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My weirdest experience is still the one where 6 people in a room have me go through my entire education starting with grade school. For a senior SWE role. Even the body shop recruiter was agast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every job/client I've acquired has been a 10-15min informal chat with a stakeholder and a technical peer, and then an offer. I don't really see the value in going through hiring gauntlets and opt out of any process that looks like it might waste time like that.
Interviews are for weeding out poor candidates; what you have left are the good ones. Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats.
You do realize you’re replying to a comment showing it _is_ possible right?
There's really only one set of personality traits (The Big 5) that has a strong scientific backing. Of those only being high in conscientiousness is a signal for being a good employee. Employers screen for that all the time via proxy, such as having a college degree. They don't need to test for it directly. There are however many not-big-5 popular personality tests that are sold to companies. I don't want to call out any specific one, but you should be highly skeptical of their validity.
At best these tests are management by covering your ass. At worst these tests are actively filtering against populations that it is illegal to filter for. For example, the IQ test was once given as part of the immigration process for the United States. Considering that the tests were administered in English they were mostly used as legal justification to turn away non-English speakers.
Glad to see feedback from real users. My company was pitched by Paradox [1] to use their chatbot and this bizarre questionnaire to hire SW. Their solution target mostly McDonalds workers and other bluecollar, where I believe it's "okeish to put human beings thru the mud first". They claim [2] there is science behind it, but me and my partner's feedback was it will never work for IT workers. [1] - https://www.traitify…
Personality tests in my opinion are what happens when companies want ever more certainty that they are hiring the right person.
I don’t think they’re helpful, and throw a spanner in the works of the hiring process.
I once had a SW interview with a job that had a 2-hour long personality test. No tech questions. Just random questions to test my personality. It started out simple, like 'what was the last book you read' to more in-depth situations that had nothing to do with the job. The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on management' and wanted…
This has been my experience as well. The more hoops a company made me jump through the less they were offering to begin with, and the culture was not great. My last gig was great in that aspect. My client found my LinkedIn, we had a quick 15 minute call to discuss the project and I was working for them the next day.
Might not work in all cases, but really, if you're trying to sniff out a pretender vs someone who can write software, would not having a heavily technical conversation about details, challenges and other things not make it clearly evident after 15-30-45 minutes if this person is who you need? Rest of the time can be spent napkin designing something or peer programming to check off those to be sure.
I had a interview in 2021 where I had to do a 1.5 hour timed exercise, that apparently isn't sufficient, so their interview pipeline has 3x1hour additional live coding sessions with engineers. Over 4 hours of coding just to prove I can write code up to their standards. Then another 3+ hours of behavioral interviews, meeting the team. Multiply that by the ~5 candidates you interview per position multiplied by each position you hire for in a given year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interviews are for weeding out poor candidates; what you have left are the good ones. Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats.
> Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats. You do realize you’re replying to a comment showing it _is_ possible right?
Take the fourth image, of the person (or two people) with two emotions on the couch. How are you supposed to identify if that image as a whole is "me" or not? I would be baffled at how to respond to that. Some of the images I can kind of understand (watching TV while you have laundry to fold? LAZY!), but how am I supposed to respond to "generic image of puzzle"?