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Comment by cimmanom | Hacker News Reader

If you’re interested in hiring people who are already employed, don’t design your hiring process to require me to take a week off work just to interview with you.

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Ok, let's say the company proposes an on-site interview that would last 0.5-1 day, how would you like to be interviewed on that day?

A full day interview is excessive, unreasonable, and almost certainly unnecessary (you're also wasting your own people's time). Again, your candidate has another job and - if they're any good - is probably interviewing other places. Especially if they're not desperate to make a move, they're not going to take multiple days off in a week to attend interviews.

(And that's not even counting the awful take-home coding challenges that take multiple evenings or an entire weekend to complete.)

For a half day, allow it to be scheduled at least partly before/after standard work hours so that the candidate can just come in a bit late to their current job or leave a bit early - claiming a dentist appointment or similar.

If you don't respect my time, I'll assume that's a harbinger of how you'll treat me after hiring, and I'll walk away.

Fair enough. Let's say that the interview was scheduled for 3 hours in a time-window that suites you, how do you think the interviewing process and contents should be? What is a good way to showcase your strengths as an engineer?

No algorithms. Talk through the design and architecture of a real life or hypothetical system.

And at least half of the interview should not be about technical skills; at least half should be me finding out about the company rather than vice-versa. Talk about process. Talk about stack. Talk about interactions with non-engineers. Talk to non-engineers.

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