Interview with a guide in small towns. A guide for developers on interviews at the largest American IT companies

CPU reader Ivan Bogaty, based on his experience, wrote instructions on how to pass interviews at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other American IT companies - from writing a resume to discussing salary.

About a year and a half ago, I realized that it was time to look for a new job. And if we’re going to change everything, then without half measures: the goal is Silicon Valley, the technology capital of the world.

After several months of preparation, long days of interviews (which, however, were much more interesting than stressful) and nights in luxurious corporate hotels, I had offers from Google and Facebook (Microsoft, alas, had a hiring freeze at that moment), and also, by coincidence, from one of the top New York hedge funds engaged in algorithmic trading.

The main thing I took away from this process is that, unlike Olympiad or scientific activities, where winning often requires a magical “insight,” successfully passing interviews for even the most discriminating companies does not require magic at all. There are standard actions that need to be done (about how to practice solving Unified State Exam problems), and standard mistakes that you need to avoid making. This is exactly what the article is about.

It is based on my impressions from interviews with Google, Facebook, a couple of algorithmic hedge funds in London and New York, as well as Yandex and Microsoft Research (my two previous jobs). Friends and acquaintances who went through the same process suggested a lot.

The recruiting process for the vast majority of top companies is the same. First you submit your resume. If it is interesting enough, you will be invited to a phone screening - a telephone interview for about 40 minutes, where you solve problems and write code. For those who have passed, there are five live interviews for an hour each (bringing the candidate you like to the main office is usually not a problem), at each of which you are given tasks and asked about some project from your resume. Time ratio: approximately 40 minutes for tasks, 15 minutes for questions on the resume and five minutes for questions from you.

Resume

The first and most important thing you need to know about your resume is to never send it “cold,” that is, through a standard form on a website. Google receives tens of thousands of resumes per week, and it is hardly physically possible to carefully read each of them.

Instead, you need to find people you know in the company you want to get into and send your resume to recruiters through them (“internal referral”). Do you have such friends? Great. No? You need to look for friends among your friends, and so on. At the same time, you should not be overly shy about asking for a referrer. If a person knows you at least a little, he will have his own motivation to help you: the chance to work with someone he knows is fun, and the referral bonus that is given for successful candidates is unlikely to hurt anyone.

On Quora, there were even recommendations to meet employees of the desired company on LinkedIn and ask them to refer you. I haven't done this myself, but some more extroverted friends have had success. Even a neutral-positive recommendation like “we talked for half an hour, it was interesting, the person seems nice” will dramatically increase the chances of passing to the interview stage, which is the main goal.

However, it is still worth getting your resume to look decent. There is a lot of advice on this matter on the Internet, the main ones are to write a page or two, highlight catchy keywords (so that you can quickly classify your specialization and experience), focus on measurable achievements.

A fairly extensive array of advice (including from recruiters who read these resumes) can be found by searching on Quora; you can find a shorter one. It’s surprising that we need to talk about this, but register a decent email (until I saw it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe that people from top universities leave addresses like [email protected]) and do not make spelling mistakes. In addition to these basic tips, instead of wasting effort on polishing your resume, you just need to skip this stage.

Interviews

1. By far the best source of problems for preparation is the book Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell (the penultimate edition is easy to find by searching, although I honestly recommend buying the latest one). The author worked in several large companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple) and conducted a huge number of interviews. The book is especially good because the problems are divided into topics (covering more or less all types of problems that I have encountered), and each has a solution.

   Initial preparation is different for everyone, but for an interview you need to be able to solve absolutely everything. Personally, to me (like many Olympiad participants) more or less all algorithmic problems seemed trivial, but it was useful to read standard solutions in systems design and scalability. Perhaps someone will have the opposite difficulties. I advise you not to be lazy and go through the book from beginning to end. One friend to whom I gave this advice objected that he was sorry to waste a week of his life on such nonsense. From my point of view, the difference between a great job in a strong team and an average project can result in years of your life. More pragmatically, the guy could well have received an offer of thousands of 5-10 dollars more per year if he had made fewer mistakes in the interview.

2. The book comes with a website where people post questions they were asked in real interviews. You can solve problems from interviews with the specific company you want to go to.
3. On the same website, you can take a test interview for $150, after which you will receive detailed feedback. I think this is a great investment. An easier alternative is to start interviews with companies that are less important to you to practice. “The first time is a bit difficult,” and it’s very important to practice, especially if you have no interview experience at all.
4. If this is not enough, there is also geeksforgeeks.org (the problems there are good, but people often post incorrect solutions, you don’t need to believe them). I also highly recommend topcoder.com/tc and codeforces.com (on these sites you need to figure out how to send your solutions to the system, but then the correct/false assessment is given automatically).
5. There is also projecteuler.net - this site was recommended to me for practice by a recruiter from Google, but there are more likely mathematical problems that come up much less often in interviews.
6. Cool from someone who's been interviewing at Google for years, and YouTube video- recommendations from my recruiter from Google.

How seriously should you prepare? I think taking a couple of months to prepare is not overkill. Otherwise, you will have at least a year left until the next attempt.

