Shaan Puri: Asking candidates for an unprepared talk tests mastery and communication
Shaan Puri · The Most Valuable Skill For Any Founder · May 5, 2025 · at 45:43
Host Shaan Puri shares his favorite interview question for evaluating job applicants' communication ability and depth of knowledge.
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“What's something you could give a one-hour talk on right now unprepared? Like, you just know it so well, you spent so much time on it, that if I gave you know, 45 minutes to an hour, you could actually, like, give me a crash course in this thing, because you have mastery over it. And in doing so, you also see how somebody communicates when they know something. So it does sort of two things. It gives you a relative bar, so if that's the thing you know best, And then you compare it to the things they've been telling you about, you realize, oh, that resume was a little shaky. They don't really know how they, how that, that, how, how that operated in their company compared to how they know this. And secondly, it tells you how their communication skills are, right? Can they actually break something down simply for somebody and then build up from there intuitively? Like, are they a good storyteller? Are they a good communicator or not?”
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