The Reverse Phone Screen: Call Your Potential Employer And Interview Them | Hacker News Reader

The Reverse Phone Screen: Call Your Potential Employer And Interview Them

martincmartin.com

47 pointsmartincmartin27 comments

I am in a position to interview applicants for development positions. I still chuckle when I think of an interview I had last year...

I knew within the first few minutes of this interview that this guy was not for us. He was coming out of a DOS development background (if my memory serves me correctly it was Clipper or FoxPro). The guy had no recent development skills and was telling us he would ramp up quickly for our .NET / SQL needs. The interview lasted about 20 minutes when I asked the question "Do you have any questions for us?"

He said "as a matter of fact I do". He opened a folder and pulled out a sheet of questions. It was obviously printed from a website. It was questions like "Why would I want to work for here?". "Please describe to me what job I am applying for?", etc. I thought to myself, "fair enough, I will take the time to answer these questions honestly even though most of them were covered in the previous 20 minutes."

When he got to the end of list, he flipped the page to another full page of questions. My head jerked, my eyes opened wide and I shook my head a little. He informed me don’t worry, I don’t plan to ask all of these, which he then proceeded to ask all of them. It was questions like, what do you use for source code control? What do you use to track bugs? Do you practice Agile development? My long winded sheet-1 answers quickly became one and two word answers for sheet two.

It was when he flipped the page to page three I lost it. My elbows hit the table, I let out a big SIGH and asked "there are more questions?" I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to ask more questions after the sigh I let out, but he did.

I don’t recall exactly how I wrapped it up, and I tried to stay somewhat professional, but more less informed him he was not the right guy for the job.

For our business, development skills are important, but do not account for everything. I would say client interaction and people skills rank right up there.

Sounds like the biggest problem with this guy was the not-smooth way in which he asked you all of these questions.

A better candidate would have found ways to work them into the conversation to appear natural.

You are correct. I am a very humble business owner (of 12) who recognizes, appreciates and praises my employees’ skills. I find it humbling that out of all the businesses "out there" they choose to work for me.

It comes down to two things. If he went about the questions differently, I would have answered all three sheets with a lot of thought and care (like I did on sheet one). It also was, that he could not read my signals and start wrapping things up. If he could not read my obvious signals, there is no way he could interact well with our clients. I have noticed over the years must clients will not inform you if you are speaking in lingo over their heads.

On a side note... let me share another story... my FAVORITE story...

I come from humble beginnings. My dad was a union work for a city and did his 40 hours per week. I started my business nine years ago on October 30th. My dad asked at our Thanksgiving dinner, "What are you doing again?" in front of our twenty or so guests, knowing darn well what I was doing since I was talking about it for a month or so. I said "Dad, as I already told you, I will be creating websites, assisting companies in database development, helping them install workstations etc... He responded, "I just don’t know" my dad had a business, you have to deal with taxes, lawyers, payroll, finding work etc etc... you are just better off working for somebody else...

My response... and it was without hesitation... "You are exactly the type of person I want to hire!". I don’t think he found it as funny as most of our guests.

It wasn’t until last year that he visited our office space (7,000 sq/ft) that reality sank in that his son has been somewhat successfully and he started to tear up.

There's probably elements of his personality that aren't being relayed properly, and I definitely agree that personality a key elements for a hire.

But your presentation of this story suggests astonishment that someone coming to you for the honour of a job on your wonderful team would have the nerve to care a lot about the environment in which he was working.

The example questions you bring up seem like perfectly reasonable questions to me and I'd be loathe to work somewhere where the manager didn't want to answer them. You'd maybe be surprised by how many places don't use source control at all, or don't have any kind of development methodology, let alone Agile.

But there's a big difference between asking those questions yourself because you care enough about them to remember what they are and just handing a sheet or reading from one that was clearly printed off the internet.

I agree, and the problem isn't the necessarily the number of questions or even the types of questions per se, it's that the choice of questions and the ordering demonstrate a lack of coherent thought. To exaggerate:

"What web frameworks do you use?"

"Django"

"Ok, so what languages do you use?"

or perhaps:

"What is your development process like?"

...answer...

"Do you use any agile methods?"

In both cases, the second question should at least be largely hinted at by the answer to the first. Somehow, people think they should ask certain questions so they do, whether or not they really understand the answers.

That is not the impression I got. The interviewee read the questions off of a worksheet. That indicates to me that 1) these are not actually his questions, and 2) he does not actually care about the answers.

Back in 2001 I was working at a little pre-press/imaging shop and I decided I really wanted to go work for a top-notch MS shop in town. I was the only developer and was pretty sure I wasn't going to grow unless I surrounded myself with great developers.

