What is the best interview experience (whether you were hired or not) that you have had?
1st Interview:
Lunch interview with my boss. Conversation was casual, covering my background & goals, the leadership's background, and the tech stack. After lunch we expanded a little on our conversation with a showcase of certain features of the company's product.
2nd Interview:
Met with the company's founder for about an hour, followed by individual meetings with a few engineers. During the meeting with the founder we exchanged some background information and I was shown some info on the company's performance thus far; this was huge personally as transparency had become a huge pain point with my previous employer. The engineering meetings went smooth; I'd consider them casual but the technical discussion was more in-depth than the 1st interview.
Code test:
After the 1st Interview I was given a take-home code test; building a simple card game using the MEAN stack (shuffle deck, deal cards, score game based on card's position relative to a brand new deck, store results & calculate ongoing average). It took me about 12 hours over the course of a week (evenings mostly - I was employed during this interview) to complete. Since our product has no relation to card games, IMO the code test sought to prove that:
1. I was capable of taking a spec to code completion
2. I was capable of working within the confines of the company's tech stack (MEAN)
It took my boss less than a day to review my submission before offering me a position on his team.
Aside from my best interview experience, I've had some not-so-great experiences, here's a few that I encourage avoiding:
- No call, no show. Be mindful of your schedule and if you can't keep the commitment, inform the candidate. Candidates hate wasting their time, especially if they're still employed since it usually means taking time off.
- Impromptu skill evaluations. If you tell a candidate that the 1st round interview is going to be non-technical, then they're going to prepare accordingly. Shotgun questioning is not well received.
- Surprises on code tests. If your code test is going to measure one's ability to work within your stack, make sure the technologies come up during the interview conversations prior to issuing the code test.
I was then given access to github and told to implement a fairly simple feature in the next few days. This was with a stack I didn't know, so I had to prove that I can navigate my way through the code base. I sat down on the weekend, learned the basics of Rails, and implemented the feature. I then pushed upstream to github and was told I was hired a few days later.
- "I see you have done this and that, have some years of experience and seem to know how to do things. Here is what you would do in our company ..."
- "Still interested? Great. Can you please reverse a string?"
- "Well, looks like you can code. Let's talk salary."
- "Welcome aboard. :)"
Whenever someone turned out to be bad, they simply asked them to leave. Usually with severance. So easy and simple. I really can't understand why only a few companies work like this. No tests, no homework and definitely no hazing and grilling. Just some guys that want to build some stuff.
Highly dependent on the legislation the company is operating in. "At will" companies, if I understand the term correctly, certainly have that flexibility where they can let the bad hire goes. In other countries where firing is less flexible, more hoops needs to be jumped through.
The interview was for an hour or so with two developers. We chatted casually for the first 20 minutes. They introduced themselves and briefly discussed about their product. After going through my CV, they asked about my experience with the startup I had mentioned, the challenges I faced, why I choose that particular technology etc.
As per the technical part, the questions involved basic sql queries and schema design. Then we discussed about various data structures. I wasn't given any problems though. I was just asked to explain various data structures(array, list, stack, queues, trees and hash tables) and their complexity with an example on a whiteboard.
The best thing was that it felt like a casual conversation between a couple of friends.
For example, one of the best interviewers I have interviewed with would answer my questions about the company and their culture straight away without hesitation or himming-and-hawing about the response. It helped me feel like I could trust what he was saying. As well at the end of the interview he took the time to lay out his thoughts about me, my abilities and how I could contribute to the company. When I left the interview I had no doubts in my mind about what he was thinking and I was left sweating for days while waiting on a response about the position.
Since that interview has always left a lasting impression on me, I always try to do the same with anyone that I interview now.
We typically will have 4-5 hour day setup for series of interviews, preferably before lunch and during lunch. By this time remote team workers already have interviewed the candidate on phone and shared their impression to boss. First interview and last interview was by the Boss, in between we alternated between junior and senior members of the team as well as a few people from teams that we closely worked with in our job. Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes. Everyone was free to structure and cover whatever they wanted to explore during the interview. There were no prescribed method or feedback forms.
We provided verbal feedback to the boss as we walked by his cubicle after the interview. The typical feedback was "S/he reminds me of XYZ or s/he is strange or something along these lines, sometime politically incorrect." The XYZ typically being a current or ex-team worker or someone we all have/had known. Sometime we will have little bit more to say but not much. The feedback typically ended with "thumbs up," "thumbs down," or "thumbs sideways".
Even though, we schedule one person to take the candidate out for lunch, by the time lunch comes around, boss has pretty good guess whether candidate is hirable or not. If he is getting consistent thumbs up, we decide to take him out for lunch with the whole team. During the lunch, there is no discussion about interview or questioning candidate, just having a good time and treating the candidate as one of the team member. Of course everyone enjoys as we go for lunch to a nicer place and it is on company dime.
We continue the scheduled interviews after the lunch. Once interviews are over, we huddle for a quick 15 minute meeting with remote team members on the conference call and comment on the candidate. By that evening or early next morning boss lets everyone know the hiring decision he made.