Negotiations and signing of the offer

Now we come to the most interesting part. Salaries for talented programmers in the Valley start at $100 thousand per year (immediately after graduation), and the difference in the salaries of people with approximately the same abilities can reach $10-20 thousand per year, depending on various random circumstances. Therefore, if you behave correctly, those few hours that you decide to spend on salary negotiations will most likely be the highest paid in your life.

Most programmers don't know how to negotiate and don't like to negotiate, but there is good news - you don't need to train your Hollywood poker face. In all cases known to me, salary negotiations took place via email, and all participants in the process had enough time to think about the decisions made and weigh alternatives.

Due to this specificity, most of the advice that you can read about negotiations on the Internet is complete nonsense. For example, one of the most common tips in articles about salary negotiations is not to mention the amount first (example). In our case, this is the biggest mistake you can make (for a more detailed explanation, I advise you to read this answer on Quora from a former Google recruiter). IT companies in the Valley have a standard ladder of “technical levels” by which engineers are classified, with corresponding salary ranges. This mechanism allows companies not to pay more than necessary, and also not to accelerate competition for employees between companies (some of these methods, by the way, were investigated by US antitrust authorities). In short, the likelihood of a pleasant surprise is quite low. If you remain silent, it is much more likely to receive an offer at or slightly below expectations, and it will be more difficult to correct this after the fact.

What is the right strategy? Firstly, as accurately as possible, determine the amount of the expected offer based on your skills (Glassdoor and word of mouth help). Secondly, ask for a little more. For example, Google offers almost all university graduates without work experience the same amount, let it be X. If the recruiter asks “How much do you expect to earn?” If you remain silent meaningfully, then they will offer you exactly X. But if you did well in the interview and think that you stand out even among those who are hired by Google, you can ask for 1.05X in advance, and the chances are much higher. For unknown reasons, raising the number of shares is much easier than raising the base salary, so if there is no difference, start there.

But, in general, the only really working point of support is offers from other companies. BATNA, that's all. In such cases, jumps X→1.2X and more are already quite possible. For the Russian mentality, such an “auction” may seem unacceptable or at least slippery behavior, but in the USA this is the norm and they will not be offended by you. Moreover, recruiters usually ask directly what other companies you are considering and how much they are offering you. And if no one else calls you, is that a good sign? Just for fun, I’ll add that dating in America works in much the same way.

I’ll end my story about the negotiations with a platitude: money is not the main thing. The opportunity to grow while working on cool problems can be much more rewarding and enjoyable in the future. A bad recruiter is one who doesn’t promise that with them you can become the youngest vice president in history, but if the company’s offer demonstrates a high assessment of your abilities not only in words, but also in deeds, I advise you to use this trust in order to get an interesting project, and not squeeze out another penny.

Brief summary

1. We send your resume to a referrer through friends.
2. Solving Cracking the Coding Interview.
3. We will interview with several companies at the same time, even if we want to go to one specific one. We are not afraid to discuss salary.
4. Profit!

Qualitative methods are used to develop IT products. A logical question: is it possible to conduct qualitative research yourself? Read articles, listen to lectures, attend a master class and go into the field - conduct observations and conduct interviews. Why not?

In an ideal world, qualitative research would be carried out by specialists equipped with the necessary skills and competencies. Sociologists, social anthropologists, psychologists - they all spent many years studying how to conduct such research, develop tools, collect and analyze qualitative data. Is it possible to hire a specialist? Do this and there is no need to experiment on your own. Why? The risk of receiving low-quality data is too high: irrelevant to the goals and objectives of the project, insufficiently detailed or completely meaningless (yes, this also happens).

What if there is no opportunity? We understand. For example, budget restrictions. Or it is not clear where to find the right specialist and how to evaluate his qualifications. Input and motivation are secondary, the main thing is that you decided to conduct the research yourself. Let's be honest, the idea is quite risky. The support of a specialist will help reduce the risk - he will help develop tools, provide preliminary instructions and advise on the progress of field work. Yes, this is not a completely independent study, but we want to get a normal result.

Of course, this will not completely protect you from problems and difficulties in working with the methodology. We will talk about these problems and difficulties using the example of working with the basic qualitative method - interviews. It’s better to start with it - the observation method is more complicated and often includes interviews. The interview allows you to obtain qualitative data about users that is used to make decisions about the product at the stage of its development or modification.

This article will be useful:

• for those who decide to conduct independent research. Once again: if you have the opportunity to contact specialists, do so. It is not possible to entrust the work to them completely - ask for help in developing tools and consultation;
• those who organize their own UX research department in the company;
• product managers who have to do everything themselves;
• trainees who come to UX research from other social science disciplines.

Basic principles of working with interviews: developing and using a guide

What is an interview? It seems like a normal conversation, what could be complicated about it? We find a user and talk with him about our product. No special preparation is needed here. Unfortunately, everything is not as simple as it seems. One of the researcher’s tasks, for example, is to create an atmosphere of relaxed communication. Experience and communication skills are important here. Ideally, the respondent forgets that he is being interviewed. What about the researcher? The researcher, on the contrary, remembers that he is not just talking, but is collecting information that is valuable for the work of the project team. And this is the key difference between an interview and a conversation.

