Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/06/30/tell-candidates-what-to-expect-from-your-job-interviews/

by zdw • 6 years ago

142 158 6 years ago

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?

vinaysshenoy4• 6 years ago

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.

catsarebetter2• 6 years ago

Oh nice, you know it does have an interesting effect on me of making Obvious a more enticing place to apply... Has this improved the quality of interviews and/or applicants?

gozzoo3• 6 years ago

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.

odshoifsdhfs3• 6 years ago

Can I honestly ask what is the point of this question:

Why do you want to be at Obvious?

I never understood this. Unless you are Apple or Google or some other big brand, most likely people found your job through a job forum or even HN and never heard of you before. Then most likely the answer is money. So what is the point?

I just stopped filling up job applications that have this. Seems so counter productive. Heck, I was approached by a CTO of a Ycombinator company a while ago, he found my resume somewhere, asked me if I would be interested in the position, then redirected me to a form where 2-3 questions was about why I wanted to work with them, and what I would bring to their team. I want money, and in exchange I give you my time and knowledge. Is that so hard to understand?

hardwaregeek• 6 years ago

Also get feedback from candidates, especially rejected ones. The people who get offers will assume that the process works, since it validates their self-worth. Even if the process is very stupid. I've had processes that were so so bad from top companies. Like "here's a repo, clone it, write a program that will be judged by automated tests that you can't see". I had to basically guess what the tests were going to do, which turns the coding challenge into a game of luck.

I'd love to do away with coding screens in general. I glanced at the doc for Stripe and it looks great. I'd have loved to read this doc, but the last time I applied to Stripe I got a HackerRank followed by an auto-rejection. I get why coding screens exist, but it's so annoying to be batted away because I failed blind automated tests.

xen0• 6 years ago

I think it can only be fair to ask for feedback from a rejected candidate if you (the potential employer) are willing to give feedback yourself, which is rarely the case, especially from larger companies.

warent2• 6 years ago

This might be what you'd think intuitively. I've conducted ~500 technical interviews, and in my experience candidates who are obvious DNP (do not pursue) often times really do not want your feedback or do not care about it, either because they think they're smarter than the whole process, or they're too busy turning inward to deal with an emotional breakdown. But those very candidates are the ones who are likely to leave the feedback!

tl;dr candidates are happy to give feedback whether or not you provide any yourself.

EDIT: I agree with you though. An interviewer should be ready and willing to provide feedback if the candidate signals that it would be welcome.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

It would feel a little awkward for me to ask for someone to do work for me after I've determined that they're not a good fit for the company. And if it's post-interview pre-result then the problem is that they'll feel pressured to be positive.

Perhaps if it were a third party.

_hardwaregeek2• 6 years ago

Agreed that it's tricky, but there needs to be some feedback loop. Otherwise you end up with seriously broken processes that never get fixed. Companies tend to care about false positives more than false negatives, but there's a decent possibility that some companies have an extremely high false negative rate.

alimw• 6 years ago

I am hardly a fan of excessive language policing, but this phrase "a good fit" bugs me. Is it common currency? To keep asking among yourselves "is this person a good fit?" seems unlikely to encourage the sort of objective assessment of a person's usefulness and talent that you'd want for your company's sake and also to stay within the law.

jrockway3• 6 years ago

I think it's instructive to look at this from the other side to see why these processes exist. At my last job, I wanted to hire a frontend engineer with some experience beyond tweaking HTML and CSS (we used gRPC/Web and Typescript, so some actual programming experience was going to make them pretty productive, and that's what I was looking for).

