Real interview recordings to help job seekers

As a hiring manager I want to advise folks this kind of offer can be counter productive.

When being better prepared for an interview results in being more of a group and less of an individual it plays into a) getting stereotyped, b) being lost in the noise. I acknowledge that there are places so systematic this idea might beget “better” results (is working at such a place really better in a real sense?). However the clear majority of hiring managers I know care a lot about their teams and use great care in adding to them.

Personally, I have always prized complementary experiences and skills (incrementally improving the team) to formulaic qualifications — in other words, differences. Being a “highly prepared” candidate probably deducts from my likelihood of hiring someone. I don’t have to look far to see people I’ve hired have been successful (including here as YC founders).

I’m sure this kind of idea has its place, but I would try to be as balanced with the presentation of it as possible, and clear on where it works and where it doesn’t, with the best interests of candidates (and hiring organizations) in mind.

says the guy that probably has one open role at any given time and zero quantitative possibility of explaining the rejections

Nobody knows that your random opinionated gatekeeping downrakes …. being prepared for an interview?

I would much rather see the recordings than listen to you

So do I. I have zero confidence in hiring managers messing around with „complimentary skill sets“.

I wonder how many trillions of dollars of lost productivity we've incurred by trying to improve our interview skills for brogrammer jobs.

Similar in magnitude to the lost productivity of people optimizing for appearances rather than results at work. All prep is basically an arbitrage between the hard work of actually becoming better and the often easier work of preparation.

The ideal system would minimize this arbitrage, both for the sake of employers and candidates alike.

I'm not sure it's a given that prep is an alternative to the hard work of becoming better. Imagine a hypothetical office job with bench press round. Improving your job skills wouldn't be the way to pass it, going to the gym would.

That's obviously an extreme hypothetical to illustrate the point, but it's along the same lines as common criticisms of e.g. leetcode and c-suite interview processes.

Definitely. Much of it _isn't_. But the parent comment was referring to the waste of the process, which is necessarily the part that isn't directly useful in the job.

I think about this a lot. It makes sense, on an individual level, to optimize your ability to interview, so that you can maximize your own results. However, it's crazy to me how frequently companies urge potential applicants to improve their own ability to interview. If a company is aware that they are missing out on good applicants due to how they conduct interviews, they should improve their interview process.

I don't see how wanting the applicant pool to improve interview skills is beneficial for anyone involved. It just leads toward reducing the signal to noise ratio of the interviewing process, leading to increased time wasted sifting through the noise.

I agree races to the bottom aren't always helpful - see also college admissions and how so many kids are loaded to the gills with "extracurriculars" to "stand out" - but ...

> If a company is aware that they are missing out on good applicants due to how they conduct interviews, they should improve their interview process.

if only it were that easy!

I've never worked at a company that hasn't wanted to improve their interview process.

Even that "tell people roughly what to expect" thing is a result of trying to improve the process - you can more easily tell the difference between "even with hints, they weren't able to hack it" and "they were able to figure it out, though we're not sure how much the hints had to do with it." That's a step better then "they passed the test" and "they didn't pass the test, regardless of if it's because it caught them by surprise or just that they aren't able to."

It's not perfect, but most of the common things I've seen pitched here to "just" make it a better process, like trial periods and take-home "real work sample" tasks, seem wildly impractical as at-scale replacements.

EDIT: my personal favorite is when the candidate has a system they've worked on in the past that they can explain in detail and describe challenges and solutions for... but... the pool of people who can do that has been even smaller than the pool of people who can at-least-pseudocode their way through some mild live problem solving and design questions.

> I've never worked at a company that hasn't wanted to improve their interview process.

My point isn't that fixing the process is easy. It's clearly not. And I absolutely sympathize with the issues of hiring. My point is that improving peoples' interview skills doesn't make them better employees, or make qualified candidates easier to find, since it's not a skill that is unique to only people who are actually qualified for the position. Just as qualified people will seem better, so will unqualified people learn how to seem qualified. It's applying a fix that does nothing but: (1) reduce signal to noise, and/or (2) satisfy the "gut feelings" of interviewers on what a good candidate look like.

