Gladiator Style Interviewing

Why not just get written feedback from interviewers rather than adding so much drama? Yes, social dynamics can play a significant role if you pull everyone into a room to hear their initial opinions. And worse if you have more than their peers in that discussion. Instead, if you get written feedback from each interviewer first, then you can skip the entire discussion sometimes and discuss on the candidates that had support via a normal discussion. If the hiring manager has the final say, they should run those discussions (not the hiring manager's boss, as implied). Also, any company that "was trying to hire around 30 developers at top speed" has bigger problems with management than how to hire.

I used to use a system where each interviewer just wrote down two numbers, hidden from others, marks out of ten for attitude and aptitude. Attitude encapsulated things like humility, willingness and desire to learn and share knowledge, etc. Aptitude was more around the technical skills required to do this job but also the capability to learn new skills when required. Those are pretty much the only two attributes I care about when recruiting.

Roughly it was:

6 - not quite there 7 - they have the att/apt required 8 - strong demonstration of att/apt Etc.

Average 7+ across both attributes for all interviewers or they’re a no.

The weighting was slightly different between contractors and FTE but as a starting point for the debrief it worked well.

I’ve also heard, and like: “if they’re not a ‘hell yes’ then they’re a ‘hell no’”, which is a lot simpler.

I don’t think I like this very much. I think it indicates something undesireable about your organisation when people cannot disagree with one another.

That’s been a way of doing interviews in the Valley for at least 20 years if not longer

I was doing this style of interviewing more than 10 years ago. I didn't think it was cool enough to invent some kind of name though. It's just a way to get people started on the talking though. It's been proven that junior people will follow senior people, and especially if some key stakeholder says yes it's likely other more junior people will feel disempowered to disagree. But since everyone had an independent interview looking at different skills, and of course the candidate might do better in certain interviews than other, all feedback is important.

Plus, if everyone votes up or down, it means that you don't have to spend a lot of time proving your case, you are just done. Everyone writing feedback down and sending to the recruiter is also a viable tactic for doing the same thing.

This isn't anything new or groundbreaking, it just seems like someone wanted to write a blog post.

That's a lot of rules.

Ask everyone to cement their thoughts in a computerized form ahead of the meeting. Bonus points if done immediately after the interview ends.

It can be freeform, or discrete items, or a mix of both. It also acts as a good paper trail for any future interactions between your company and the candidate.

Just an, uh, writing style note:

> Unavailable interviewers provide a thumb and a brief written summary of feedback to an independent third party beforehand. Yes, I said a thumb.

If you're going to do leave the reader in suspense like this—and I do think it's fine and even healthy to leave them momentarily perplexed—you need to add a little more information. For example: "Yes, I said a thumb. This will make sense in a moment."

Maybe it's my own morbidity, but combined with the article title, my initial thought was that I must be reading parody. Surely the author doesn't really believe people should cut off their thumbs as punishment for missing the meeting!