Anyway, I wrote up a req and posted it to the usual career sites, and within a day, I had 500 resumes to review. About 490 of these had no real-world programming experience. They were all candidates from "boot camps", that, as far as I can tell, copied some example code into their GitHub and called it a day. (They listed each example project as "work experience", and many of the candidates had bit-for-bit identical repositories in their GitHub.) I would have been fooled if I had only seen one of these, but when you see hundreds of them all on the same day, you realize that investing in each candidate isn't possible. Even a 30 minute phone call to each candidate would have cost me an entire month of 8 hour workdays. Even a cursory review ("maybe this person actually did something other than the boot camp, let's look through GitHub") was excessively time-consuming. Even an email along the lines of, "sorry, we're looking for 5 years of experience for this senior position", is expensive.

So at that point, you have to somehow shift the cost onto candidates. It costs nothing to spam your resume to hundreds of companies, and I have no doubts that the bootcamps automate this process to some extent. That is why online coding tests exist. You have so many candidates in the pipeline that missing one good person is a cost that's acceptable for having to spend 30 minutes with someone that probably can't actually program. Is it impersonal? Yes. Does it suck for someone to be in limbo for forever because you are too lazy to write them an email saying "we're not moving forward with the process." Yes. But the submitting-resumes process scaled and was automated much more efficiently than the reviewing process. It's kind of like spam filtering now. (I get a ton of emails in my spam folder from people from HN that are email-blasting everyone on HN their projects. I get a ton of emails in my spam folder from people in open-source Slack channels that I read along the same lines. Is it unfortunate that I can't read and respond to every one of these emails? Yes. Does it suck that their "hustle" got detected by some machine-learning algorithm that has permanently blacklisted their company. Yes. But that is life -- attention is limited, a for loop that sends email isn't. So something has to give.)

I realize that it's confusing to say "we can't hire any engineers!" and at the same time throw 500 resumes into the trash can. But a resume is not equal to a hirable engineer. Anyone can make a resume. And, attracted to the high salaries of the software engineering field, many people do!

Anyway, I don't know what other fields are like, but I feel like the programming world is unique. You don't need extensive background -- university, internships, prior work experience. You can buy yourself a Python book and teach yourself everything you need to work at Google all by yourself. As a result, there are a lot of people that think they've taught themselves everything they need to work at Google all by themselves, but in fact can't actually do the job. As a hiring manager, your job is to filter the wheat from the chaff, and there is one grain of wheat in every ton of chaff. It's hard, and you're going to miss something. But, that is the world we built for ourselves. In other fields, there are other bodies in place that handle the filtering ("what's your Professional Engineer license number?"), but not in ours. As a result, the hiring process isn't as good.

I think we could do better, and I do appreciate people that I've emailed and wrote back "the process is over". But even that is hard to scale.

Internships seem super valuable to me. When I was at Google I had an intern every summer, and I basically dedicated my summer to teaching them everything they needed to know to be successful at Google or another big software company. Obviously, Google was 100% happy about this; I would go to weekly team meetings, say "all I did last week was spend days with $INTERN figuring out how to adjust build options for this new target" and the response was not "wow, you're lazy, get back to work" but "great!". Not every company can support that, though, which is why they're looking for people with experience. They want to pay money for getting work done, not pay money to have a senior engineer do no work for 3 months with the hope of someday having someone who can get things done by themselves. Again, it sucks, but that's how it is. Job training is EXPENSIVE. You can't always expect to get it for free. (That's why colleges exist, not that I think they do a great job.)

TL;DR: Practicing those coding challenges and how to write A* on the whiteboard is going to send a strong signal to companies that you're worth their time. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." You have to ask yourself, do you want a job, or do you want to change the world. Changing the world is going to be a lot harder. Kind of sucks, but that's life.

fogetti• 6 years ago

I am sorry but this tells me exactly one thing: that you don't know how to write a job description.

If you have written your job description tailored to the ideal candidate you would have had a smaller candidate pool and a better match to the actual job.

pdimitar14• 6 years ago

You have so many candidates in the pipeline that missing one good person is a cost that's acceptable for having to spend 30 minutes with someone that probably can't actually program.

VERY debatable. I've chatted with dozens of HR and CTO people during the last 4 months of interviewing and looking for a job. They all complain "there are no good candidates". Without exception. (And I know you addressed that one paragraph below this quote.)

