The Art of Job Interviewing
artofwork.co
artofwork.co
Edit: thanks for the feedback
If the HR department is really that powerful and obnoxious, maybe you don't actually want to work there after all. A crap HR department can be an ongoing headache.
Tell your boss, and get him to either get the nonsense waived (which can be done - do you think a new CEO would be doing logic tests?), or put another hundred grand on your salary!
Nothing of the sort. Hopefully you'll stick to your guns.
It's amazing anyone uses them in the hiring process.
They are barely-better-than-horoscopes-junk-science... but people genuinely believe in the stuff.
Meyers Briggs is complete trash, I could easily get any result I wanted to. And at the end of the day it doesn't give any useful insight.
-not completing the test is an indicator of your personality. I have had a few of these things shoved at me and it has , in my experience, very little to do with placing you in a personality complementary position. workplace personality testing has more to do with making money from the data that is generated, and that came from some long in the tooth middle management that gave 0fux about the job at the time.
feel it out and maybe turn the table for the interviewer, so its not about how well you fit and what you bring, make it about how well the employer fits your capabilities and how much they will lose if you walk away, maybe in mid interview have someone call you and beg for you to reconsider and come work for them they need you now. in other words HAX YOUR INTERVIEW
I have to disagree with this point. Phone and screen interviews are awkwardly paced and some individuals simply don't come across well in this type of setting. If the qualifications on their resume fit your requirements, just bring them in!
As much as I agree that companies should be more willing to just have people come in for a quick chat, I'd like for recruiters to reach out through email or text and then setup a Hangouts chat or such. A video call would be sufficient in my book.
EDIT: One of the things that sucks about phone screenings, IMO, is when the interviewer is clearly asking a prewritten set of questions and taking notes as I speak. What I'd like instead is for the interviewer to record the conversation so they don't have to take notes, thus freeing their minds up to having a chill conversation and perhaps getting a better sense of who I am.
I believe European carriers were traditionally caller pays, not sure if that's still the case.
The sentiment is mutual.
We can talk about how much we hate doing anything over a voice call, but it’s ludicrous to think that interviewers should never ask a question that could be answered by reading the résumé.
For example, we have some Scala code in our analytics stack at my work. I have worked with it, but I avoid touching it and honestly, I am not a Scala programmer.
I have been at this company for 3 1/2 years, on this team for one year. Some people in such a situation will say that they have 3 1/2 years of Scala, an outright fabrication.
Others will say that they have 1 year of Scala, which is kinda-sorta true on some bad-faith, you-can’t-call-me-a-liar planet.
If I put Scala on a résumé, I would totally expect someone to drill down and find out if I was using it every day, whether I was writing big chunks of code or just fixing the odd bug and so on.
I wouldn’t highlight Scala, personally, but what if I put JavaScript down? Given how tenuous Scala might be, wouldn’t an interviewer want to know if my JavaScript experience is “real” or not? I know that I use JS almost every day and Scala almost never, but my interviewer doesn’t know that I have such scruples, so they are supposed to ask me questions about JavaScript that my résumé answers, then drill down and corroborate.
To provide contrast, I had a phone screening yesterday where the screener was only asking yes/no questions that were easily answered by my resume, didn't want me to go into much detail, and didn't seem friendly at all. Why would I want to move forward with that company? There are others where I can tell off the bat that they'd be a better culture fit. First impressions do matter.
One of the things I like about a video screening is it usually changes the tone of the conversation towards being a bit less formal.
You are a number as an employee, we are all just disposable pieces of the cog. The business transaction is simple. I’ll stay there as long as they are putting money in my account twice a month that is commensurate with my market value and I know they will keep me employed as long as it is in their best interest.
You are just one of a pile of resumes that they are filtering at any one time.
While I wouldn’t want to work in a toxic environment, I have no problem with working with a bunch of professionals that all feel the same way and just want to go home to their families, friends, and enjoy other alternatives.
I have no interest in playing foosball, socializing after work, etc.
But I gave up getting meaningful raises within a company. My m.o. for the past 10 years has been to look at the market, gain the skills that are paying more, and change jobs.
As far as promotions, that’s not something I care about. 20 years ago, I was sitting at a desk writing code in Visual Studio 1997. Now I am sitting at a desk writing code in Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio Code - making a lot more money of course.
I was a Dev lead for a while, at one company just to put that on my resume, I self demoted, got a job at another company with the same pay, less responsibility, and the chance to fill in some technology gaps for next job as an overpriced consultant.
It's not uncommon for there to be a huge mismatch between what the resume says and how the candidate interviews. Especially since it's well-known that resumes are programmatically screened nowadays, candidates feel pressured to play buzzword bingo with their resumes.
