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If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

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Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#41

Post by beager »

dsr_ wrote: post #24

I am, now and on occasion, a hiring manager. Naturally, every freelance recruiter wants to be my friend. They often start cold calls with a description of a person's technical abilities, and then ask if I would be interested in interviewing that person. When that happens, I ask them to define one of the buzzwords that they have just used. "Could you tell me what 'big data' means?" or "What's the difference between AW…

There's another side to the value of headhunters and agencies, at least the competent ones, and that's the ability to warm a pipeline of candidates and do a lot of the grooming that your regex, no matter how clever, won't be able to do.

You can scour LinkedIn day and night for candidates, but especially in software engineering, finding inclined candidates is a much narrower task than finding an engineer with big data experience and experience with GCE.

Any recruiters I work with only need to understand how much they need to understand about technical skills to deliver me a workable and most importantly inclined pipeline. It's my job to educate them about subtleties in my requirements.

Edit: I should note, these are recruiters I've worked with on an ongoing basis. With cold calls, if they lead with a frag grenade of skills and buzzwords, that's just a bad pitch imo.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#43

Post by beager »

TamDenholm wrote: post #12

I get at least 5 phone calls from recruiters a week, being a contractor. The amount of times i get someone that asks me something like: Recruiter: "We're looking for someone with React experience, do you have that?" Me: "Yes" Them: "Ok, how about Javascript?" I want to explain to them but i end up just saying yes to every acronym on their list since they've no idea what they're asking for.

It's funny because in a different context, that's exactly a sequence of questions that I as an engineer would ask:

> Do you have experience with React?

> Okay, do you have experience writing pure, vanilla JavaScript? Absent a framework like jQuery or Backbone or Angular?

The second question can often screen out people who simply maintain framework apps rather than those who actually know JS.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#44

Post by ryanmarsh »

mrfusion wrote: post #31
dagw wrote: post #15

On the flip side I recently interviewed for a programming position at a civil engineering company and at no point in the process did anybody ask any questions that would in any way test if I actually knew any of the things I claimed to know. The entire "programming" part of the interview was essentially: "We use quite a bit of python. I see from your CV you've used python". "Oh absolutely, I consider python the langu…

We all deserved to be treated with that kind of dignity. I'm not sure where our industry went wrong. You'd never ask a doctor medical school trivia during an interview.

Doctors take a test and go through a verifiable apprenticeship period.

If Dr. Nidal got his MD from Johns Hopkins and did his residency in pediatric oncology at Sloan Kettering where he is a fellow and has published 2 papers on Nueroblastoma you can safely assume he knows a thing or two about high risk pediatric solid tumor cancers.

What do we have for programmers?

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#45

Post by sleepychu »

cyphar wrote: post #17
sarabande wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give credit where it is due, this especially funny quote is nearly verbatim copied from the original article ( https://medium.freecodecamp.com/welcome-to-the-software-inte... ) from which "inspiration" for this one was taken: It means we do Agile. Everything is in a flat structure, except when it comes to salary and responsibilities. We have a Translator Master, that coordinates all the other Translators in Sprint…

"""inspiration""". It's a flat-out and less funny rip-off of the original. In fact, several of the responses don't make sense in this version that did make sense in the original. Candidate: Forget it. Just give me a second ok? I think I will organize rows as candidates and columns as dates/times and use NOW, TODAY, WEEKNUM and the rarely used called YEARFRAC Interviewer: Oh, no, that’s from the answer sheet in the “C…

Oh yeah, I read this as like "you fail for giving me a standard answer" but reading the original it's clear they missed the point here.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#46

Post by jancsika »

> You see, we are looking for the very best Recruiters, and it has been proven by major companies that the people that are able to do the job best have a very solid foundation in spreadsheets for quick applicant tracking.

Doesn't the punchline hinge on the above quote from the interviewer being false?

In other words, if the research really did show that testing on spreadsheet desiderata would get you the best recruiters, there would be no joke here.

edit: clarification

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#47

Post by animal531 »

dagw wrote: post #15

On the flip side I recently interviewed for a programming position at a civil engineering company and at no point in the process did anybody ask any questions that would in any way test if I actually knew any of the things I claimed to know. The entire "programming" part of the interview was essentially: "We use quite a bit of python. I see from your CV you've used python". "Oh absolutely, I consider python the langu…

Some of the best places I've worked at were these. They're more concerned about the person/company fit, which has in some cases been shown to be a better indicator of success at the company (than technical skills).

Although if I were interviewing I'd also ask a few basic programming questions to figure out what kind of programmer they are, how good they think they are, the things they've worked on etc.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#48

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jordanpg wrote: post #20

When I read articles like this, I tend to assume that they are exaggerations written by people who feel burned because they didn't get the job they want and that the reason was unfair interview questions. In other words, I simply don't believe that interviewers are, as a group, so stupid that they regularly ask obscure Excel questions when they are plainly not relevant. To continue with the recruiting example, I susp…

I was once interviewing for a fairly generic Java CRUD job, and the interviewer asked me to figure out how to balance a binary search tree. He then interrupted me every minute or so as I was trying to figure out a way to ask me if that was my completed algorithm.

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#49

Post by ryandrake »

mrfusion wrote: post #31
dagw wrote: post #15

On the flip side I recently interviewed for a programming position at a civil engineering company and at no point in the process did anybody ask any questions that would in any way test if I actually knew any of the things I claimed to know. The entire "programming" part of the interview was essentially: "We use quite a bit of python. I see from your CV you've used python". "Oh absolutely, I consider python the langu…

We all deserved to be treated with that kind of dignity. I'm not sure where our industry went wrong. You'd never ask a doctor medical school trivia during an interview.

Further, when I hire someone to fix my roof, I don't make him build me a doghouse first to scrutinize whether he's any good.

On the other hand, if you don't ask at least some basic questions, you risk hiring the Brillant Paula Bean [1].

1: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

Re: If companies interviewed tech recruiters the way they interview programmers

#50

Post by ryandrake »

fecak wrote: post #18

20 year recovering recruiter here (now more focused on providing services to help job seekers). I think at least some of the animosity job seekers have for recruiters is that they may feel recruiters are designing these types of esoteric interview questions and exercises. The overwhelming majority of recruiters are entirely incapable of designing them because they lack the technical skills (myself included). The recr…

Exactly. My interactions with tech recruiters are, by and large, pleasant and effective. There are some bad ones, but most just seem overworked at best, flaky at worst. I don't see recruiters as a major part of the tech interviewing problem. It's not until the point where the recruitment process gets tossed over into to the hiring manager's hands where things go feet-up and I start feeling like a piece of steak being graded.
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