Generally, if you're hired, and you're working out, and your coworkers like you, why wouldn't you immediately be trusted to vet new hires? This is more or less startup scaling 101 - strange the author didn't just say "hey, mind if I skip the interviews?". That usually works for me for _years_!
1) Interviewing is a minefield of legal stuff that can easily blow up into he said/she said lawsuits. At a minimum (well, assuming $Company is past a certain size), you'd probably want baseline training vetted by Legal to train new interviewers to avoid those sort of issues.
2) Interviewing is a skill, or really, multiple skills. Reasonable questions, learning how to explore the space around the question, knowing when to lead the candidate and when to shut up and when to drop the question and move on. Spend some time on training the interviewers. Spend some time on internal reflections on good questions, pooling potential questions and giving guidelines on good and not-so-good answers...
As everywhere I have worked (and virtually all of my technical interviews), the interviewer gets a packet, runs the candidate through the packet, writes down the answers, and then moves on to the next one.
I have heard "I have no idea, so I will let you assume that" or some variation of that so many times whenever I ask a question outside the clarifying ones available in the packet.
Tech interviews just seem like exam proctors.
As someone with experience in the EU but mostly Canada, organizations with 150 employees and 150k employees, can someone put this into perspective for me please? It's this mostly an American thing? I've never had any issues like this or even any exposure to things like that happening around me.
Also, I believe in some places, it's illegal to ask what they were making at a previous job. This might be something that an interviewer discusses if they don't know about the rule.
There's just a lot of little landmines like that.
Don't ask questions that are irrelevant to the interview. If you need to make pleasantries, stick to very broad questions, eg "how's your day going so far?", "How about this weather?". There's no legitimate reason most of the protected classes should come up in an interview.
Sometimes people will ask "where are you from?" or similar during an interview, and that's in the off-limits category.
That's mostly why we are told "write down things that were said, not your opinions", but I've definitely seen interview notes that include things that would not be appropriate to share back with the candidate.
If you ask a candidate, "How would you approach problem X", and the candidate says "I believe X is Y because A is B, so I'll approach it from this angle", you'll likely need to paraphrase. And even in that one sentence, you can paraphrase many different ways: "Candidate believes X is Y", "Candidate says A is B", "X is Y" "Candidate approached from angle Y"... All are color. Your bias seeps in in many ways. Paradoxically z the less attention you pay to it the more other people will be able to work around it, because they'll understand how you work.
It was years ago, but I think I might have taken a half hour interview training session at a large company that was along the lines of "Don't ask about age, marital status, kids, etc, but it's fine if the candidate brings it up first. Use your best judgment." That was about it. I could also be mis-remembering and that could just have been something my manager at the time told me before throwing me into the interview rotation.
So I think calling it a legal minefield is stretching reality by quite a lot.
A candidate came in for an interview. It was quickly apparent he slipped by the phone screen, as he brought code examples in MS Word documents. During the interview, he claimed to be the second coming of Christ. The interviewers (my coworker and his boss) wisely said nothing in response and moved on to a different topic.
A few weeks later, he initiated a lawsuit claiming we did not hire him due to religious discrimination. It was a nuisance suit and dismissed as such, but a good reminder that interviews are business transactions, not chats between friends.
A very short list of questions that would potentially be cause for a lawsuit:
- religion
- family (i.e. do you have kids)
- culture (aside from work behaviors)
- personal background
- race
- health (nothing at all can be said short of stating that accomodations can be provided if necessary, assuming the job does not have physical requirements such as lifting or driving).
There are more, but I think this should give you a decent idea. The point is not that everyone is litigious, but rather that there are people who are, and you must act as a representative of the company during an interview.
Personally, I would not expect someone to take an active role in interviewing unless they had some training or I knew they were already experienced- partly for these reasons, but more so because it is not an easy skill. I have suffered through bad interviews at companies, and wouldnt want a company I work for to make those mistakes.
I have never taken an "how to give an interview class" although I think I got handed a packet once. Also I'm glad I didn't have to go to some interview training class, it would be written by some HR person that doesn't have a clue. The legal stuff is already well-handed by the standard HR (don't be an asshole or racist, or sexist, etc) training.
In every team I have ever been in, the interview responsibilities rotates through each team member, even newer ones unless they are maybe recent college grad super greens, then they would still go but maybe have somebody else sit in. In the small shops places, everybody interviewed each candidate.
This actually makes a lot of sense as the candidate is potentially going to be their new teammate and member of the work community and it makes sense to give the people that will be day to day with this person input on the hiring decision.
I would agree with this so much. I really, really wish companies would spend more money/time on training or preparing interviewers.
I've been pushed into being an interviewer for almost a decade, across 4 or 5 companies. Not a single one of them has provided any kind of training. I was a terrible interviewer when I started, and to be blunt, I still don't think I'm a great interviewer; probably mediocre at best.
Other random thoughts on things I would like as an interviewer:
1) A small upper limit on the number of interviews conducted per week. 3 a week is too much to sustain. I start resenting doing interviews, and it shows in the scores I assign.
2) Recruiting should sent interview invites that block out the whole hour before the interview. I need time to prepare, and to come down off whatever's going on at work that week, be it good or bad.
3) Scores should be multivariate, and should have some kind of "I like them as a person" score. Even if those scores are going to get discarded, it would ease my mind when I get people who are a little under the technical bar, but who I like as people. It really sucks to give someone you liked a bad score.
A "domain expert" is far more useful in a hiring team than another HR rep or someone from an entirely different scope.