Today\u2019s technical recruiting tip is my 7th magical interview question, the Mirror Question<\/b>. As with all past six technical recruiting questions I shared, this is also a form of an open-ended question. Furthermore, as I also shared previously, a lot of psychological, behavioral, human resource and executive recruiting research proves that open-ended questions tend to provide more quality information for your management recruiters than other forms of interview questions.<\/p>\n
Let me demonstrate this by an example. Let\u2019s say that you are interviewing an engineer, scientist, R&D, IT or technical professional. Then you should ask this job candidate, \u201cWho is your best friend?<\/i>\u201d The candidate\u2019s response may be, \u201cJoe<\/i>.\u201d Then should follow up by asking this candidate, \u201cIf I were to ask Joe what type of person you are, what would they tell me?<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n
Do you see what I did? I used the candidate\u2019s anticipation that you might call on Joe to your advantage. Because, psychologically, this candidate believes you are going to call on Joe, they will project (or mirror<\/i>) Joe\u2019s potential response. This response will tend to be very factual. As a result, you will get a very good picture of behavioral characteristics of this candidate.<\/p>\n