A quick phone screen or take-home is far more humane than bringing them on-site for 6 hours and having them flail miserably in the interview because of the resume problem.
I also don't see how they could nail an on-site interview but fail a phone screen. It seems like the skillset there is roughly equivalent, regardless of whether you agree with that skillset being indicative of on-the-job performance.
On the interviewing side, I have had 6 phone screens with different companies in one day -I was able to “work from home” to do it.
On the interviewer’s side. I was able to screen 6 people in one day and bring in only two.
A “resume fit” means nothing. People say all sorts of things on their resume but they fall apart when you actually talk to them.
Also, you'd be surprised at how different the role they want to fill is from the one they posted.
Furthermore, phone screen allows ability to get perspective on soft skills. At least in my field, technical people need to communicate and therefore a phone screen allows ability to review this attribute of candidate which isn't conveyed on a resume.
Both of these before either side has expended significant resources on a proper interview. More that 50% of the most recent interviews I have done have involved getting on an airplane (sort of "amusingly", more than once even for a position in the same city I was located) - no way I'm going to put that sort of time in for most places without talking to them first. On the other foot, it's pretty frustrating as a hiring manager to have interviews and people all lined up and prepped for someone it only took you 10 minutes to know was not going to work out.
I should probably add, I mean technical, or at least hiring manager, phone screens. Recruiter can rarely handle this, and if I'm talking to one it's really only to arrange/understand who I really need to be talking to.
In more niche/difficult to match area, good recruiters can be helpful at finding difficult to source candidates, much more so that evaluating them.
Those two skill sets are quite different, most recruiters don't do both well.
I suspect many of the gut feelings people get doing phone interviews are a matter of luck.
I do appreciate the convenience of a phone interview, but it would be incredibly good for my peace of mind if more of them could start off with a simple email conversation to introduce each other. I tried to do that myself for a brief moment where I was interviewing people, and I thought it went quite well. (My boss, wondering how he almost didn't hire me, put me in charge of hiring someone like me, which was surprisingly non-destructive, but I'm grateful I don't need to do it on a regular basis).
With that said, I really dislike the jobs where they ask you a bunch of random questions right in their application form. That's way too much work when your answers to those questions probably won't even reach your interviewer anyway.
Eg. I’ll provide more context on my needs as the hiring manager (often the recruiter explains the role poorly). Then I’ll ask a few questions related to the role that are pretty basic to validate your background isn’t BS.
So if you get screened out here despite nailing the questions then the manager is hiring on the wrong criteria (likability?) and you probably don’t want to work for them anyway.
Then read some (maybe this, I didn't look at it in detail, but at first glance looks reasonable) and practice.
> I just want to see how well the candidate can code :-(
All this tells you is if the candidate can code. If you want that, give them a test, look at their Github history (if they have it). Ask for code samples from any project they can share that they're proud of.
I personally find it much more valuable when interviewing someone to talk about what they've done. How they've solved problems. What their interests are both in and outside software.
Setting up a non-stressful experience and using behavioral interview type of questions and form is my personal favorite. Something I think is really important, that many people forget, is that the interviewee is also interviewing you. If you come across disorganized, unprepared (didn't even read their resume), etc., then you may fail the interview and even if you want to hire them, they'll say no.
I try to get all information I can about the candidate, including reading through their Github or Linkedin profile, or looking them up on StackOverflow or on social media just to get a deeper understanding of what kind of person (and coder) they are. But I was consistently surprised by how difficult it may be to find relevant information about a candidate before an interview. Many do not include links to their code (Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, whatever, just show me how you think) in their resumes (admittedly, we did not have it as a hard requirement, but one would assume that a programmer would include them). Resumes often contain spelling or grammar mistakes that bias me against the applicants (and I need to tell myself that these mistakes don't necessarily matter).
Our process is a screening interview over Skype with a simple coding challenge. Followed by an hour-long in-person interview, also coding-heavy, but relevant to the work that the candidate will be doing (no brain teasers, no CS algorithms). I feel that at least this gives me some objective datapoints to assess and rank the candidates. Asking about previous work or interests in and out of software feels too subjective to be useful for subsequent comparison, and is prone to false-positives (we once talked to a candidate with an interesting background and all the right buzzwords in their social network who did not even pass the screening challenge). Although we certainly do ask.
Yes, this is a problem in subjectivity, but I don’t think there’s any better way to judge a cadidate than their past experience. Experience is an important factor in determining leveling, etc.
> we once talked to a candidate with an interesting background and all the right buzzwords in their social network who did not even pass the screening challenge
Yes, and I did recommend giving a programming test. It sounds like your process worked if you were able to disqualify them early.
