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Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

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Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#81

Post by ivalm »

brailsafe wrote: post #27
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.

Afaik, research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone. I don't have references and don't know if this would translate well to tech interviewing, but I'd wager that the vast majority of a 7h interview day is totally pointless.

This has definitely not been my experience when I do tech interviewing. Lots of people can talk the talk...

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#82

Post by kevsim »

What I'd like to see is the process documented and actually stuck to. Not the content of the interviews, but the actual composition of the process - how many interviews, timelines, etc.

I've been on both ends of terrible recruiting processes. Processes which have gone so slow that good candidates get away, processes with slow follow ups after interviews, processes where candidates are asked to come back in with short notice.

I think documenting and sharing how the process is going to run might cause it to actually run that way. That may be wishful thinking.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#83

Post by molsongolden »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #80
Huggernaut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not hard to understand, but that doesn't do you any favours. I'm not saying that someone needs to be so desperate to work somewhere (that would probably be bad), but if a candidate can't express why they have an interest in a particular role then that's of note, especially if I'm comparing to someone who can. Pretty much everyone wants to exchange their time and knowledge for money, but they could do that an…

I'm not sure what to reply. I was going to be snarky but prefer not to. From their website 'We help people create digital experiences their customers love.' Has anyone been 6, day dreaming in school, 'when I grow up, I want to help people create digital experiences their customers love.'? My interest in the role is it matches my experience and I want money. Again, if you are a FAANG, fine, if you are a startup no one…

This is one approach and way that people feel about work and job hunting but (anecdotally) many others, including myself, do care about things like culture fit and company vision.

Beyond a threshold salary level, these intangible things matter much more than money since I am going to be spending every single day working on these things and with these people. I want to work with skilled technicians but I also want to be in alignment with my team.

I understand the "not changing the world" mindset but motivation is still a hugely important consideration when hiring and when choosing where to work. Every job has bad days/weeks/months and it takes motivation, beyond the paycheck, to hold myself and my team together through those moments.

Similar to your million dollar situation: If you paid high performing knowledge workers a million dollars a month to do soul-crushing stressful grind work in a bad environment, those people are still going to quit after a short period of time.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#84

Post by ivalm »

bradlys wrote: post #77
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " ...interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone... " Without even seeing a single like of code from the candidate? That definitely doesn't translate to tech interviewing. It takes at least 30 minutes to get enough code out of the candidate to form even a first impression.

> It takes at least 30 minutes to get enough code out of the candidate to form even a first impression. Yeah, gonna stop you there. It takes less than 30 seconds to get a first impression. That's the whole point of first impressions. As soon as you see a person, you have a first impression. I've talked to many interviewers - they all agree that they basically have an impression formed within the first few minutes and…

Grandop said

> research suggests that interviewers know after 20 seconds whether they'll hire someone.

That’s not first impression, that’s a meaningful ability to see if I hire someone. I can tell you that without seeing code/discussing some previous experience there is zero chance I can form hiring decision for most reasonable candidate (the only 30 second hiring impression I can form is perhaps a negative one).

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#85

Post by sokoloff »

bradlys wrote: post #78
sokoloff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much of that is like-me bias with the risk that 3 short interviews might get us (even) more homogenous employee populations?

I rarely have encountered an employer that is truly - actively - trying to avoid like-me bias. If they were even remotely successful, your interviews wouldn't almost always be constructed of 3 races... and various teams at orgs wouldn't have such wildly lopsided demographics.

Wouldn’t entire elimination of irrelevant bias mean that teams would have wildly varying demographics?

If I have 16 teams of 4 people each, I should probably expect to find an all female team and an all male team, if we assume that gender has no bearing on individual performance or on team selection and that gender bias was entirely removed, leaving the gender of each team member to a coin flip?