Although similar to a conversation, an interview is a way to obtain relevant data about users. This is exactly how this method should be perceived: conversation is just the outer shell. The collected data will be used to solve specific product problems - developing a new IT service, mobile application, professional interface, etc. Your project team has its own information needs: to study real-life situations, understand user behavior, test hypotheses, or gain valuable insight for developing a new product. And this is where the difficulties begin.

Usually there are quite a lot of such questions. Forgot about them during the interview? We received low-quality data for the team. And it’s easy to forget - lack of experience, stress during the first interview, a silent or overly talkative respondent. What can be done? The interview guide helps solve the problem. This is a printed interviewer's guide containing a list of topics, key questions, and follow-up questions to explore them. A simple but effective solution. It’s better not to take on an interview without a guide. Especially if you have no experience yet.

How is an interview guide created? First, the bad news - there is no ready-made guide for all occasions. For each project, a unique tool is created that takes into account the goal and objectives of the project, the information needs of the team, product features, use environment, etc. Although there are also the same questions of a general nature, for example about the digital habits of users. Over time, you will form your own block of constant questions, but you will have to forget about the universal guide forever.

Despite this uniqueness of the tool, some general advice can still be given.

1. Start with simple questions to warm up the respondent.
2. To begin with, a block of questions about the respondent. This is your introduction to your interlocutor. Ask about age, education, leisure time, family (if this is important for the study).
3. You can add general topics that are relevant to the study in the first block. For example, to better understand the level of computer literacy, the specifics of using the mobile Internet, the place of gadgets in a person’s life, etc. All this will be useful in the future for drawing up user profiles and understanding their actions and motives.
4. The first block should contain extremely simple questions about familiar everyday activities. Let the person get comfortable with the interview situation: don’t immediately overwhelm them with your product.
5. The general principle of any guide is from simple to complex. The most important topic to explore comes up in the middle - by this point trust will be established and the interlocutor will be immersed in the subject of discussion.
6. The topics may vary depending on the purpose of your research. But it is always important to obtain information about a person’s actions, his motives, the environment, the results of actions and the difficulties and problems that have arisen. This is the minimum required information - remember this when writing questions.
7. Sometimes when developing a guide, you want to immediately get an answer from the respondent: what should the future product or service be like? Do not delegate the work of your team to a person - he does not have the necessary professional competencies. Your task is to study his experience, his daily life and understand where your product or service belongs. During the interview, you are at the data collection stage; you will design later.
8. You can start modeling a future product or service together with the respondent only at the end of the interview - this will allow your interlocutor to build on personal experience, described earlier.
9. At the end of the interview, ask the respondent if he or she would like to add anything to what was said. Maybe he has questions for you. Sometimes important points for research emerge.

What does using the guide give us? The guide sets the structure of the conversation, but does not set strict boundaries for the interviewer. What does this look like in practice? The respondent raised an important topic for research that you did not take into account in the guide. You do not interrupt the respondent, discuss this topic with him, and then return to the structure of the guide. That is why such interviews are called semi-structured. The guide does not oblige you to reproduce the wording of the questions verbatim - look at the situation of the dialogue, the experience of the respondent, the manner of communication and choose the options that are most understandable to the interlocutor. At the same time, it is better for beginners to adhere to the structure of the guide and often check the list of topics and questions.

How should I use the guide? Having a guide does not guarantee that the interview will go perfectly. Research experience, communication skills, and, in fact, the ability to work with a guide are important here. You won’t be able to purchase the first and second using the article, but you can give a few recommendations for working with the guide.

1. The guide is a hint for the interviewer. There is no need to look at it constantly and read out questions - in this case, you destroy the atmosphere of the conversation. Think of it like a cheat sheet for an exam: you can quickly glance at it and make sure everything is going according to plan.
2. Before you start researching, look at the list of topics and questions in the guide - you should clearly understand the reasons why the team needs this information. This helps keep the structure of the guide in mind: you don’t memorize the questions mechanically, but have a good idea of ​​their purpose.
3. Try to remember the order of topics and questions. It is not necessary to know all the questions by heart, if you have a very detailed guide, it is enough to remember the main ones, and you can ask additional ones along the way.
4. Print the guide in a format convenient for you. Let the font be large enough, the division into topics clear, important issues highlighted visually. There are many design options, the main thing is that you feel comfortable. Everything else is a matter of taste.
5. If the respondent deviates from the topic, try to bring him back to the structure of the guide. Don’t interrupt his speech, listen, and then return to the topic that is important to you.

These tips will help you use the guide effectively during an interview, especially if this is a new experience for you.

Of course, creating a guide is not an easy task. The time to create it depends on the volume of information needs, requirements for data depth, and complexity of the topic. For example, when developing a new IT product, a more complex guide is needed - its creation will take more time. After the first interviews (piloting), the guide may need to be revised; this is normal practice. A well-made, pilot-tested guide is a good help for the interviewer. However, the development of such a guide should still be carried out by experienced researchers.

