This is the sort of interviewing technique that has bothered me for quite some time. It's all a matter of attitude. By the time someone reaches the interview stage, the elimination screening should have been done. At that point, when I'm interviewing someone my philosophy is to look for reasons to hire him (or her). My experience is that people don't need to be tricked into eliminating themselves; they do a good enough job of that without any help!

Excellent advice in response to a pre-conceived disqualifer. As a "worker bee" who participates in group interviews of potential teammates, I've always held military experience in high regard. This is especially true in judging whether a person will be able to be effective in a giant corporate machine and its associated culture of adherence to policy, procedure, and understanding chain of command. An HR screener might appreciate military experience even MORE than an MBA. (I mean, how many HR screeners hold MBA's?)

I think its somewhat sad that the art of interviewing has devolved so low.

Rather than being able to demonstrate a body of work, prove you can get along well with others, and illustrate how you can add value to the organization, more focus is placed upon "who can answer the trick questions." It's almost like the HR gurus were inspired by Monty Python's Holy Grail where the knights were asked their favorite color before crossing the bridge.

There's a phrase "you are what you measure." Meaning, if you place a lot of emphasis on measuring efficiency, odds are that the company has grown to be highly efficient. So if your HR decision making is based on answering trick questions, then most likely you hired the best trick question answerer, and less likely the best candidate for the job.

Well then. How many perfectly qualified people get stopped at the HR level before the hiring manager ever talks to them? I know this has been covered over and over but the function of HR is to provide a different viewpoint of the candidate. They should not be the gatekeeper for technical positions.

Back in the day when I was a hiring manager all the resumes came to me. Unfiltered, unsorted, unvetted. I went through them and found the ones I felt were best suited. Then the team went through and voted for their top candidates. At that point I informed HR of who was getting interviewed.

The face-to-face interviews were myself, then the team, then HR. After all the interviews we all sat in a big circle and chose a candidate.

Did this take time? Yes. But what it got us was someone everyone agreed upon at the beginning.

Where was I going with this? Hiring should be a team endeavor if the person is going to be working with a team. Since the burden is going to fall on these people if the new hire doesn't work out they deserve the respect of having a say in who is going to be joining their team.

Several years ago my employer (a state government agency) shifted to a concept called 'Competency Based Interviewing'. It's strength is that it requires to interviewer to, up front, decide what is key to know and to frame 3 to 5 basic questions around them. The interviewee is then asked to "tell a story" about how their past work experience covers the question asked. The advantage with this concept is it focuses the interviewee on describing how she/he fits the job and keeps the interview on a postive note rather than on a "what can I use to reject this person" approach.