You're not wrong that selecting good candidates is extremely hard. I know it is. But the companies have to find a way to do better. I know many examples of world-class programmers being passed on by employers who, if they actually paid attention, would kill for them (and often times they contacted them anywhere from 6 to 18 months later, only to be predictably laughed out by the now-happily-employed person).

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

That is why online coding tests exist.

Actually, it's why other high-salary professions have professional licensing and advanced degree requirements.

jameshush2• 6 years ago

I 100% agree. I used to be in the boat of "I shouldn't have to study to pass a job interview" when I was younger.

Now that I'm older and I've interviewed a lot of people too, I realize sometimes life is un-fun and kinda sucks but you gotta do what you gotta do. There's a strong co-relation between people who spend two hours a night for three months studying algorithm questions and people who are willing to spend 8 hours a day debugging un-fun code. Which, more often than not, is what I need my team mates to do.

I work in AdTech. It's not particularly sexy. We don't have particularly sexy projects but we do have a large (millions of users per day) scale. A lot of our projects just require a engineer who has base level of experience plus a positive attitude and a slightly above average level of responsibility because we have to avoid outages. I need people to do work that is oftentimes not particularly fun but particularly important and revenue driving. My best filter, apart from actually having worked with the person for years beforehand, is asking a low-ball JavaScript "can you debug this asynchronous JavaScript" question.

So while the current system is frustrating, until we can figure out a best solution, unfortunately you just gotta play the game how the rules are laid out now.

_hardwaregeek2• 6 years ago

I agree and sympathize with what you're saying. Coding screens are a necessary evil. But perhaps they can be omitted in certain situations. I know I completed the Google foobar challenge far enough to alert a recruiter, only for the recruiter to send me a snapshot test. Like c'mon, I just solved a whole slew of harder problems than this.

I wonder if companies like TripleByte are actually successful in solving this issue. I've avoided them because I'm skeptical of recruiting companies, but it might be a good idea to have people take one coding screen and have it apply to multiple companies.

denzil_correa• 6 years ago

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 energy at the (n-1)th interview. The interviewer is baffled and gives a slightly negative feedback. The reason for the interviewee's interaction is not the skill of the interviewer.

So, in short - please keep breaks. You should have a 1h (min.) dedicated lunch break if you have a long 1-day interview. In additional, you should schedule 15m breaks in the morning and afternoon session to let the candidate recuperate. Finally, please ask your interviewers to look through the candidate schedule. Take into account that they have had many interviews, do your bit to make them comfortable. Also, please do not spin this as "If you can't go without breaks in a 7h day, you are not good enough to work here". Kindness, empathy helps and makes you a better employer.

barbegal• 6 years ago

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.

austhrow743• 6 years ago

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

brailsafe4• 6 years ago

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.

kamaal• 6 years ago

>7 hours of interview seems like overkill.

There are companies that do this plus a bar raiser round. Some times two bar raiser rounds.

9 rounds is quite common in FAANGs.

There is also this condition that even single negative feed back after 9 hours of interviews. Like a 10 minute bad session in a 9 hour game disqualifies you. Like 8:50 of blazingly awesome performance is considered a waste even if the feed back was slightly negative in a 10 minute section.

This is basically a circus performance.

bryanrasmussen• 6 years ago

"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"

csunbird2• 6 years ago

It is even worse when it is legally required for employer to allow for an hour break after every 4 working hours.

Edit: It is at least where I live. (EU)

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

in a 7h day of meetings

While still being expected to produce 10+ hours/day worth of software development.

twic6• 6 years ago

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.

AtlasBarfed2• 6 years ago

Amazon just showed you it doesn't care about its people in the least.

That is accurate based on the 10 people I've known that have worked there.

bleah1000• 6 years ago

I think the problem is that even with breaks, you can still be mentally exhausted by the last interview or two. For a normal work day, I wouldn't expect people to switch between writing completely different algorithms and problems so often. In a day of interviews, switching to a new problem five or six times can be exhausting.

