Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery at Atlassian) discusses his favorite hiring technique for cutting through rehearsed interview responses.
“When people describe an experience, you ask them the name of the person that they worked with back then, and you ask them, so when I call this person after our call, what do you think they're going to say about that? And apparently this does something, and I've seen it happen, where people are unable to project and invent on the spot something from the lens of another person talking about them. And so they might be able to talk about, I did this, I did that. So when I talk, who was your boss? My boss. So when I ask this person, what do you think they're going to say? He's like, ah, well, actually, and they, I was only doing a part of it, or maybe you shouldn't call them because X, Y, Z. That part makes people all of a sudden go out of this scripted version they give of themselves and become more real for a second, and you get a bit of the authenticity Coming out”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
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