How To Ace The Brainteaser Part 1

RIDDLE ME THIS

Interviewers are looking for meaningful, uncontroversial conversations with candidates that will provide actionable information on which to make reliable selection decisions. Interviewers hope that puzzles and brainteasers will help create the possibility of such quality conversations.
Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and a former program manager at Microsoft, is an advocate of using brainteasers, primarily as conversation starters. “The goal is to have an interesting conversation with the candidate, and to use that conversation to see how smart and capable they are,” Spolsky explains. “If you have an interesting conver- sation about certain types of topics with a person, you can determine if [he] is the type of person you want to hire. The questions are almost a pretext to having that conversation.”
In almost all cases, the interviewers are less interested in the answer you offer than in the road you use getting there. It’s all about process. To that extent, the best strategy is to take your time, think out loud, and let the interviewer see you sweat (at least a little). Ironically, solving these puzzles too fast may work against you. At a minimum, the interviewer may conclude you’ve heard the puzzle before. In any case, even if you impress the interviewer with your speed, you will have missed the oppor- tunity to talk about how you would use the skills you just demonstrated to add value to the company. Let the interviewer participate with you in solving the puzzle.
The truth is, puzzles generally make up less than 10 percent of any job interview. “The puzzles are a small part of the interview process at Microsoft,” says Ron Jacobs, product manager for the Platform Architec- ture Guidance Team. “We’ve found it’s very effective in giving us insight

into a candidate’s potential. And that potential is the hardest thing to gauge. We know the résumé looks good, and they seem to have the skills. These puzzles put them in a place where it’s just them and their raw thinking abilities.”
Jacobs says that the puzzles are usually designed so that there are no clear answers. Sometimes the interviewer will throw a candidate a hint that points to a solution that is clearly wrong, just to see how the candidate will defend his or her position and push back. “A level of confidence is good,” Jacobs says. “Microsoft is very much a company that values that kind of independent thought.” But don’t let the attitude slip into stubborn- ness or arrogance, he adds.
Jacobs speaks from experience. He should know, because he’s had three interviews at Microsoft. In 1997, in his first time at bat, Jacobs impressed people that he was a “Microsoft hire,” but he was nevertheless thought not a good fit for the position at hand. In his first interview, he was asked to design an airport. Jacobs immediately began to wax eloquent about how he would design a world-class international airport like Seattle’s SeaTac or Chicago’s O’Hare. But after letting Jacobs go on for five minutes, the interviewer stopped him and said, “But all I need is a small regional airport.” Jacobs learned a lesson: “I didn’t clarify pre- cisely what the customer needed.”
In his second interview a year later, Jacobs anticipated brainteasers but didn’t get any. He was asked to solve a coding problem instead. Since then, he’s interviewed for an internal job. “My take on the big pic- ture here is that when we ask these questions we are looking not so much for the answer, but how the candidate thinks about the problem and approaches the solution,” Jacobs notes. “Some candidates will be very quiet for a few minutes and then spew out an answer. This is generally a bad approach,” he says. “A better approach is for candidates to think out loud as though they were collaborating with me on the answer. I es- pecially like to hear them ask questions which clarify the problem. Sometimes we will ask an intentionally vague question to test for this.”

THE INTERVIEWER’S DILEMMA

Selectivity is the key reason for interviewers including puzzles in the mix. Interviewers believe that puzzles help them separate the outstanding

