One of my favourite interview questions isn’t mine originally. I just use it constantly.
I go through every previous employer and ask: “If I called your last manager right now and asked them to rate you on a scale of one to ten, what would they say — and why?”
Most candidates give me a nine. Then another nine. Then another.
One engineer this week gave me a seven. Then another seven. Then a nine.
I found that more interesting than anything else I heard.
The first seven came from a role where the team was building something new. The direction felt circular. Some weeks, it was hard to tell if what they’d done had been productive at all. He wasn’t sure if that was the project or himself — and he was honest about not being sure.
The second seven came from a team with genuinely exceptional people. He used a word I almost never hear engineers use about colleagues: “damn.” As in — there were moments watching someone approach a problem where he thought: damn, I hadn’t seen it that way.
When you’re surrounded by people like that, a seven isn’t embarrassing. It’s accurate.
The nine came from his current role. Hard challenges. Handled well. He felt good about it.
Seven. Seven. Nine.
What I noticed was the precision of the reasoning. Not “I think I did well” but a specific explanation of why that number fit — what was happening in the context, where he fell short, what the gap was between his contribution and the team’s expectation.
People who rate themselves consistently high without nuance are telling you something. People who can explain exactly why they got a seven are telling you something else entirely.
If I could ask every hiring manager one thing back: how do your best hires tend to describe their own past performance — and were they right?
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