Make sure your interview process isn't stacking too many in a row, or the signal from the last few is going to be pretty bad.

axegon_2• 6 years ago

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 account when you are checking them and you can check the test along with the candidates and ask additional questions which will steer them in the right direction, which ultimately will give you more insights about their thought process. Imo, their thought process is arguably the most valuable factor.

Also the most valuable question you can ask as a part of the non-technical interview: "So do you have any questions for us"? If the answer is "no", you are not looking at a good candidate.

Dayshine4• 6 years ago

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.

ConsiderCrying• 6 years ago

I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable then seeing their work with them knowing what to expect

But why? The odds of them facing unexpected tasks on the job aren't that high, they have their job description, they have their set of skills, you delegate tasks based on that. It's not like there are curveballs coming every week where they have to upend their knowledge and strategies. It might be good to see how they act under pressure but seeing the person comfortable and putting in their best work helps evaluate how beneficial they will be to the company.

brailsafe4• 6 years ago

Imo, most of most jobs come down to how well you can tolerate doing what is basically intellectual grunt work while people interrupt your attention. As an IC, things are much more boring than ridiculous interview processes would have you believe.

twic6• 6 years ago

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.

I agree that you want to see someone thinking on their feet and tackling a new problem. But you can get that without making the whole interview a mystery. I can tell you "we will be giving you some C# code with concurrency bugs and asking you to find them", and it's still going to be a challenge when i do.

I have recently been doing interviews where we talk to candidates about past projects they've worked on, and ask them to go through some of the technical decisions they made. We don't warn them ahead of time that we're going to do this. Often, candidates have interesting projects they did a few years ago, and they just don't remember them in enough detail to go through them with us. This tells us nothing useful about the candidate. I think the interview would be far more useful if we had prompted them to revise their old projects, and i don't think this would generate false positives, because we can still distinguish bullshit from actual understanding (although of course i think that!).

Also the most valuable question you can ask as a part of the non-technical interview: "So do you have any questions for us"? If the answer is "no", you are not looking at a good candidate.

I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart?

axegon_2• 6 years ago

I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart?

Not at all. The lack of questions shows a lack of interest. In every test I've ever prepared I've deliberately left one or two questions which are near impossible to answer and no one has ever been able to correctly answer them so far. The least you can do is ask about those. Or what does the release cycle look like or how is the development being tracked - literally anything, just to indicate that you genuinely are interested and not "I simply want this job".

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart?

If a senior engineer, at no part of the process, asks questions about the company, I would question that. To be clear, my experience is exclusively startups, but everyone I know would be very discerning about where they're going to be working for the next x years (x ≥ 2) and that's a long time with great opportunity cost. I'd be using every part of the interview that I can to extract information about how the company is run, who makes what decisions, and how long it takes to get a trivial feature out (mean-time-to-copy-change haha).

If they don't ask, then they either already know (which can only mean they're familiar with someone on the inside or someone who left on good terms, both of which are worth mentioning) or they don't know at all and don't care.

pdimitar14• 6 years ago

I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart?

I recently got told by the VP of Engineering of the company I am now undergoing onboarding with, that if a senior programmer asks no questions about how the company['s teams] work and doesn't have any requirements, that to him sends the message they are desperate and don't know their value.

Other people told me that not asking anything means that the interviewee is not proactive.

pm215• 6 years ago

The main thing "did the candidate have any questions for us yes/no?" tells you is "has the candidate read the usual 'how to prepare for interviews' guides where this is noted as a very common question for which the candidate should spend a little time in advance thinking of one or two good questions to ask". I guess that's a little bit of signal about their ability to prep for interviews but you probably are getting enough "does candidate know how to play the job-interview game" signal already...

collyw5• 6 years ago

I am not sure I agree on the have you got any questions for us. Interviewing is a strange process. I find it quite difficult from being sociable friendly, coming up with decent answers then jumping into some kind of coding question, as it engages different parts of your brain. After you have done that coming up with questions for the interviewers is something different again. I can see why many people wouldn't have anything unless it was prepared. The interview process should be fairly two way anyway, so I ask as I am being interviewed, so often any questions I have are answered already.