Behavioral interviews, when done properly, are not something they can easily BS through. In fact, I find I get far more details about how they work through this process than white boarding sessions.
Programming is not the only aspect of a job, understanding how they resolve conflict, disagreements about API design, how to design higher order interfaces, who they talk to and how they determine what to include in designs, how they deliver software into production, what they consider MVP; these are all things that can be discovered through behavioral interviews, and many people don’t represent these well on resumes.
If you job is really coding most of the time and challenging/interesting enough on itself, you have less reason to do projects on the side (and it might not be effective use of time). Same for those working in competitive positions where either maximum time or output is expected.
I've been given tests galore though. Last week I was given one and told while I was halfway through it that somebody had accepted an outstanding offer.
Hiring is so broken.
They absolutely matter! Spelling, grammar, and usage mistakes on a resume can be a red flag that the candidate is sloppy or careless. They didn’t even make the small effort to have a native English speaker proofread. Will they have a similar cavalier attitude about code reviews or compiler warnings?
When I’m looking for programmers, I’m often looking for craftsmen (or women): people who “use good wood in the back of the cabinet” [1]. If you’re misaligning the margins on your resume or if you incorrectly use “your” instead of “you’re,” it says something about the level of polish you find acceptable.
1: https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-obsession...
I wonder if there have been any studies done into this or whether it's just a popular mantra repeated in many resume guidelines. I lean towards your side, but a much more experienced colleague of mine is adamant that you cannot tell a good developer from a bad one by how clean or sloppy their resume is. And that the list of companies they worked at and their years of experience are a much better predictor of success.
I think this is a bad idea. If you discover through this stalking that they are on the opposite side of some issue to you, will you be able to overcome any innate bias? Like it’s utterly irrelevant to anyone’s professionalism if in their private life they happen to be e.g. pro or anti abortion and if they never bring it up at work. And you also don’t know the context that lead them there. When I interview a candidate I deliberately know nothing apart from what’s written on the CV, I don’t even talk to my colleagues about them.
Absolutely, there is this risk. On the other hand, how do you know they would never bring up this opposite side of the issue at work, or that you would not inadvertently offend them by something you say? Also, I've heard culture fit mentioned a lot, and if you are looking for someone for your team and they turn out to be on the opposite side of some issue to you, is it possible they wouldn't fit your culture?
Although I completely understand what you are saying and it's a really good point.
Oh you absolutely can, if you look at group memberships, volunteering experience or whatever. Sexual orientation too sometimes. Even if they don’t make a big deal of it or get into arguments or even explicitly mention it at all.
Basically you are better off not even looking.
Then I was the lead at a small startup where I was the only technical interviewer, led to a nightmare situation. The person could talk the talk but had dismal output in practice and was super defensive when things were on the line. Took a lot of work to convince others in the org he had to go as he was charismatic with excuses, personal issues, etc.
Never again. Now I grill people and only consider offers where I was sufficiently grilled, in real time, to ensure I'm around people who can do the job.
I haven't been burned by this process once. I have gotten to the end of an interview and decided a candidate was not being forth coming on details, and turned them down, but I've never ended up with someone getting through where it was a complete disaster. That's not to say that there haven't been people that weren't perfect and ended up letting go, or they decided to leave themselves.
Behavioral interviews when done properly get very detailed. I often am able to discover exactly how much of the HTTP stack someone has worked on, for example, down to choices on parameters at the TCP layer, or asyncio libraries.
Unless your part in the interview process is explicitely to only look at the coding skills, in which case that's perfectly OK I suppose!
Their part on bias is woefully inadequate. "We’re all human, and we’re all biased, so the best thing to do is just accept this." sounds like they have no idea what unconscious bias actually is.
The worst unconscious bias is "this person isn't like me, so they can't possibly be good." People unconsciously would rather be around people similar to themselves. This creates groupthink and monocultures, and the reason why there are so many issues in tech. They see a candidate who is a female or a different race, and maybe they approach problems differently, and the interviewer rejects this because it wasn't THEIR way of thinking, which obviously to them is the best.
There are many ways to solve problems, and the best interview problems are the ones where people are free to use their own creativity to solve a problem, not regurgitate the exact same CTCI answers ad nauseum.
Interviewing is not an art - it's a means to an end. A very pragmatic event, the focus of which, is to minimize wasted time.
This very document is an invitation to waste people's time. The length of it and its contents.
It'd really help if people who've actually run companies, managed, hired and fired, would be the ones speaking on these topics, not some middle-man recruiting agency doing content-marketing.