Ask HN: Whiteboard interviews don't work, what's your ideal technical interview?

I don't claim to have things figured out but I can create a list of things that owrk and things that don't work.

Things that work:

- white board interviews, they let you get a dialog going with the candidate,

- take home work, they let the candidate work at their own pace

- showing work samples, whether that's a hacker rank type thing or github repo or open source work that you use.

Things that don't work:

- white board interview, some people just aren't good at them and they don't map well to real world work

- take home work, its insulting to candidates that you expect them to do something on their own time without pay

- showing work samples, github repos, etc. To easy to fake or take others work as their own, some people don't work on open source-able code, etc

Hmm, so we can establish that no matter how you interview you'll cut out some good candidates. I think we've all come to the conclusion that there is not global maximum on how to hire. In my opinion, you're really just going to have to pick one option and stick with it.

As an aside, as a candidate that kind of sucks, if you don't like white board interviews then you're probably not going to work at a company like Google, Microsoft or Facebook. Your choices are to accept that you won't wokr there or to get better at white board interviews.

Well then we could start by looking at what really successful companies do.

The worlds most successful hedge funds tend to not allow people to really apply, instead they look around for who is doing great research and then reach out to them.

Now its easy to start by saying this isn't applicable to most other companies and you'd be right, your company probably can't have their pick of MIT professors, but it does open up an interesting line of thinking.

What are you looking for in a candidate and how do you find people who are doing great work in that area.

Honestly, I think finance has this area figured out better than tech does. They either hire new grads by doing very heavy university recruiting or they hire from competitors.

In finance the saying is that by the time you are 30 you don't need a resume anymore as wall street is so incestuous that everyone knows everyone else. You are only 1-3 degrees of freedom away from any other person, which means that to hire someone, I just need to pick up a phone and ask the 5 people I know that the candidate has worked with to see if a candidate is worth hiring.

The best technical interviews I've been involved with seem to be mostly conversation about what the candidate has done and likes to do, and what the company wants and is like. Typically the candidate has a general impression of the company from having heard about or read about it (or having friends that work there), and the company has a general impression of the candidate from their resume, cover letter, some public code/etc., and possibly common acquaintances. That seems to produce the best results.

EDIT: More importantly, the key problem in hiring is not finding people that are technically qualified. The key problem is assembling teams of people who mesh well and are productive as a team. The world's companies are filled with teams of brilliant people who don't work well together.

1) There is first a very short phone chat with one of our recruiters to see what sort of role within our team you're interested in, let you ask questions, and to make sure you're clear on the scope of the take home challenge.

2) For the first technical interview, we have you talk through your approach to the take home challenge. Not everyone has publicly available code that they can walk through and not everyone's publicly-available projects are good for a discussion with any given one of our engineers. The pair programming interview is also on a challenge that we've standardised and calibrated with the team.