If other people find thay have this problem have a couple of canned questions ready. Ask how much of a mess their code base is on a scale of 1 - 10.

NumberCruncher• 6 years ago

I think that seeing how someone reacts unprepared is a lot more valuable

I share your unpopular opinion, because the truth is generally told between the lines. At my last job I was the only one excluded from interviewing new candidates, because I am silly enough to throw ad-hoc technical questions into the discussion. My colleges managed to hire really nice people lacking basic technical skills, e.g. data analyst with 17 years of experience not knowing how to make a left join or a sub-select or PHDs not knowing what python or even a "programming language" is. We had some "fun", I can tell.

And this goes both ways. I remember as an "unprepared" candidate facing the ad-hoc question "how would you deal with time series data". Through well placed questions I figured out that they have - after removing the obvious seasonal effects - only 5 data point. After my answer "I wouldn't even fit a regression line on it" the interviewer said "no one here does time series analysis, not even I" and left the room with some made up excuse. Or when the interviewer was bragging about "valuing work-life balance and having a lower churn rate than the industry average" and I figured out he is with the company since 9 months. He was just smiling and left the room with some made up excuse.

Basic rule for hiring: don't let fool yourself AND don't try to fool others.

dilyevsky2• 6 years ago

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.

greggyb4• 6 years ago

I disagree. I've interviewed an abnormal amount: roughly every 8 months since getting my first job, and for more than one job at a time.[0]

Based on my experience, the best interviews have been the ones with the most detail shared up-front. When I say best, I don't just mean my own performance has been best, but I also feel that the interviewer has been most satisfied and that they have learned what they meant to learn.

The reasons for this are several-fold. In order to prepare a candidate well, there must be a well-structured interview process. This means that each interview should have some explicit goals - information about the candidate which the interviewer intends to elicit.

It is painful for everyone and a waste of time for the goal of an interview to be unclear to one party (and many times so if the goal is unclear to both). My favorite interviews have been at several FAANGs, which were highly structured. I knew up front what the interviewers would be looking for in broad strokes, and how the interviews would be structured to elicit that information. I knew how technical acumen would be ascertained.

I much prefer this over walking into a room with no idea what will happen. I do very well in those interviews as well, as I have spent much of my career in professional services, where part of my job description is to be always ready to project competence and to rapidly build rapport with new clients and potential clients. I also have much experience in interviewing to lean upon. Nevertheless, this is still a worse interview process, as I have to spend time figuring out what the interviewer needs to learn.

You may object that a good interviewer should be able to guide the interviewee. This is correct on the face of things. However, any people are bad interviewers, because there is rarely much training or prep for them. I have had plenty of successful interviews where I have had to lead the interviewer, rather than the other way around.

Additionally, there are very few jobs where job requirements include being quick on your feet and being able to rapidly (aka within an hour or so) ascertain what someone needs and how to give it to them. If you are looking to fill such a position, no-prep "genuine reaction" interviews might be a good fit. If, on the other hand, the position requires analytical thought and deliberation over periods of time greater than an hour (or whatever the length of your interview is), then such a no-prep interview seems a poor method to learn whether the interviewee has the skills you are looking for.

All this said, I do not like interview processes that have large homework requirements. It is one thing to inform the candidate of the structure and broad content of the interview, but another thing entirely to request that they do extensive work. My most extensive interview prep (excluding homework assignments) has never been more than a few hours, even for FAANG interviews with much structure and lots of prep materials shared by the company. If you can't find a few hours to prep for interviews, you're probably not taking them very seriously. And if you can't fit two or three hours of prep into a period of one to two weeks, then you've got bigger problems in your life.

