This is the first part in a two-part series, the second part is here.
One of my favorite things to read about is technical interviewing; both giving and receiving. I think the last five years have produced a lot of interesting reading material on the subject as smaller companies have been rejecting the Google-style interview marathon, just as Google rejected the 90s-era trivia-style interview.
Now, most of this was just entertainment to me, until two things happened:
- At the start of 2016, I was looking for a new job; the first time since actually having work experience
- After joining a growing company, I became part of the hiring and interview process
I’m going to focus on #2 here, since that’s the challenge I’m currently facing and trying to get better at.
So, looking back 10 years, Joel Spolsky makes an interesting observation about being an interviewer:
You are going to be making Major Decisions About [the candidate’s] Life soon
Wow, I better not mess this up; I remember the pressure of being on the other side of the table. Knowing this, when I started interviewing candidates, I knew to put in the effort of actually reading the resume and coming up with relevant questions before the interview. They really care about the result of this interview; I should respect them enough to do that minimal work.
What I’m finding, however, is that taking time to prep for an interview is simply not enough. Did I ask the right questions? Were they relevant to what information I want to get out? Do I even know what information I’m trying to get from the candidate? Were my questions, my expected answers, or even my interpretations of answers influenced by implicit bias?
My current hypothesis is that investing time to improve the entire interview process within an organization will pay off more than investing per-candidate time before interviews. In a good case, this will either reduce the per-candidate time required, or even reduce the number of candidates that need interviewing either through quicker hiring of open positions, or better filtering of candidates early.
So how can I help improve this process? There’s a lot of reading material in this space. My plan is to go through some of these articles, summarize their action items, and see what the overlap is.