Similarly, I’d expect to find a fair number of teams who all had O+ blood type today, as I think we do not discriminate on that basis.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#86

Post by claudeganon »

pdimitar wrote: post #59
jrockway wrote: post #24

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you shoul…

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad…

The solution is to make companies pay people for their time during interviews, at an hourly rate equivalent to compensation for the position. Everyone else in the interview is getting paid by the company, after all.

Suddenly, managers, hiring committees, and recruiters will stop wasting people’s time and everyone will know what to expect to get paid!

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#87

Post by schoolornot »

pdimitar wrote: post #59
jrockway wrote: post #24

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you shoul…

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad…

Goes both ways. I make a point of working at well-funded tech companies and if a recruiter neglects to raise salary from the get-go I use it to my advantage to make them and the hiring manager squirm as they re-arrange the department budget to pay me an extra 20%+ over the initial offer. As you mentioned, time is money :) and interviewing sucks even more after you find the right candidate.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#88

Post by odshoifsdhfs »

molsongolden wrote: post #83
odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what to reply. I was going to be snarky but prefer not to. From their website 'We help people create digital experiences their customers love.' Has anyone been 6, day dreaming in school, 'when I grow up, I want to help people create digital experiences their customers love.'? My interest in the role is it matches my experience and I want money. Again, if you are a FAANG, fine, if you are a startup no one…

This is one approach and way that people feel about work and job hunting but (anecdotally) many others, including myself, do care about things like culture fit and company vision. Beyond a threshold salary level, these intangible things matter much more than money since I am going to be spending every single day working on these things and with these people. I want to work with skilled technicians but I also want to…

> do care about things like culture fit and company vision.

And you know this from a job post in a job board/website how?

This is what I mean. A no-name company can't say 'we want people to be motivated to work with us' when 99.99% of the world have no clue what they do/how they work.

If you are Uber, or Microsoft, 37 Signals, or even Doctors Without Borders you know in general their motives/how they work (from the 2389472309 blog posts). But 5 employee start ups? Or a consulting firm that does client work for companies you never heard from? Really?

> If you paid high performing knowledge workers a million dollars a month to do soul-crushing stressful grind work in a bad environment, those people are still going to quit after a short period of time

Maybe being from different country shows my bias, but even with a lot of friends in the USA, most don't change jobs for lower paid positions. There is even a term for it: 'Golden Handcuffs'

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#89

Post by slg »

pdimitar wrote: post #59
jrockway wrote: post #24

My general thought is that your compensation scale should be proportional to the complexity of the interview process. If you're going to be copying the FAANG interview process, then the candidate should expect an offer similar to what they'd get from FAANG. In general, I haven't been disappointed on this front, but I fear that many people are. If you want to be super transparent about the interview process, you shoul…

This is strongly misaligned with many companies' incentives so it will never happen, I am afraid. A lot of interviewing processes are kind of like fishing. They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy ("not sure how much time the other companies will waste me, let's take this one on their offer, it's not so bad"). I am glad…

>They hope that if they wasted you 6-10 hours of your time before an actual offer then you'd make a decision based on the sunk cost fallacy

You might be overthinking this. I doubt many companies really have this viewpoint for the simple fact that falling for this is a trait of a bad employee. You don't want to actively select your employees based on their flawed decision making process.

Re: Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

#90

Post by bradlys »

sokoloff wrote: post #85
bradlys wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely have encountered an employer that is truly - actively - trying to avoid like-me bias. If they were even remotely successful, your interviews wouldn't almost always be constructed of 3 races... and various teams at orgs wouldn't have such wildly lopsided demographics.

Wouldn’t entire elimination of irrelevant bias mean that teams would have wildly varying demographics? If I have 16 teams of 4 people each, I should probably expect to find an all female team and an all male team, if we assume that gender has no bearing on individual performance or on team selection and that gender bias was entirely removed, leaving the gender of each team member to a coin flip? Similarly, I’d expect…

Team size is going to be important to note. The teams I'm talking about are frequently near 10 or more members.

As your point becomes more important as the size gets smaller. If it were all teams of 1 then each time would have incredible bias...

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