Thus, the guide allows a beginner to solve several of the most pressing problems:

• do not forget about the goals and objectives of the project during the interview;
• adhere to the general logic of the conversation;
• control the progress of the interview.

Interviewer fears: reasons and ways to overcome them

Let's move on from the tools to the one who will work with them - the interviewer. A hot topic for beginners is interviewer fears. Even experienced interviewers can experience fear when working on a difficult, sensitive topic. There are two types of fear factors:

• refusal to participate in an interview;
• refusal to answer certain questions.

Do such situations exist? Of course they do! Although not as often as it seems to a beginner. Most people are willing to cooperate if you clearly explain why you need this information. We'll talk about how to do this.

Before you start researching, you need to come up with a story that is accessible - this is important! - explains the reason for your contact to the interlocutor. This story is called a legend. Despite its name, the legend must be true - you should not lie to people when turning to them for help. Legends, like guides, are different for different projects. Here are some tips for preparing them.

1. Briefly, without unnecessary details, tell the respondent what you do - for example, you are developing an application for a mobile bank, making a website for young mothers, etc.
2. Explain why his experience is important to you. For example, “you often buy clothes in an online store”, “you have been working in this field for a long time”, “you have encountered this problem more than once”, etc.
3. Tell us how your interlocutor will benefit from communicating with you. More often, this is not a material reward (although the respondent may receive a gift or bonuses on a loyalty card), but a deferred benefit (for example, a convenient service for wholesale purchases that your interlocutor will use; an application for effectively solving his daily tasks).
4. Be sure to say that you guarantee the confidentiality of information - leakage of personal data is excluded. These are not just words - be prepared to protect the data received. If, for example, a company manager wants to know which employees do not know how to work with corporate software, you should not give him this information, since it is not relevant for designing a professional interface.

A competent, understandable legend reduces the risk of refusal to participate in an interview. Remember, people will talk to you if you clearly explain why you need it and why they need it.

Now let's talk about refusing to answer specific questions during an interview. This happens when it comes to sensitive or simply difficult issues. Some tips to ensure that such situations happen less often or are overcome with minimal losses.

1. Topics and questions in the guide should be arranged from simple to complex - when trust is established and the respondent is immersed in the topic, it is easier for him to remember his actions and motives.
2. If the respondent refuses to answer, tell him again why you need this information and remind him of the confidentiality guarantees - sometimes this is enough for the person to meet you halfway.
3. Ask why the person doesn’t want to answer. Perhaps he does not want to talk about points that are not important for the study, but he is ready to tell the rest.
4. Try to formulate the question differently, without asking for unnecessary details: for your purposes, for example, specific amounts of money, real names of people, names of companies, etc. are not important.
5. If the above techniques do not help, ask the respondent to talk about other people. For example: “Tell me how your colleagues perform this task?” It is easier for a person to talk not about himself, but when describing the actions of others, he often expresses his thoughts.

Only experience will help you completely overcome fears, but the advice given above will help reduce the risk of situations where a respondent refuses to participate in the study or does not want to answer specific questions.

Interviewer Confidence Problem: I know exactly what you mean

Let's move on to the circumstances of the interview itself and discuss one of the most serious mistakes of a beginner, which can ruin all efforts to develop a guide. During the interview, it may seem to you that you are on the same wavelength with the respondent - you perfectly understand his situation, motives and actions. This is one of the most dangerous illusions for a researcher. It is easy to succumb to it, for example, when discussing ordinary everyday actions that everyone should do the same. What could be special there? Or if you are a professional and have an excellent understanding of the subject matter. Here your knowledge can play a cruel joke on you, creating the illusion of understanding another person.

Why is this a problem? Let's figure out what results the interview gives you. Your task is to obtain a respondent's story (or stories) that describes:

• actions;
• motives;
• environment (physical space, social environment);
• problems and difficulties;
• result;
• human assessment of the result.

A good guide is designed to elicit such stories - using questions from the guide, the interviewer pushes the respondent to tell a detailed story. What happens if you are confident that you fully understand the respondent's motives and actions? Will you try to reveal all the details of the story? No. Even if you have a guide. You will be so confident in the correctness of your own assessments that some questions from the guide may seem unnecessary. The result of this overconfidence is the poor quality data you bring to your team. And she will use this data to make specific product decisions.

Let's take it as an axiom: you don't know what, how or why another person is doing. That's why you came to him and are doing your research. This approach will make it easier for you to conduct interviews and improve the quality of your data. Your main question during an interview is “why?” Ask it as often as possible - it allows you to reveal a person’s motivation, reproduce the logic of his actions, and understand his attitude to the situation. Don't be afraid to sound stupid when you ask this question. Remember, your job is to get detailed history. More "why?" and fewer questions that can only be answered with “yes” or “no.”

Expecting quick results: interviews are only the first stage of research

So you've done the interview. Is the research completed? No. Depending on which method of recording information you chose, you have a notebook with notes or a voice recorder. Now you have to transform the results into text - you need to set aside time for this right away. It's easier and faster to get the text from notes in a notepad, but during the interview you will have to be distracted by notes and quickly decide what is important and what is not. If you choose a voice recorder, then you have an audio file that needs to be transcribed. This is monotonous and long work.