If companies are goading applicants to improve interview skills, all else being equal, assuming this actually leads to increased job offers for the candidates, it means companies are filtering too hard for unimportant "interview skills".

----- EDIT

> EDIT: my personal favorite is when the candidate has a system they've worked on in the past that they can explain in detail and describe challenges and solutions for... but... the pool of people who can do that has been even smaller than the pool of people who can at-least-pseudocode their way through some mild live problem solving and design questions.

This lightly touches on part of what I mean. Companies frequently test for things outside of what they intend to. Its not possible to completely avoid, but, based on my own interviewing experience, it's doesn't seem like much work goes into adjusting for it. Just breaking down this example, I'll explain what I think you are looking for, and what you end up asking for.

Intentionally testing for:

- experience working with a complex system

- able to identify issues in a complex system

- able to figure out solutions to said problem

- able to identify tradeoffs to said problem

- able to communicate the problem, solution, and tradeoffs

Unintentionally testing for:

- ability to recall, on short notice, details of a complex system from (likely) months ago, including it's tradeoffs and outcomes, without resources on hand.

- the ability to recall challenges and learnings from (likely) months after they've been experienced and absorbed. (This is a big one for me, personally)

- knowing how complex is complex enough. An applicant may think bringing up a system they do not consider to be particularly complex may hinder their chances by not meeting expectations.

Every point from the unintentional section is something that could completely prevent someone from coming across as a good candidate, but have no bearing on how well they can actually do their work.

I'm not sure I understand your point/perspective, but maybe it's due to differing assumptions about what constitutes "interview skills." I consider refreshing one's memory about complex systems or challenges that have been experienced and absorbed to be important parts of interview preparation (from your "unintentional" list). That is, "interview skills," in my opinion, includes practice at describing one's experience, and doing this well helps the hiring manager correctly assess the candidate's practical on-the-job skills.

I feel like I may be misunderstanding the point you are making.

> That is, "interview skills," in my opinion, includes practice at describing one's experience, and doing this well helps the hiring manager correctly assess the candidate's practical on-the-job skills.

I agree that doing these things is "interview skills". That's basically my original point. People spend more and more time practicing "interview skills" rather than practicing what the job actually is. This is the wasted productivity, and it means that every candidate needs to spend more and more time studying tactics to get a job, over spending time actually being good at, or even just doing, their job. If you urge all applicants to get better at interviewing, that's not going to make it easier to find qualified applicants. It's just going to make more people seem like good applicants, since bad applicants can also improve their ability to interview.

The more "interview skills" we require people to have, the more detached interviews become from actual jobs, which advantages people who practice "interview skills", which makes it harder for companies to decern good candidates from bad (since one doesn't need to be a qualified candidate to be charismatic or lie). It's at this stage that companies seem to come to the conclusion that the solution is to focus even more on "interview skills", even though it's those "interview skills" that start the chain reaction in the first place.

Back to your example interview question. After passing an interview, does one ever need to frequently spend time refreshing one's memory about complex system's they worked on in the past (and are no longer working on), on a moments notice, without references, and tell people stories about them? If so, I would yield it's probably an excellent interview question. Even without that caveat, it's probably still a good question. My main goal with that part of my comment was to point out that questions have unintended failure modes that, in my experience, tons of people aren't aware of. If one isn't aware of these failure modes, one will not be aware that they are unintentionally skipping over potentially good candidates.

I’m not sure I agree with your analysis of the those unintentionals. They all seem loosely related to “ability to communicate about complex systems”, which I consider a valuable quality in an interview and colleague.

I actually think all three of the things you list as "unintentionally testing for" are extremely important.

Systems often work well for months and don't need touching, then have an incident, or need a new change, etc. You can remember that stuff fairly quickly? Perfect. You can't? I think that's a potential flag, directly related to "able to identify issues in a complex system" and "able to figure out solutions to said problem."