[0] Note I haven't changed jobs this frequently, but I've always kept an eye out for interesting opportunities. I would interview companies to see if I like them or their job offer. I would frequently bail out early if it didn't seem like a good fit. Some I went for offers and used that to negotiate. Some I went for offers just to learn what comp packages look like. Some I went for offers to get the job.

dilyevsky2• 6 years ago

I don’t really understand how few hours of prep work can correct for crappy interviewer. Also not talking about few hours - people spend months grinding leetcode and if you don’t you’ll be at disadvantage

pdimitar14• 6 years ago

All this said, I do not like interview processes that have large homework requirements.

Wish I could just outright refuse those but between 4 months of looking for a job (I was looking in a rather niche zone) plus the pandemic draining my savings 5-7 months before they were supposed to run out, I really had to work a lot for free...

Lessons learned, and I completely agree with your post.

incognito_limey2• 6 years ago

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.

michaelt• 6 years ago

A lot of people say "never be the first to give a number" (which might be wise if you aren't confident you have a good idea of your market value) but I've always found it useful to just give recruiters a salary requirement figure upfront.

After all, I know $X is what it will take for me to move enthusiastically and see it as good for my career trajectory, so if $X is over their salary range being coy about what I want just wastes my time.

twic6• 6 years ago

I think that "never be the first to give a number" advice is good if you want to maximise your income. If you want to minimise your drudgery, name a number as soon as possible.

collyw5• 6 years ago

I agree. I am at the higher end of the payscale where I live (Spain so overall pretty poor salaries). Most jobs will be offering around average salaries, so it's saves me time to state up front what i expect.

twic6• 6 years ago

not total package, but actual base salary ranges

Why base salary rather than total comp?

incognito_limey2• 6 years ago

Because I've experienced a lot of number fiddling to describe total comp. For example we offer you X equity at Y valuation, when the valuation is something they have made up internally etc. I want to know how much cash in hand I can expect. Also, offering private health insurance, when you live in a country with a decent public health care system is not much of benefit and generally not worth what the company says its worth. If it was the US, I could see how that would be valuable, but in most of Europe, it is not.

jrockway3• 6 years ago

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 should probably define what compensation range you're going to offer and realize that some candidates will simply never contact you. Saves everyone time.

pdimitar14• 6 years ago

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 that your experience has been positive but as you correctly intuited yourself, many others' experiences are very far from it.

(To clarify, the employer I started onboarding with is nothing like that; I am talking about all the others that I talked with before I stumbled upon them.)

claudeganon• 6 years ago

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!

schoolornot• 6 years ago

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.

slg2• 6 years ago

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.

lmilcin2• 6 years ago

I conduct interviews with candidates almost every other day.

Believe me, interviewing is a huge cost for the company and nobody wants to organize interview to "fish" for the candidates.

We have screening process to remove candidates that don't have chance passing next stage so that we can spend more time with candidates that pass screening.

It is really difficult to figure out if you want to work with somebody after 1.5-2h discussion.

For 2 hour interview I must fit following things:

* Spend 5 minutes getting everything to order, bringing water, solving connection problems etc.

* Spend couple minutes introducing myself, who we are and what we are doing

* Spend couple more minutes trying to calm the candidate, break the tension. People react very differently to stressful situation and we would really want to get the candidate little bit more calm to level the field (we don't want just the people that deal well with stress).

* Ask couple technical questions from various areas. I can understate how difficult is to gauge candidates knowledge and experience from 30m of technical questions

* Give a coding task. I can't tell how many time we had a candidate that was able to answer questions quite well but was unable to organize process to write simple piece of code. It is when the candidate is solving the task when we learn for example if the candidate can react to hints or how it feels to have a discussion on a technical problem. This typically takes 0,5h to 1h

* Have a discussion on the candidate experience, past projects, what was his/her involvement, etc.

* Let the candidate ask his/her own question about our project.

