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Comment by neilk | Hacker News Reader

Interviewing.io is a startup that does some research into candidate evaluation. To their credit, they have even posted research with negative results.

http://blog.interviewing.io/posts/

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I had the opportunity to be in a small interviewing workshop with Aline, she really knows what shes doing and I believe the tech interviewing world would be a better place if more companies adjusted their process based on Alines/Interviewing.ios insights.

I don’t really see what’s special about their process other than the resume-blindness aspect. That’s been validated elsewhere by Triplebyte. Other than that one aspect, the process is exactly like your standard technical phone screen, except that you have to do a really easy Hackerrank problem to get invited to the platform.

If I am wrong here, someone please correct me.

Hey, Aline here. Unlike Triplebyte, we offer people free, anonymous mock interviews with engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, etc. Basically, you get on the platform, practice, and then if you do well in practice (again real interviews not coding challenges), you can book real interviews top companies. Those interviews are also anonymous, which means that if you do poorly, you don't have to unmask.

Well, I disagree with your use of the word “anonymous.” Gender, national origin, and ethnicity are frequently easy to guess (at least at the level of “is not a white, American-born male”) via voice. I know you tried voice masking and it didn’t help equalize the results wrt gender, and I don’t have a better suggestion, so I’m not blaming the process, for not attempting to remove bias. This criticism applies to both the mock interviews and the real interviews.

Bias creeps in in other ways, too. I have done both on interviewing.io as a candidate. You probably remember how Instacart has interviews on your platform under the terms that it was just an informational chat, and anyone who met the criteria to interview would then get a real technical interview. I did the informational chat and was then not interviewed after deanonymizing. And, BTW, after I emailed support I never got my technical interview, nor was I given any sort of resolution or information about what happened.

It’s a good experiment, but it falls short of what I’d call “anonymous” and doesn’t really remove very much bias in the overall process.

We've stopped letting companies do informational chats precisely for that reason. It's all technical from here on out. I'm not a fan of the "informational chat" approach at all.

Thank you for saying that! It was great to meet with you and the rest of the team =)

^^ this. Aline learner runs a solid content strategy over there focusing on data journalism.

Lerner

^ Where do you report bugs around here?
That reply button's in italics?!

It seems you can italicize your reply button by putting a star at the end of your comment

Please don't anyone report this bug, let the italics roam free

whoops, thank you.

Has anyone here done interviews with interviewing.io? How was it, did it lead to a job?

Yes and Yes. Interviewing.io was great for kicking some rust of the ol' interviewing tires and also led to an offer that I accepted.
I have a longer reply to a different HN thread with more detail about my experiences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679844

I think reading 10-20 ancedotes is far more useful than an academic paper.
After meeting my PhD professor. I stopped trusting academia for truth.

Academia's disconnect with practical things is amazing.

Perfect example of a field were the quantification of performance killed all good intentions.

The dishonesty to "prove" something was shocking.
Now I skip the abstract and go straight to Data.

I spent some time digging through academic research last year for a chapter of a book I was writing. There was some interesting work both relating directly to software development and collaboration and other topics more broadly. There was also a lot of unreadable crap that was pretty disconnected from the real world.

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