Where should a beginner start? We recommend using a voice recorder at first so that nothing interferes with your concentration during the conversation. In addition, listening to your own recording and recording your answers is a good way to work on mistakes. You will immediately see where you did not ask clarifying questions, did not reveal the story, or missed an interesting new topic. For this reason, it is better to write texts for the first interviews right away - this will help avoid repeating mistakes in subsequent interviews.

The interview text is only an intermediate artifact. His task is to record the results of the interview so that later it will be convenient to create other documents. Some tips for writing an interview text.

1. Interview texts should be standardized. The easiest way is to repeat the structure of the guide.
2. The text should include the date, duration, comments (for example, important points during the interview) and key characteristics of the respondent.
3. The text should contain illustrative quotes - this way you will preserve the living speech of the informants, which can be used, for example, to revive the characters.

We gave an example of an interview summary earlier in one of the articles.

After compiling the outline, analytical work begins on processing qualitative data. The result of such an analysis will be documents describing respondents and their daily lives: portraits of users, life situations, environment of use, user expectations, user questions, etc. It is these documents that your project team will work with. A separate article could be written about the creation of each of these documents. It is very desirable that at the stage of their development you also have the opportunity to consult with specialists.

Let's summarize this part. Interviews are just the first stage of user research. After this comes the equally complex work of analyzing “raw” data. The quality of its implementation determines what your team will work with. Your task is to convey all the collected information about users in an understandable form. This is not so easy to do.

Afterword: Is it worth doing the research yourself?

We examined the main problems and difficulties associated with the independent use of qualitative methodology using interviews as an example:

• development of research tools - interview guide;
• working with the guide;
• interviewer fears and reducing risks such as refusal to participate in the study or refusal to answer certain questions;
• the problem of interviewer self-confidence and the risk of obtaining poor-quality data;
• specifics of processing “raw” qualitative data.

The following tips will help you reduce the risk of receiving low-quality data.

What is the answer to the main question? Should you conduct qualitative research yourself? We repeat, if possible, it is better to contact specialists. Alternative option- joint research, where you work with ready-made tools and have the opportunity to seek advice (especially important after analyzing the first interviews). This format of work presupposes the desire to independently understand the methodology, work on mistakes and - most importantly - see the value of quality data for your project. If you're ready for it, you can try it.

And as a bonus - an example guide (comments are allowed).

Tags: Add tags

Uncontrolledly copied by a variety of websites, magazines, and newspapers, psychological tests lose their ability to provide the psychologist with reliable and objective information about people. This problem leads to the use of new, more advanced assessment methods. The guide interview method belongs to this group.

Guide interview(from the English guide - guide or guided - managed and interview - conduct a conversation) - a guide for a specialist, containing a number of open-ended questions that require a detailed answer, rather than a monosyllabic “yes” or “no”, and are aimed at revealing a specific topic. It does not imply a strict sequence of questions, but only sets a direction. Moreover, a detailed and clear description of behavioral examples, desirable or undesirable, avoids subjective and erroneous assessments, and also makes it possible for everyone involved in this procedure to have the same understanding of the processes and accepted standards.

Often to receive additional information The interview is recorded on audio or video tape. Despite the fact that the interviewer adheres to a pre-developed script (guide), he actively reacts to the respondent’s answers and asks clarifying questions. This method is indispensable when searching for competent specialists, in cases where respondents represent people who are difficult to gather at the appointed time in one place, or when discussing sensitive topics, since the main condition for the interview is the creation of a trusting atmosphere.

The development of guide interviews for identifying or selecting competent employees is based on the competency model and is included in the guide. It describes a general scheme by which interviews can be conducted skillfully and the most complete and adequate information can be obtained. For each category of candidate, the questions are approximately the same, but the flow of the conversation will differ depending on the specific situation and experience of the interviewee.

This guide also provides as many questions as possible for each competency, allowing the interviewer to be flexible in the conversation. In addition, the guide interview provides positive and negative behavioral indicators that help in the rapid assessment of the quality being studied. Despite its apparent ease, the use of this technology requires its full understanding and practiced skill. Typically, types of questions are divided into: theoretical, behavioral, guiding.

Example of guide interviews with job candidates:

• The first guide is a career story, a proposal to talk about activities and responsibilities in the previous organization. Additional questions may include the following: what was the work being performed, what was attractive about this work? Now let's talk about your experience as an employee of this organization. Have you encountered conflict situations in your work and life and how did you overcome them? If possible, describe each of them.
• The second guide is an idea of ​​the upcoming activity. Questions: Tell us what areas of activity you can highlight while working in a new organization? If you receive a complaint, what will you do? Tell us about opportunities for collaboration with other specialists. What challenges do you expect in your new job? Who do you expect to receive tasks from, and who will monitor their implementation? What methods of reward or punishment do managers usually use and how do they control the quality of task performance?
• The third guide is awareness of performance. What is your understanding of the concept of operational efficiency? Describe an example of a job well done. Think about a working day that you consider successful. What do you think good leadership looks like? What do you see as the meaning and purpose of your work and how do you imagine your future career and your future in this organization?

