I haven't had to cold interview in 20+ years. I hope I never have to based on how it works now. I get all my jobs from previous colleagues. Companies are closing the door to a lot of great talent based on this silliness, but they'll never learn.
class Foo {
}
On the whiteboard.
In any context.
That one saved us a lot of time.
It wasn’t some weird out of context thing either, he just literally didn’t know how to write Java at all. Even approximately.
I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.
And this was a middle aged white dude candidate, a small company, and about 20 years ago.
The risk tolerance has only decreased since then.
I work in an "at will" state. Our 3 people are usually on teams chatting about the interview going on and will decide to end it early and not waste everyone's time if it's not going well. We've never had anyone tell us they were concerned about that. What liability was senior management at your company concerned about?
To paraphase "We want to give the candidate every chance to prove themselves, and cutting the interview short gives them a bad impression of the company (and it would make it easier to sue us for unfair discrimination)."
Since it was just a few (or in this case 1) interviews, and that makes it easier to claim that I cut it short because queue whatever protected class. Which, if someone was going to be that kind of jerk to a candidate, I guess doing it on the first interview WOULD be the one, eh? It would just be my word against theirs, instead of x interviewers vs theirs.
And I guess the riskiest type of candidate for that kind of crazy behavior WOULD be the person who felt okay blatantly lying on their resume about such a fundamental fact AND EVEN SHOWING UP FOR THE INTERVIEW, come to think about it.
We didn't get sued in this case though. I think the interviewee was just surprised someone was interviewing him who actually knew how to code.
After getting chewed out, I never walked them out early though.
I guess that is why FAANG told us to not talk between ourselves and put everything into the system for the HC independently - so we wouldn’t know what we were in for, and would give each individual interview a fresh shot without all the anticipated pain and suffering. Makes it easier when you can’t see the nut shot coming I guess?
Makes sense, but yeah - terrible.
To be fair though, out of hundreds of interviews I’ve done, that was top 5ish for bad. Most were much better.
That place never stopped doing the practice, but other places I've worked (including the current) have decided against that pretty brutal candidate experience. (And, as you say, have also had a policy not to share any information about the candidate's performance until after submitting the write-up and recommendation from the interview.)
We should fix the modern interview loop (very hard) but the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.
Calculate it this way. I can spend 3x 1 hour (3 people interviewing a candidate for 1 hour) and have a 60% chance of hiring a performant person. I could also spend 3x 6 hours and have about the same chance. When that 40% non-performant candidate shows up and I have to repeat the hiring cycle, It's significantly less expensive in both labor costs and opportunity costs for the 3x1 interview style than the 3x6 interview style.
This doesn't take into account all the talent that has no need or interest to go through a 3x6 interview process (I am one of them).
>the idea we’d ever go back to one hour is kind of out there.
Ya like I said, the industry just kinda does what it does, complains about not being able to find talent, and will never learn.
Okay, sure - dispute it if you want. It doesn't change the fact that the industry seemingly collectively decided that 1 hour isn't a sufficient amount of time to gauge fit/effectiveness/etc.
My point to you is that given the above, you have to make a choice. Spending the extra few hours gives you some hopeful assurance of what you're getting.
I once again will note it's not a good system, but there is to date seemingly no widely agreed upon good system.