But the other reason why not many candidates do well on that is because there's also just a lot of companies where the day to day work is not-complex problems on not-complex systems (even (especially?) at FAANG where the typical dev is a very tiny piece of the machine). So in that case we have to fall back to made-up approximations for "complex" problems that don't require a ton of extra context.

I’d bet the reason is that very few people think strategically like that. Also how many hiring managers are really incentivized to improve the company interview process as a whole? Even very smart people rely on feelings like “this person seems likeable, confidant, knowledeagble etc” so if an interviewee fails at those things the it could be genuinely well intentioned honest advice from the interviewees’ perspective to get more polish in those areas. When faced with a real person trying their best it seems kind of mildly sociopathic to be like “no you fail and we won’t say why because that would dilute our hiring signal” (which does happen btw as I’ve received that treatment).

Or to look at it another way many people (like me) are naturally bad at putting their best foot forward even though they would be good employees so improving their ability to convey thay they would be a good employee is a win all around.

First, what's a brogrammer job?

Second, how is productivity being lost? If, as you say, the loss happens _while_ trying to improve interview skills, then, presumably, the person working on the improvement is looking for a job, and either is not currently employed (and thus can't be losing anyone money in lost productivity), or wishes to quit his current job (and thus is probably not super committed to the tasks at hand).

> (and thus can't be losing anyone money in lost productivity)

What? No, no, no. Being unemployed when you want to be employed is 0% productivity. That is lost productively compared to having a job for that period of time. That extra time spent interviewing is money lost for you compared to working.

Having everyone spend more time learning skills that are only used between jobs is productivity that is lost relative to learning skills that improve your ability to do your job, or just doing the job itself.

First, what's a brogrammer job?

Pretty much most industry work these days.

I agree the term is vague (as used here), but what I think the commenter means is "same old, same old". In the interview process, every company talks about how picky they are about hiring, and how special everyone is who works there. And then you get in there and it's the same sloth and pretentiousness (and not too infrequently, just plain bad interpersonal behavior) as everywhere else.

And the same productivity-killing open plan office, too.

Companies won't want to do this beyond releasing a token video or two because interviewees would use them to prepare narrowly to the exam, memorizing the questions, and fail on the job.

There are interview training companies like interviewing.io that pair you up with employees from the desired companies for mock interviews. This is pretty close to what you propose to do.

Finally I think this is a bad business opportunity because people will only use your product once every few years.

I understand your perspective and thanks for mentioning interviewing.io. Totally appreciate it! While mock interviews with employees from the desired company can be valuable, our platform offers an additional layer of insights through real interview recordings.

With real recordings, job seekers get an authentic glimpse into actual interview experiences, observing real interactions and learning from both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.

By providing an authentic glimpse into the interview process, our platform offers job seekers a firsthand experience of what interviews for a specific role are truly like. This practical and realistic understanding can significantly enhance their confidence and improve their interview skills.

While the value may vary depending on individual preferences, I believe that real recordings can complement mock interviews, providing unique insights and learnings for job seekers.

*And about it being a bad business opportunity since people would only use it once in a few years, I totally get that and if I pull this off by any chance, that’s definitely one of the first things I’d have to look into.

> Finally I think this is a bad business opportunity because people will only use your product once every few years.

Yet realtors and car salesmen are doing fine.

This exists, take a look at https://interviewing.io/ replays.

Companies don't allow that. people won't risk their jobs to earn a few bucks

But the videos are completely anonymized... So no one who know who recorded who, or what do you think?

Remove the audio and video of the people involved, keep the rest. Not very useful.

What about a real-time voice-to-text transcription of the interview?

This is a bad idea for so many reasons. For starters, you’re not going to be able to use any video where the interviewer is in a two-party consent state, and good luck determining where an interviewer is currently located with 100% confidence.

Yep there's 0 incentive to allow this by the actual decision makers (companies) to open themselves up to sending potentially law-suite leading footage to a 3rd party.

Completely valid point, but what if we invest so much in anonymizing the recordings, so that it is not possible to identify the companies or jobseekers involved?

