Hey, I thought that was a lawyer joke!

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Here’s the even better thing — you apparently enjoyed the process, no?

At 21, you were full of potential to be manipulated as they saw fit. They were trying to find out what they could get you to do.

What is the difference between laboratory rats and State Dept employees?

There are some things a lab rat will not do.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

I’ve subsequently been interviewed several times as a reference for friends pursuing various agency jobs, and have been sorely disappointed with the quality of the supposedly professional background reviewers. Most seem to just go down a list of check-the-box questions.

.’
Once you start to hire at the education level of someone like you, the rules change a bit. My advice is intended for the startup world in a general sense.

Having said that, your responses to those questions would have been sufficiently enlightening — not “sufficiently” perhaps “perfectly” is the better word — that I would have been interested in hiring you because of the clear depth of your mind and the quality of your ability to see into the intellectual depths.

Now if you didn’t have that one gun charge . . .

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Some concernes:

(1) Understanding such ‘internals’ is
difficult under the best circumstances.
E.g., a Ph.D. in clinical psychology with
20 years of experience and an hour a week
for a year with a candidate usually has
difficulty. A hiring process stands to
have more difficulty.

(2) Even if we have some of the best
understanding of the internals, a standard
remark in the social sciences is that such
understanding has little predictive value.

I came to understand (1)-(2) after “paying
full tuition”.

So, at this point I’m guessing that a
better approach is to design the jobs so
that we do not really need to have good
predictive value from understanding
personality ‘internals’. If this guess is
correct, then mostly we should design jobs
so that the work that needs to be done,
the background needed to be able to do
that work, and our ability to evaluate
that work are all relatively simple so
that trying to understand personality
‘internals’ and getting predictive value
there is less important.

I’m reminded of the movie ‘Moneyball’
where the scouting and coaching staff keep
giving long lists of subtle things wrong
with various players in style, their
personal lives, etc. but the General
Manager Billy Beane keeps saying “they get
on base” and don’t cost very much and
ignoring nearly everything else.

Thus I conclude that the interview process
is mostly to look at education and
experience. Sure, if there are some
obvious, serious red flags, then look at
those and maybe let them be a reason to
reject the candidate. But trying to
understand and make good use of deep
personality ‘internals’ in the interview
process I have to chalk up as nearly
hopeless.

To some extent we can evaluate the
internals and make good predictions based
just on what we can clearly observe about
just how well something works; if it works
well, then, if we wish, we can conclude
that the internals must be at least good
enough.

So, if a candidate has done well with
education and experience and there are no
obvious red flags, then that is about as
much as we can hope to know about the
internals and their predictive value.

But maybe I see two ways to get by without
much attention to personality internals:

First, one of my suspicions is that most
people need a good, maybe even formal,
structure where they know in fairly clear
terms what they are to do and how they
will be evaluated and get praise and
approval and financial, career, and
emotional security.

Second, in addition most people can do
much better given some good leadership.

One question would be, what does the US
military do about understanding
‘personality internals’?

There were some interview questions.

Q. “What is your favorite movie of all
time? What lesson did you take from it?”

A. In movies, I like (A) history that
explains things, especially some
surprising causes, (B) characters that give
examples of how people can be, especially
women, (C) stories with intricate puzzles.

So, ‘Gone with the Wind’ shows Scarlett
O’Hara being a surprisingly determined to
be an extreme Southern Belle and
narcissistic, ditsy, destructive bimbo, Rhett
Butler being surprisingly slow to see how
bad Scarlett really was, and how fast and
foolish the South was to pursue the war.

‘Fat Man and Little Boy’ for how
Oppenheimer did really well through lots
of silly, practical obstacles just getting
it DONE.

‘Winds of War’ to see how shockingly eager
the German people were to support Hitler,
how determined Hitler was to be a total
nut job, how foolish he was in
overreaching, and how have to suspect that
he expected to fail and even pursued
failure, how content Goering was to have
only a short range air force, how well the
German army fought while being asked by
Hitler to do too much too fast with too
little, how many submarines Germany lost,
how bad the Germans were at cryptography,
how bright the supposedly ‘stodgy’ British
were at code breaking, radar, fighter
planes, and long range bombers.

‘Tora …’ on how slow the US was to make
use of the rock solid intelligence they
did have. Or, why the heck bother to try
to detect the enemy coming if are going to
assume that any detection signal is a
false alarm? This lesson has fairly
general utility. Heck, taking the
detection seriously, the US had a good
shot at shooting down all the Japanese
planes and then going after the Japanese
carriers, especially since the US carriers
were already at sea.

‘Midway’ on how much the US got from code
breaking, how bad the Japanese were at
intelligence, cryptography, and making
good command decisions quickly under
broken plans, and how determined the US
Navy was to exploit the code breaking and
resulting intelligence, take risks,
emphasize winning, and accept the costs.
More of interest was in just how bad the
US Navy planes were at navigation and
having fighter cover for the dive bombers
and torpedo planes. Some of the US
execution was really bad; bad execution is
bad stuff quite generally.

‘The Sting’, ‘The List of Adrian
Messenger’, and ‘Witness for the
Prosecution’ for some tricky puzzle
problems.

‘Captain Kidd’ (1945) for a master class
in manipulation and duplicity or what the
heck the other guy might be doing to you.

‘The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe’ (1954)
for insight into what a man might go
through when alone for a long time.

‘Back to School’ for how a bright,
determined, successful guy in business
swaps some of live’s lessons with a
college faculty.

‘Absence of Malice’ for how eager people
can be to convict a son due to what his
father had done and how silly, foolish,
lost, confused, driven, and destructive
the ‘feminist’ reporter was — good
lessons on what might happen.

‘Moneyball’ for how much determination and
guts it took for Billy Beane to set aside
traditional baseball evaluations, how
clear was the depiction of the resistance
of baseball to anything new, and how
clearly the owner of the Red Sox saw the
lessons of Beane’s example. Those lessons
likely apply to more than just baseball.

‘Khartoum’ for the suggestion from Gordon
that being afraid of death gives up a lot
of power; that point has to apply both to
self and to adversaries.

The old ‘cinema noir’ ‘Impact’ for the
extreme contrast of the two women, one who
pulled miserable defeat from the jaws of
magnificent victory, all for no good
reasons, and the other who pulled
magnificent victory from the jaws of easy
defeat, for all the best reasons. Another
lesson was that the poor guy was a dummy
not to see the truth about both of those
women.

Q. “Is there a particular public figure
you admire? Why? How would that apply to
your life?”

A. D. Eisenhower for how important it is
to have integrity, determination,
prudence, and insight into people and to
keep up with history and technology.

Q. “What are your favorite charities and
why?”

A. Mike Bloomberg’s — he has a shot at
helping really significant progress in
medical science. James Simons, for his
help pushing forward interest in
mathematics and science.

.
Process and exemplars are the lowest tuition that one will ever pay to learn. Use them hard.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

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You will never beat a lie detector test with sweaty palms.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

.
Nothing drive like a Big Red Car.

Use probationary employment periods of 90-180 days to ensure that you have a good fit.

Firing fast is almost as important as hiring well in the first place.

Resist the temptation to do missionary work. If it doesn’t work, move on and don’t wring your hands as to why. Treat everyone fairly but cut the ties and move on.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

You wrote an excellent post a few months ago on using the “letter of intent”. We are using this today to help secure our first customers.

I’m a fan.