Interviewing process, knowledge-base and judgement

Think of a situation in which a person is interviewing other for some web development skills. Interviewer asks the following question – ‘How do you build a scalable system for pizza delivery? When a pizza is ordered online, it has to be delivered within 20 minutes to the customer.’

There are multiple possibilities for a candidate here:

1.      The person has resolved similar kind of problem earlier. And can relate to his prior experience to this problem and come up with a decent solution.

2.      The person knows only theoretical background of how to build scalable system using different computation building blocks and starts giving a solution based on this knowledge.

One of the key point that interviewer is expecting is to identify the bottleneck for a scalable solution. One obvious thing for the interviewer is identifying a bottleneck of human/manual involvement. You may build a very powerful mechanism in the virtual world in terms of taking orders, prioritizing, shortest path, optimization in delivery, proper task assignment, quickest way to deliver message, etc. but you know that human involvement becomes the ultimate bottleneck in the delivery.

Consider a situation where in the candidate with second possibility starts explaining a scalable situation in the virtual world but fails to identify human bottleneck. The interviewer will become impatient and he may consider that the candidate as not worthy and may reject that person. It is possible that the same candidate is capable of identifying human bottleneck given sufficient time or with a subtle hint.

According to various studies done by Psychologist Amos Tversky and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, there are two kinds of thinking systems: first one that operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control and the second one that allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of second one are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice and concentration. Daniel calls them as fast thinking and slow thinking minds.

Now, let’s go back to the situation in which interviewer is going to reject the candidate. If the organization is looking for a creative minds, then there is a possibility that it is going miss a candidate because the interviewer hasn’t explored that part of the ability. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. It comes with several hours of practice or exposure and recognition of similar situation several times in our life. When faced with a difficult situation, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. Giving sufficient time to the candidate can help in uncovering real skills. There is a need to relook at the way a candidate is evaluated.

When we are relying more and more on artificial intelligence, we should be aware that machines are also prone to similar cognitive biases because of limited knowledge-base.