* Spend couple of minutes to close the discussion on a good tone regardless of how the candidate fared.

Our HR does not like us to extend the discussion over 2h supposedly because it "scares" candidates but you have to understand, it is very difficult to do all of this and get to know the candidate in such a short time. I can totally understand somebody wanting to spend couple more hours with a candidate that shows really good promise.

Hiring a bad employee is a huge cost and totally worth spending couple more hours trying to ensure this person does not have "dealbreaking" faults.

You would not believe what kind of things I met in my past. Candidates who passed technical questions really well just to start googling solution to our coding task? Candidates we give the same critical hint 5 times and each time he/she tells me that's not right and dismissed to go continue with his/her faulty line of reasoning?

awithrow• 6 years ago

This is a big reason why I talk compensation up front during initial conversations. I'm not sinking hours of time into an interview process only to find out they're only offering less than half of what I'm expecting. Plenty of recruiters say no they don't discuss this up front at which point I'm fine not continuing the conversation.

tschwimmer2• 6 years ago

I’ve actually found that there’s an inverse correlation: companies with worse comp seem to have more rounds, more take home and harder questions. The confounding variable is that the lower comp companies tend to be startups.

Nasrudith2• 6 years ago

Also confounding is that start ups usually offer equity which is an unknown variable. Financial planning-wise it is geneally best to assume it is worth nothing but there is a small chance that it will utterly outstrip the certain compensation.

bootlooped• 6 years ago

I don't think many companies will be able to come to terms with not being able to hire FAANG-level engineers if they can't offer FAANG-level compensation. I can't remember where I once read the quip, "we only hire the best, and so does everybody else".

swarnie_• 6 years ago

I've just finished this maddening process for the 4th time in my "career" and it was as frustrating as i remember.

To all potential employers and recruiters: When a candidate asks you for the agenda or some indication to the structure a meeting will take its because they want to be prepared. They aren't trying to "cheat", they want to be as productive as possible. Unless your company operates some insane work methodology where preparation for any task is strictly forbidden i don't understand why you wouldn't give them this info.

Twice in my last round of interviewing additional people where added to the call with short or no notice. These people where obviously experts in their technical niches so expecting me to preform well in a 30 minute grilling unprepared seemed unreasonable.

sokoloff4• 6 years ago

My experience is that when obvious experts in niches are added late to an interview loop, that’s almost always a positive sign for the candidate. Those people are generally busy and aren’t on the “everyday candidate” loop typically.

tumetab1• 6 years ago

For some reason developers seem to assume that the recruiting process is immune to the regular company dysfunctions.

If they scheduled an interview without an agenda is because it's the norm to do that within the company when talking with outsiders. If someone jumps in to a call, it's their practice to have surprise guests within meetings. If someone ask you subject matter expert questions, it's how the company sees developers, as subject matter experts.

So, you were interviewing to a company which views, my guess, developers as subject matter experts, has people jump in into calls and doesn't prepare specific calls.

andrewstuart2• 6 years ago

It's a pity job interviews aren't generally better run.

I'm tempted to run the job interview myself and instruct them on how to properly assess and interview developers, and then go ahead and interview myself for the role with them watching on.

But of course the outcome of that would be a rejection for insubordination - "not a team player".

You can't win so you just have to shut up and hope that some random series of events will get you a job.

robjan• 6 years ago

I usually ask for feedback on the interview process from the candidate. Not sure how common this is.

andrewstuart2• 6 years ago

The psychology of recruiting is that once a candidate is rejected, the interviewers and company have lost any sense that the potential employee is competent and their opinions at that point are of little value.

I'm yet to encounter a company that thinks their interview process is anything but awesome. Companies really aren't interested in feedback. This is human nature - pretty much anyone, when given "feedback", it is taken as criticism and the status quo is defended and the feedback disregarded.

Companies who say they want feedback I think like the idea of asking for feedback but not acting on it or internalising it.