Additionally, the interviews use various situational tasks that require a choice of behavior. For example, for security guards: your post is on the outer security perimeter. A woman runs up to you and asks for help, as her son fell into a sewer manhole. What will you do? A desirable indicator in the assessment is the candidate’s awareness that he has no right to leave his post and must contact a senior person to resolve the situation, including providing assistance. And what is undesirable is a willingness to help even at the expense of performing basic job duties. There are always several such task-situations - this makes it possible to avoid repetition when several candidates are assessed per day.

The interviewer's task is to obtain a sufficient amount of information to make it possible to determine the candidate's competencies. It is necessary to avoid that it provides generalized information that does not indicate a person’s actual behavior, but his idea of ​​​​the optimal course of action in such situations. You need to achieve a clear understanding of all aspects of the development of events, and not be limited to your own assumptions and double-check your guesses. Typically, the description of the situation contains information about several qualities of the candidate, and questions on the same topic, asked in a row, allow the applicant to guess the interviewer’s goal and give socially desirable answers. Therefore, having a prepared guide, the interviewer should not ask all the questions on one competency at once. In addition, the interviewer needs to ensure that the person uses the word “I” instead of “we,” i.e., it is important to find out what his personal contribution was to resolving the situation. In any case, when conducting an interview, you need to clearly understand what characteristics of the candidate need to be identified in order to get a complete picture of him:

• Professional - does he have certain knowledge, experience in the desired field, etc. As a rule, this kind of information is presented in a resume and is easily verified by conducting a practical task or situational task.
• Behavioral - how one behaves in basic management situations. This is clarified during an interview or during an assessment center or business game.
• Motivational - what motivates a person? It is also clarified during the interview using real answers as an example.

An employee should be assessed only after an interview based on the desirable or undesirable indicators proposed in the manual, or on the assessment indicators for each profile.

For an objective assessment it is necessary re-read notes taken during the interview. Summarize and classify them, taking into account that many of the information that the candidate spoke about may relate to different competencies. For an integral assessment, you can use various sources of information - descriptions of facts from life, interpretation of them by the candidate himself, descriptions of other people, dynamics of behavior during interviews, etc. Give the applicant scores on competencies and write them down and brief comments on each competency in the “Report about the candidate." If there is insufficient information, a “no information” assessment should be used.

For example, the degree of proficiency in negotiation skills is revealed. The candidate said that he participated in them with the aim of concluding an important agreement. “The negotiations were difficult, neither side wanted to concede. But in the end, we managed to get our opponents to accept most of the conditions.” This is the so-called incomplete STAR model, in which the element of “action” is missing: it is not clear what exactly was undertaken and by whom. In addition, the candidate used the pronoun “us”. What is hidden behind this and who completed the task remains unclear. Next, the resulting assessment should be correlated with the profile, which is a reference set of skills (competencies) necessary for the employee to perform the tasks facing him, and a decision should be made as to whether the candidate meets it. It usually consists of five levels, where the first is the lowest rate and the fifth is the highest.

Profile is a management tool that can be used to evaluate employees in a specific position and candidates for it. It is possible to specify strategic goals in relation to this position, to focus personnel on the development of competencies that are priority for successful activities. If we depict a successful profile in the form of a graph, then in the last example for middle managers the acceptable level of development of negotiation competence should correspond to indicators of at least the 3rd level, and for top managers - only the 5th.

And yet... the main application to any assessment model is the irreplaceable inner intuition of a psychologist or personnel officer. To verify this statement, I suggest testing yourself by evaluating two guide situations:

• The first situation (nightmarish). What do you advise a woman, a mother of 8 children, who has been diagnosed with pregnancy, but the term is quite short, if two of her children are blind, three are deaf, one is mentally retarded, and she herself is currently suffering from syphilis.
• Second situation. A senior manager needs to be selected. The decision must be made based on the following information:
  • Candidate “A” is found to have connections with people convicted of fraud. Constantly consults with an astrologer. He has two mistresses, smokes a pipe and drinks eight to ten martinis every day.
  • Candidate “B” - was dismissed from service twice on the initiative of the administration. Has a habit of sleeping until noon. At the institute he was caught using opium. Every evening he drinks a bottle of whiskey.

Within the framework of which they show an exhibition of German photographers Michael Schäfer and Victoria Bienstock. Anna Karpenko met with photographers and talked about the exhibition and modern photography.

WHY IS THE EXHIBITION CALLED SO?

Michael. In general, the name was invented by the curators, but I interpret it as what is around us, the flow of pictures, images that each of us constantly produces. And in this sense, we all go with the flow.

Why "against"? Because in fact we should row in reverse direction, you need to stop a moment to “snatch” a picture, an image, an image - and then work with it. This results in resistance.

- We exist ineravisualglostery,that is, visual dominance. Mediaproduce trillions of images every week. Where can a person find hisplace of freedom in this flow?

Victoria. All this dominance of “pictures” appears on the screen. And we always have the opportunity to “turn off” it and not watch it. Just take a break. For example, even when I view the news, I only read texts without looking at photographs.

