Beware of the Hijack

I recently coached an interviewer who was almost exclusively focused on testing the candidate's strategic problem-solving ability. Here's an example from that session:

Interviewer: “What was your biggest accomplishment at Google?”
Candidate: “Well, I led the creation of this product from a prototype when I arrived to over 10,000 users by the time I left four years later.”

At this point, there were several great follow-up questions the interviewer could have asked. My personal choice would have been: “What was your unique contribution here?”

Instead, the interviewer shifted gears and started asking very specific, hypothetical questions about product tradeoffs—such as which types of customers to target—and then followed up with questions like: “How do you think about [topic XYZ]?”

While these questions were clearly designed to assess the candidate's product thinking, strategy, and analytical horsepower, they missed the mark. None of them dug into the core of the candidate's accomplishment. Unless the candidate’s strategic decision-making was the central highlight of their story, these questions were unlikely to uncover the most relevant or impactful data.

Let me be clear: analytical ability, strategy, and problem-solving are critical traits for many roles. You absolutely have the option to assess these skills in specialized interviews, such as problem-solving interviews or Facet interviews dedicated to these competencies.

What you should not do is hijack a story that the candidate has shared and turn it into an impromptu “mini problem-solving” interview. By doing so, you risk missing the unique contributions and substantive accomplishments that the candidate is trying to highlight.

Remember, your goal as an interviewer is to elicit core data that reflects what the candidate did best—not to test unrelated skills on the fly.