If a candidate was not good enough for a job with a company, why would they be qualified to advise that company on how to improve?

Don't believe me? Run an experiment - next time a candidate is rejected, ask them to give feedback to other members of your team, and in the unlikely event you get considered feedback, observe what happens to that feedback - don't intervene - just do the experiment to see whether the above assertions are correct or not.

collyw5• 6 years ago

You are more likely to get ghosted after wasting hours on a technical "challenge" than asked for feedback in my experience.

davidhyde• 6 years ago

Great article but I also really liked the website. Fast and simple but still aesthetically pleasing. It's got that charm of being hand written. Love it.

anjc• 6 years ago

We used to apply a ‘Sunday Test’: “If this person were alone at the office on a Sunday, would that make us want to come in just to hang out with them?”. However, this was the wrong phrasing for the idea we really cared about (we don’t encourage people to work Sundays, and we want people who would make excellent coworkers rather than be our personal friends). Instead, we now ask: “Is this someone we’d actively seek to work with”

I'd love if this requirement were explicable and quantifiable. Two people can each be nice and kind, but not get along for whatever reason. When a hiring process can include face to face meetings with 10+ people, the chances of a suitable candidate being excluded for an arbitrary 'personal' reason seem high.

What's the point in many stringent evaluation criteria if, at the end of it, all interviewers then have to agree that they can be besties with a random person. It's too fuzzy.

kevsim• 6 years ago

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.

azhenley• 6 years ago

A recent research paper looked at traditional coding interviews versus "private" interviews. One of the authors summarized the paper in a blog post [1].

[1] The case for the private technical interview. https://medium.com/@gameweld/the-case-for-the-private-techni...

pm246012• 6 years ago

How about telling candidates why they were rejected?

stronglikedan• 6 years ago

I presume it's a liability thing. It only takes one candidate to "spin" an otherwise valid reason into something they can sue for. Same reason why companies don't tell employees what they're being let go for in at-will states.

pm246012• 6 years ago

That is not true. GDPR specifically requires that interview notes be available to the candidate

greggyb4• 6 years ago

I've had some surprisingly good feedback experiences in recent interviews.

One was at a 40,000-employee global tech professional services firm. I got feedback from each interviewer filtered through the recruiter at each step along the way, sharing both positive and negative. This process ended in an offer I didn't accept.

Another recent interview process at a FAANG ended in a rejection. The recruiter followed up with me and informed me which interviews were considered a pass and which were a fail. Each interview had several components, and the recruiter was able to tell me which components were the cause of failure in the one interview, and what to focus on in any future applications to the company.

raghava4• 6 years ago

IMO, if a company is very serious about hiring for the role, they must offer a 1 week trial period (PAID!). The candidates get a fair idea about the kinda muck they might be getting themselves into. The team(s) get an idea as to what kinda schmuck they get to deal with over next months.

It's too easy to fake "expertise" and "culture fit" over a 2/3/4/5 round interview each lasting an hour or so.

Most companies who deem this mode as not an option, simply aren't looking for great experts or engineers, but rather a cog in the grand system of wheels to keep the show running - or what HRs end up calling - a resource!

Solution: What can engineers do for this problem?

1. Propose this option (1 week PAID work trial) to HRs 2. Keep a backlog of technically engaging, but smaller work-items which could be taken up with least amount of background-knowledge , or something that has an easy-ramp-up-path for a newbie in the realm 3. Iterate and improve

This is just an extremely condensed internship of sorts. And many firms understand the value of intern-to-hire path.

XargonEnder4• 6 years ago

I like it except for one problem. I never leave a job unless I have a job. Seems too risky to jump ship from a good job where you're under paid to get a chance at a little more money.

raghava4• 6 years ago

I never leave a job unless I have a job.

This is actually solved by this approach. Nobody needs to quit, a week's leave/vacation is good enough for the trial period. Or, am I missing anything?

Tell candidates what to expect from your job interviews

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