Michael. Basically, when we work as photographers, we are trying to capture reality. And it turns out that this is an independent picture. And I, as an artist, working with these photographs, take the next step - I change a lot of pictures associated with reality even further.

HOW TO CORRECTLY CALL THE ERA IN WHICH WE LIVE

- Walter Benjamin defined photography as a uniqueth border, such a conceptual divide between the eras before photography and with its advent. Today, in the digital era, what do you think is such a frontier? ?

Michael. It seems to me that today we exist in a time when only images shared with others become liquid. On the other hand, photography has always helped to look at the world from a different angle, and today people look at images differently than they did even a few decades ago.

For example, in the 70s, when you looked at a photograph of a person jumping out of a window, you were shocked and said: “Oh my God, how did they manage to film that?” Today it won’t be something original: “Well, ok, nice reporting job. I can take it off like that too.”

With the advent of Photoshop, we perceive reality as already created by us. But, in truth, today we cannot say for sure what kind of era we live in, because everything technologically changes too quickly. We live “after photography”.

Victoria. Everything happens right here and now. With the advent of digital cameras, followed by the boom in smartphone photography, this naturally changed the face and boundaries of even the professional work of a photographer. For example, we used to be able to take self-portraits, and this is completely different from taking a selfie on a smartphone today. That's why it's so interesting to explore a new era, which is what we're doing.

NOW EVEN SCREENSHOTS CAN BE A WORK OF ART

Michael. I have a huge archive of screenshots taken from the video. When you watch a video or news, a lot of images just flash and pass by, but when you stop the flow and take a screenshot of that image, you perceive it completely differently.

The video installation that can be seen in the exhibition is my recent work, which consists of looped images taken from video news of the G20 summit held this year in Hamburg. While politicians were enjoying classical music at the Philharmonic, protests and violent clashes between people and the police took place on the streets of Hamburg. When we see these “frozen” images, we perceive them in more relief.

WHY DOES AN ARTIST HAVE SCREENS FROM GOOGLE MAPS?

Victoria. I took the photographs presented at the exhibition from Google Street View - these are images taken by a satellite, an impersonal camera. You see that there are no faces on them. And yet these images are public.

I started collecting images and noticed that in Google Street View photos people were looking directly into the camera lens. But this is an automatic machine, not a human photographer behind the camera. And this is a new way of taking photographs in public places and a new problem of privacy, personal space. After all, these are still real people who live in real places...

- The reality in which wefor a long timeWe live, but we don’t always understand what it is...

Michael. On the one hand, yes - this is a new interpretation of the problem of private and public. But if we remember how street photography appeared in the first place, then we are not talking about any privacy rights here. If we always laid claim to the “private”, then street photography simply would not exist as a separate direction.

Vitokria. But it’s one thing when a real person with a camera in his hands takes a photograph of you on the street, and quite another when it’s an impersonal machine, a mechanism.

- Yes, there is such an effect of an enduring panopticon...

Michael. The main thing is that photos from Google Street View are visible, but there are millions of photo images that we do not see, they are not available to us, and this is a more serious problem.

I have always been interested in how people who move to live in another country live and what they do. And especially those related to travel, since this topic is my immediate passion. And then the opportunity provided an opportunity to communicate with Alexey Usik, an individual Russian speaking guide in Munich and Bavaria, and interview him. His website is www.vash-gid-v-bavarii.ru.

Afterwards, I thought that such work is a great option for some travel bloggers who know the countries, cities, and customs of local residents well.

Alexey, how did you end up in Germany?

In 2000, my wife’s family received a call for permanent residence in Germany. The question arose: to move or not... Having weighed all the pros, i.e. standard of living and stability, and “against”, i.e. my unclaimed Russian higher education in Germany and the prospect of getting up from scratch, nevertheless, in order to save the family, the decision was made to move.

What did you do before becoming a private guide?

Upon arrival, we found ourselves in the richest, and in my opinion, the most prosperous land in Germany - Bavaria. A few months later, after getting all the necessary paperwork done, I started working in a flower shop, and then trained as a truck driver and got a job at a company that delivered groceries to nursing homes, kindergartens, hospitals and hotels.

How did you manage to become an individual guide?

While delivering groceries to hotels, I increasingly began to encounter Russian-speaking tourists from Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union near the reception, who were studying maps of the city, trying to find excursions around the city and to the castles of Bavaria on the Internet (almost every hotel has corners with a computer and access to Internet), tried to find out where and how you can book a transfer or excursion to Neuschwanstein Castle, etc. etc. During the beer festival - Oktoberfest, our people were feverishly looking for where they could buy vouchers to get into the tent.

Then, for work, I started going to Munich airport, which is located 40 km from the city, where I observed a picture of people flying from Russia (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.) to Munich with further transfer to ski resorts Austria, they hire taxi drivers (who communicate with passengers using gestures and broken English) and order transfers to Sölden, Ischgl, Mayrhofen, Kitzbühel and other resorts.