Good luck with that. Programmers are good at de-anonymizing data, and video of people having a conversation is ripe for being de-anonymized.

One thing you haven't mentioned yet: what is the value over existing online sources of interview assistance/training?

That might help with tailoring the advice.

Our platform stands out by providing real interview recordings, giving users authentic insights into real interview processes. Unlike other online sources that provide mock / made-up interview scenarios, we allow you learn from actual interviews conducted by real companies / candidates.

This provides job seekers with a more practical and realistic understanding of what to expect during interviews. By observing real interviews, users can gain confidence and learn how to answer questions effectively.

While training and assistance have their value, witnessing live interviews can be an added value when prepping for success.

Overall, it gives this humane touch and feeling that you're not in it alone, and seeing people fail/pass just gives significantly more insights into what to avoid/do.

Value of this vs having mock interviews with someone who works/worked at said company and has interviewed candidates is very very minimal. There isn’t much incentive here whether the interview is anonymized or not.

You would be better off providing a service where candidates can simply talk to people who have successfully gone through the interview process for similar roles recently or vice versa.

I understand your perspective and thanks for joining this discussion.

You're totally right! Mock interviews with people who have direct experience with the company can certainly provide tons of significant value. However, this platform aims to offer a new/unique approach by providing also real interview recordings.

These recordings provide an authentic glimpse into real/actual interview experiences, allowing job seekers to observe real interactions, understand the dynamics and how these conversations are typically held for that particular role, and learn from both successful and unsuccessful outcomes.

About your service suggestion, what if this comes as an added feature to this real interview recordings platform? Thoughts?

Who actually records interviews?

Many states are two party consent. The company will absolutely not want it recorded so there will be no record of any mistakes related to illegal hiring practices.

I've had mock interviews recorded as part of business classes. Those would honestly be more helpful since they're individualized and can help you stop making mistakes.

Why is interview.io not good enough?

This is something that I believe interviewing.io does already but not sure if it costs money

I think staging fake interviews based on the recordings will invite fewer lawsuits.

There are practice interview services available, with top-tier engineers.

If you can pull it off it might have some value to people just getting into the job market, but I suspect watching someone else get interviewed for a different role at a different company would have much less value than just prepping for your own interview in a more traditional way.

As an example, when I go into an interview I generally try to get a sense for what the company does and what I am likely to be doing day to day. This allows me to tailor responses in a way that explains how I can be of use to the company, and allows me to prep for questions I might be asked about the technical requirements of the role.

Watching a some random dude interview for another job, in another industry, with different requirements just wouldn't be very helpful to me, and it may actually be a determent if I believe everything that worked in his interview will work in mine. If it was an interview for the same company, for the same role, and I knew the guy got hired then it would probably be somewhat useful, but otherwise interviews are just too different to really have any transferable learnings.

The other thing I'd say on this is that interviews in my experience are largely about personality. I work as a contractor so I generally do interviews once or twice a year and I know an interview has gone well not because I've managed to answer all the technical questions, but if I simply connect with the interviewer. In fact I've had interviewers cut the technical questions short on me a few times simply because they liked how I presented and had a good feel about me. And I've seen this on the other side of the fence too... I know people who have not gotten roles or have even lost their jobs because those making decisions just didn't like them on a personal level.

This personality aspect of interviews is extremely hard to optimise for because you don't know what people are looking for. Going into interviews I try to guess based on what I know about the company and who is interviewing me (age, techy, position at company) what type of person they might be looking for. A non-techy at financial company for example might expect you to dress professionally and speak proper, where as a techy at a startup might actually be more inclined to hire you if you're wearing a hoodie and act slightly more casual. But this needs to be done in a way that's congruent with your baseline personality because people can sense when you're putting on an act.

The point I'm trying to make is that it would be a mistake to extrapolate about what works for a different people in different interviews.

Just my thoughts anyway. I think a website about interview hacking with some video clips as demonstrations would be a better idea personally. I'd probably even take a look at that myself.

This is The Way.

The psychopathy of modern applicant hazing will persist until it's publicly documented.