Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#11

Post by dilyevsky » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

All of that sounds like you’re just going to favor people who are slacking at their current work, unemployed or have a ton of free time outside of work to prepare. How is that “leveling the playing field”?

Obviously if you’re google or whatever your process is going to leak anyway so better to tell candidate upfront what to expect (and they do). If you’re smaller/unknown co may as well get genuine reaction rather than choreographed dance. Ofc that doesn’t mean you should expect candidates to have their env already setup that’s just silly.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#12

Post by Dayshine » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 8:40 AM UTC

axegon_ wrote: post #10

Perhaps a bit of an unpopular opinion but as far as interviews go, I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable then seeing their work with them knowing what to expect. You see their ability to adapt and improvise, which is far more valuable then being picky about a particular library or technology. Yes, the quality of their tests will be lower, but that's fine and you can take that into a…

That only works if your task is equally unexpected/unusual for all candidates. If it isn't then either you punish them for being familiar with your stack (as you don't get that valuable knowledge) or you punish them for not being familiar (as you reward a good result).

> you can take that into account

I seriously doubt you can do this in a consistent and fair way.

Whether someone does well in a completely unfamiliar stack is fairly random, so you're almost certainly filtering out excellent candidates who just got unlucky with understanding the IDE.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#13

Post by gozzoo » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 8:40 AM UTC

vinaysshenoy wrote: post #3

catsarebetter wrote: post #2

Just curious, thought of doing something like this for my company too, how long did this take and who did you have to go to to get this approved for public consumption?

We ( https://obvious.in ) documented our entire hiring process on our Playbook ( https://playbook.obvious.in/hiring/hiring-process/engineerin... ). Took us about a week to write everything down the first time and then we continuously updated it until it reached the current state. We had the advantage of being a "public by default" company, so there was no need for approvals of any sort.

> We expect you to use git, commit code as you go along, and build the app iteratively -- just as you would during a normal workday.

This seems a little bit odd to me.

How long do you expect people to work on their home assigments in order for them to commit often? Is it days, or weeks? I don't imagine multiple commits for a 3 hour poject.

For a new project there aren't any well defined states of the code that make sense to be persisted. This means the commits will be arbitrary and their messeages not very meaningful.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#14

Post by incognito_limey » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 8:44 AM UTC

I think an additional piece to this, is to tell candidates what level they are interviewing for and the possible salary ranges, not total package, but actual base salary ranges.

I just went through an interview process with AWS that wasted a lot of time for both sides due to them not being up front about the potential package. I had to push a fair bit to get any info, and finally had to politely tell them if the it's less the X I don't think it makes sense to move forward.

Edit: -----

Additionally, they were unable to explain how after two interviews, what an additional 7 interviews in an onsite capacity would add/build on top of the first two.

It felt like they were just putting me through a gauntlet without really understanding why.

It saves both sides effort if you can make sure you are in general alignment before going too far into the process.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#15

Post by barbegal » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #9

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know! I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energ…

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#16

Post by austhrow743 » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

barbegal wrote: post #15

denzil_correa wrote: post #9

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know! I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energ…

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

I can fake who I am for 3 hours. I'm not sure I could do 7.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#17

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 9:03 AM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #16

barbegal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

I can fake who I am for 3 hours. I'm not sure I could do 7.

[deleted]

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#18

Post by ThePadawan » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 9:05 AM UTC

austhrow743 wrote: post #16

barbegal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any evidence to suggest that more than 3 hours of interviews is actually beneficial? 7 hours of interview seems like overkill. I've never had more than a couple of hours of interview: an hour with the department head and another hour with my future line manager and/or another senior employee.

I can fake who I am for 3 hours. I'm not sure I could do 7.

Your phrasing is such that I can't tell which side you are arguing for.

I love it!

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#19

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #9

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know! I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energ…

>"If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here"

even worse when you think it's really saying "if you can't go without breaks in a 7h day of meetings"

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#20

Post by twic » Wed, Jul 01, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

denzil_correa wrote: post #9

> We will do our best to provide a 15 minute break and/or lunch/coffee break during your interviews, especially if you'll be interviewing for more than 3 hours. That said, we are happy to accommodate additional breaks or fewer breaks, depending on your preferences, just let your recruiter or recruiting coordinator know! I have seen this w/o breaks 5-7 interviews a day, too often. Some candidates suffer from low energ…

When Amazon interviewed me, it was something like 10:00 - 17:00 with no breaks. They didn't tell me that in advance, so i hadn't had a big breakfast.

I actually don't think they did this on purpose. When i mentioned to someone at the end of the day that there was no lunch break, they were surprised. I think it's just that they're such a constitutionally incompetent organisation that things like this will just happen from time to time.