candidates from the great ones. Ironically, a recession that creates a seller’s market (more candidates applying for each job) only aggravates the inter- viewer’s dilemma. Selectivity becomes harder, not easier, when dozens or even hundreds of candidates chase each position. Now interviewers are confronted with an abundance of outstanding candidates who all seem perfectly suited to the requirements of the job. Each has passed the preemployment background screening and sports a sterling résumé, the requisite technical skills, the appropriate certifications. Pastures of plenty! It’s easy to distinguish between an average performer and a superstar. But what do you do when you have to select among superstars?
You may have noticed that the job reference, once the backbone of any recruitment process, is nowhere mentioned. Over the past 25 years, organizations have become increasingly reluctant to provide references for former employees. The reluctance is not hard to understand. In our litigious society, job applicants—whether downsized or voluntarily separated— have their attorney’s telephone number on speed dial, ready to push the button for any perceived slight. As a result, most organizations will limit reference checks to verifying dates of employment and job title and final salary at separation. An increasing number of companies automate the reference-checking process using touch-tone voice-response systems to eliminate the chance that a human might say something that a former employee can claim was defamatory.
Letters of reference, once key to the hiring process, are likewise obso- lete. Even on the rare occasions when they are submitted, reference-letter inflation makes them less useful. Every reference is glowing; every appli- cant is flawless. If they were so flawless, interviewers rightly wonder, why are they unemployed? No one wants to take the risk of writing a letter that is nuanced. Besides, with many candidates applying through the Internet, there’s often no opportunity to submit letters or attachments of any kind.
Today, even the traditional job interview—the most valuable tool in deciding on the “fit” of a potential employee—is circumscribed. Inter- viewers are running scared. Interviewers now have to worry about subjects they need to avoid and questions they are not allowed to ask. In the United States, state and federal law take a whole swath of topics and questions off the table. Interviewers are not supposed to ask a candidate’s age,

weight, marital status, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, political outlook, sexual preference, financial status, or reproductive plans. Except for specific jobs, interviewers can’t even ask about a candidate’s arrest record. Only questions that point to the candidate’s ability to do the job at hand are allowed. Many of these rules protect women and minorities, and that’s good. No one wants to go back to the days when employers asked women job applicants about their birth control practices. But the new rules also create uncertainty about the kind of small talk that is vital for any human interaction. Innocent questions such as, “Did you have trouble getting here?” become ominous when the interviewer is afraid that the candidate may wonder if the question is just an icebreaker or an attempt to discover if the candidate drove or took the bus.
For these reasons and more, puzzles and brainteasers are making a comeback. Employers are desperate. It’s all part of an increasing empha- sis to use the job interview to provide actionable information on which to make reliable judgments. With many job interview questions off the table, puzzles and brainteasers become more attractive as a way to have extended conversations with candidates. By asking candidates to respond to a puzzle or brainteaser, the conversations not only stay on safe ground, but create an opportunity to have a conversation that genuinely reveals critical aspects of how the candidate approaches a challenge, formulates a response, and articulates a strategy. When most of the candidates on the short list are overqualified for the position, these types of conversa- tions, interviewers hope, can give them a meaningful basis on which to make a selection.

PUZZLES THAT WORK

Puzzles appropriate for job interviews help catalyze a meaningful conver- sation between the candidate and the interviewer. It is in this conversation, more than the solution to any particular puzzle, that the value of the inter- view is experienced.
The world is full of puzzles, but relatively few of them are appropriate for job interviews. Most, for one reason or another, simply don’t create extended conversations (see Appendix D for types of puzzles inappro- priate for job interviews). The puzzles that have the best possible traction for interviews have these attributes:

• Have solutions. Puzzles are meant to be solved.
• Short. The puzzle statement is clean, crisp, and obvious. Puzzles with elaborate narrations or many conditions don’t work well. The best puzzles can be solved in less than five minutes, although the conver- sations about them can be extended.
• Open ended. Puzzles that have multiple acceptable answers allow candidates to be creative or demonstrate their ability to come up with multiple solutions. Most of all, if there are no right or wrong answers, candidates cannot be defeated.
• Unobvious. By this, I mean not only that the problem is “deep” in some nontrivial way, but that it often suggests an “obvious” first impression that is inevitably wrong.
• Charming. The best puzzles engage our intellects in ways that leave candidates stimulated. It’s hard to define what gives a puzzle this quality, but we know it when we see it. Puzzles shouldn’t be arduous. One goal of puzzles in job interviews is to have fun while doing serious business.