But I didn't know where, so instead of going to monster.com I just searched for all the Microsoft partners in the area and cold-emailed them to see if they were hiring or interested with a quick little bit of information about myself. I ended up with two interviews, both with great shops. I ended up taking a job at G.A. Sullivan (later bought by Avanade) and was thrilled.

Neither of the places I interviewed with had job openings posted and I never posted my resume on monster or other sites.

To this day I think this is the best way to find a job, seek out where you want to work. Don't wait them to come to you or find you online.

Absolutely!

Maybe I'm not as good as I think I am, or maybe I'm too honest, ;-) but my resume+cover letter has never made it through the HR gauntlet. I almost always have found an email address of someone inside that is associated with the position I'm interested in and sent them a cover letter email and resume. I have always gotten an interview by doing an end-run around HR, but never through HR.

FWIIW, I see the same thing at my place of employment. When we have had big projects and were in serious need of more engineers (including HR giving rewards to employees for recruiting new hires), the new hires almost all got hired through a personal recommendation to a manager, doing the end-run around HR (in some instances, HR did not give the reward because they already had the resume on file and never acted on it).

I once applied for a job working with a particular group, going through standard HR process. I heard nothing.

About two months later, I saw an identically-worded opening with the same group. This time I contacted the manager of the group directly. I quickly had an interview, and was moving in to my new office in a matter of weeks.

Depending on the culture, this could work really well, or really badly. I guess the type of person who would use this technique wouldn't want to work at the type of company who wouldn't want him to, so maybe it's a good filter.

It's also something to consider carefully if under a lot of pressure. It could scare away employers that may not be great, but would be better than nothing.

The immediate response when I mentioned this to a friend was that some companies might not "like you wasting their employees time while they are at work", to which I responded that I would probably not enjoy working there.

In a fast growth company engineers spend a lot of their time on hiring (phone screens, multiple in person interviews, "selling" after the interview). Candidate "screening the company" after a phone screen, but before an interview actually saves engineering hours that would be wasted interviewing a person who won't take an offer.

But would they realize that? Tightass companies are tightass.

"Tightass" companies typically don't get to fast growth, either.

Try to do that with a big technology company and you will get nowhere. E.g., at Google nobody knows where you will be working before you really start.

This may work well for small/medium sized companies, where they really care about who is being hired. Most big companies don't care, they just attract people to work under their predetermined conditions.

Heh. I had this conversation with a Google recruiter (paraphrased):

GR: "Hey, you seem perfect for a position I have in mind. Want to chat?"

Me: "Sure. What's the position?"

GR: "Well, what do you want to work on?"

I understand that people at Google are allowed to work on whatever project they want, at any time. If an employee working on project X decides they want to switch and work on project Y instead, they just inform their manager and then make the switch.

If you assume that:

a) people are most productive doing something they're passionate about; and

b) the set of Google employees is smart and creative enough that what they want to work on is probably the right thing to work on;

then this is probably the optimum method of allocating developer resources.

Before I arrived I was told that it used to work somewhat this way way back when. But while I was there it did not -- for the simple reason that it doesn't scale and just isn't practical. Gmail can't take on a dozen new engineers every week, nor can it lose a handful of crucial engineers.

You're encouraged to move on to another project every 18 months or so, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen too often, either.

You've shattered my dreams. :)

Thanks for the clarification. The ad hoc manner in which many projects roll out at google, it almost seems as though they're still following the previous method; but I suppose that it could also be a function of management deciding to jump when a 20% project bears fruit.

I don't know about actually calling before your in-person interview, as some companies may find that somewhat presumptuous, but many of these questions would also be excellent for the "Do you have any questions for us?" part that comes at the end of most in-person interviews.

You know, if I was going to have a single unifying principle to me improving my conditions at work over the years, it would be "be presumptuous" :-)

I have seen that not asking for a raise or promotion is a good way to not be considered for one.

If you don't make it clear that you are striving for something more then people will assume you are happy with what you have.

I'm considering this frame of mind at the moment.

I currently have a job, but am looking for work elsewhere at the moment. I'm tired of the dysfunctional way we schedule, speak with clients (lack of respect from head of company) as well as the way we treat our best assets (developers).

In my search I'm trying to figure out as much as I can about a company before I apply and being presumptuous may just help me find that illusive "perfect" job.

Thank you for stating this in this post.

Or for during your phone screen

A note to the author/submitter: It's Gantt, with two 't's, and it's not an acronym.

Pedantry aside, it's important because assuming that it is an acronym obscures its Taylorist origins.

That's good point; thanks!

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