. Maybe it makes you seem like a serious person to certain kinds of people.
It might be a little uncomfortable for someone like me. I'd rather you ask, "what are your favorite qualities in your best employees" and then respond to that.
Maybe it's just my area of work but I can't imagine caring about previous experience, degree, or anything. I mean, the candidate has gotten past the resume screen already so you're just living up to that impression and other candidates at that point.
"Are there any concerns you may have that I can address that may lead you to believe I'm not the right candidate?"
I've been able to address: lack of previous experience, lack of a degree, time in between jobs, time spent at the last job, all thanks to this question.