In general, I looked at all this, and gradually a question arose and developed in me: “Wouldn’t it be easier for our people if there was a person who could give them a tour of Munich in Russian? Take them to castles? Arrange a holiday on the lakes of Bavaria? Offer a transfer within Germany and to ski resorts in Austria? Moreover, I always liked working with people...”

Was it difficult for you to retrain, because a truck driver and a tourist guide are completely different things?

I sat down with textbooks, poured through dozens of books and historical publications; Almost every weekend I took several of the same city and outdoor excursions with German (both tourist and individual) guides; passed exams for the right to engage in this type of activity and to transport people; registered as a private entrepreneur; traveled, searched and created routes specifically for my future clients that would be of interest specifically Russian tourist; borrowed cars, etc.

I can say that all these details took me almost 2 years, not to mention the financial costs and stressful situations.

I always wanted to know what is the difference between individual guides and large travel agencies?

One of the main advantages of individual escort and excursions over “mass” ones is exclusivity. That is, a person understands and feels that everything is done ONLY for him, and based ONLY on his interests and wishes.

I in no way belittle the merits of those mass excursions that are offered by large companies. This price niche should also be occupied. But the same large travel agencies, if their client orders an “individual”, contact me so that I can take over these people and conduct personal excursions with them, because... They themselves are unable to organize this kind of approach for their clients.

Alexey, what interests Russian-speaking tourists in Bavaria now?

Most tourists from Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union who come to Munich do not know exactly what they want to see, i.e. don't have a clear plan. For them, the main thing is to collect as much visual information as possible about the city in particular, and Bavaria in general. This is, if you can call it that, untargeted tourism. Of course, I offer such clients exactly those excursions and attractions that are “well-known” to the average person, i.e. walking and car tour of the city with visits to iconic and interesting places, as well as Neuschwanstein Castle, Linderhof Castle, Herrenchiemsee Palace and other equally interesting castles and palaces.

If people go purposefully to see or visit something, then an individual program is already prepared or tailored specifically for them, taking into account the wishes and capabilities of the client. This could be visiting an exhibition, clinic, sporting events, concerts, Oktoberfest, jousting tournament, Legoland, etc. with parallel filling of free time with excursions.

Who are your main clients and from what background?

After the fall of the so-called “Iron Curtain,” our people began to travel more actively around the world. If earlier, in the 90s, not everyone could afford this, but now almost anyone can visit, in particular Germany, and other countries.

Another thing is that not everyone can hire an individual guide-accompany, because... my services are much more expensive than if a person (or family) orders general excursions in tourist office. This is the whole difference - or cheaper, but on a common bus, according to mass tourist places, “on the whistle” you boarded the bus, etc., or, on the other hand, the excursion program is tailored specifically to you. In this case, you go on an excursion by prior arrangement with me, at the time you want, and return to the hotel at a pre-agreed time.

Today, with rare exceptions, my clients are private entrepreneurs, businessmen, officials, corporations who send their employees on company business to Munich, etc. As for amateurs alpine skiing, then these are completely different segments of the population. They all have one thing in common – a love for the mountains.

You say your services are more expensive, and what is the cost of your services, if it’s not a secret?

It will all depend on what the individual, family or group needs. If these are excursions around Munich, then their approximate templates (which can be discussed), including the cost, can be found on my website www.vash-gid-v-bavarii.ru in the “Munich” section. If these are trips around Bavaria, then go to the “Bavaria” section. To calculate the cost of transfers, the “Transfers” section is intended + now I have made a more convenient transfer calculator in the right vertical menu.

For each specific client, an individual plan of excursions, trips, events can be drawn up, and the cost in these cases will fluctuate both up and down. But, at the same time, I remind you that it cannot be individual excursions at a group price, and people should clearly understand this.

Do your clients have any strange desires?

Different people have their own, unique ideas about the strangeness, or unusualness of desire. What is natural for some will not necessarily be the norm for others. Here, rather, we can talk about expediency. For example, I had clients who ordered a transfer from Munich to a Nuremberg clinic, asked me to wait for them while they underwent procedures or examinations, and take them back to Munich after the doctor’s appointment, because... they didn’t want to call a taxi and go back with someone unknown. And every hour of waiting for a client, it should be noted, costs money. Those. a person thinks: ordering and transferring a taxi from Munich to Nuremberg costs, for example, 230 euros. On the contrary, the same amount. If a client orders a transfer from me, then he does not need to pay 100% of the cost for ordering a taxi in the opposite direction. He pays for way back I'll get 50%+ for the amount of time I'll wait for him. That is, in the end, in both cases, the amounts are approximately the same (but he does not need to call a taxi and remain silent the whole way, since the driver will be German or Arab), and in some cases, I can order a transfer even a little cheaper.
For example, I no longer consider this strange.

They say that Russian tourists behave the worst when abroad. Have you ever had to resort to police help?

We must pay tribute to our people, so far no one has ever tried to challenge or “overturn” the agreements on routes and payment for services reached during pre-trip correspondence and telephone conversations. I don’t know whether this is caused by innate integrity, or fear, if something happens, of not getting a Schengen visa next time, however, our people always adhere to the terms of the preliminary agreement.