"How do you deal with difficult people?"

[Joe Holloway]

It's a style of interviewing known in HR circles as "behavioral
interviewing". My former employer required interviewers to walk
through an entire script of such behavioral questions even when hiring
for technical positions.

Having been pulled into many interviews for programming positions at
this company, I found it very frustrating because it left little time
for assessing the candidate's technical prowess.  The HR team often
gave more weight to culture fit as opposed to being able to explain
something like the space and time complexity of various programming
data structures, for example.

I'm sure HR folks can justify using this interview technique, but for
technical positions it needs to be supplemented with other interviews
that carry just as much (or more) weight than the behavioral portion,
in my experience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_interview#Behavioral_interview
http://www.career.vt.edu/Jobsearc/interview/Behavioral.htm


On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Sean Crago<cragos at gmail.com> wrote:
> That sounds like a pretty typical question to me. I've never asked it,
> but I've heard it in interviews a time or two, including the interview
> for my current gig. Common variations replace "difficult people" with
> "inappropriate/impossible requests" etc.
>
> For the whole class of questions like this, you're generally much
> better off briefly retelling and analyzing a narrative about a past
> situation than jumping straight into the platitudes. As the great
> Admiral would point out, though, it's a trap - Don't go negative, and
> make sure your answer stresses the professionalism and calm, friendly
> manner you've dealt with these issues in the past.
>
> Sean Crago
>
> PS: My apologies for the blank message that preceded this - Gmail+tiny
> pipe glitch.
>
> On 6/8/09, Sean Crago <cragos at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
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