Ask HN: Need for better technical interviewing tools?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830367

by timsegraves • 13 years ago

7 11 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

So I've been doing development for about 12 years and have been an active member of the hiring process for at least half of those at various companies. It's always been a mix of random tools we use from Google Docs, to Collabedit, to Evernote, etc. I got frustrated a couple months ago and started building something I thought would work better.

I have an MVP about ready to start letting a few people test out but I thought I'd open up the idea to the Eye of Mordor (different HN thread) and see what people thought. Are there things I'm missing? Is the idea just dumb? Is there another option out there I couldn't find?

I put up a little splash page you can find below with some screenshots of what I have and the basic idea I'm going for. Feel free to ask questions, suggest ideas, throw rocks. Thanks.

http://interviewsy.com

manish_lnmiit• 13 years ago

personally I am also the part of hiring process. and same level of frustration I got as you got while interviewing them. I think its a good idea what you going to do and I totally suport it. There must be a common platform for each applicant where all the corporate information is available there, where any one can host the interview, call for interview, scheduling of interview and many more things can be handled there.

timsegraves5• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback manish. I think there a lot of ways the process could be improved and could see this going a few different ways. I'm trying to focus on the most painful parts for developers doing the interviewing initially. I know what's painful for me but am looking to hear what others find painful about the process.

staunch• 13 years ago

There's a lot of friction to getting people to use new tools to manage the entire process. It could be quite profitable, but it probably requires someone who's really good at selling to companies.

The low hanging fruit I see is for standardizing part of the interview process. If you ask every candidate the same 20 questions, and then rate their responses on a scale from 1-10, you get a really nice and somewhat objective measurement.

It's just one signal, it doesn't solve the whole problem, but it's something every company should probably do every time. HR loves it because it's documentation (for any potential discrimination lawsuits). In fact, that could be half your sales pitch. Sell it to HR as a tool to protect the company legally and to hiring managers as a way to more objectively measure candidates.

It could be useful for phone screens or in-person interviews. Provide lots of pre-made questions for each job type, but let people customize them. Maybe have each interviewer rate the candidate separately on the same questions, so you can make it even more objective.

timsegraves5• 13 years ago

Thanks staunch, that's great feedback. I think you're totally right that getting the entire process replace would be tough. I like the idea of an objective measurement score. It wouldn't be everything but could help out deciding between a couple candidates that were otherwise equal.

mariusz331• 13 years ago

at the angelhack last weekend, my partner created streetcodr.com. it was well accepted and seemed like a cool way to code.

timsegraves5• 13 years ago

Nice, that's an interesting idea. Couldn't really play with it since there were no opponents but I think I get the gist of it.

omnisci• 13 years ago

Just to bump this, I was at angelhack and saw the demo for streetcodr, it was awesome! I could totally see this being a useful tool for interviewing. Congrats on an awesome app guys Keith @omniscience

tptacek• 13 years ago

I run hiring for Matasano, which is one of the hiring-est companies (in its size tier, I guess) on HN. We've looked at a couple tools like this and none of them have kept us too engaged.

A feature idea for you: when you do the scheduling, have contact information for all the interviewers enrolled in the system, and the candidate, and (optionally) SMS them 15 minutes in advance of the interview.

timsegraves5• 13 years ago

Yeah, the reminder scheduling piece is definitely a challenge. I think the site will need to maintain that and do notifications, but I feel like to do it right I'll need to integrate with as many calendar providers as possible to make sure I'm not scheduling over someone's meeting. I have the Google calendar part about done but that probably covers less than half of small tech companies out there.

ScottWhigham• 13 years ago

http://interviewsy.com/

I like the board layout and how you pull the social info. But I don't understand focusing on "technical interviews" - that's just illogical to me. A typical 100+ person company's technical interviews happen much less frequently than their non-technical interviews, don't they? Maybe that's not clear - in other words, for your typical company that has technical employees, don't those same companies also need to hire non-technical employees as well? Of course they do. So... if I, the hiring person, use your tool for the technical interviews, what tool do I use for the non-technical interviews? If the answer is, "Uhhhh..." or "A different site", then that's it - I won't use you. I don't want to have to use multiple sites/tools during hiring; I want to either use one site or no sites.

Here's an idea - maybe you open up the board layout/social part for all interviewees, and make the coding/testing aspects an in-site purchase/option? I don't know - it's your business and all - but it seems to me that people will pay a premium for those extra features:

* Coding tests

* Intelligence testing

* Custom Q&A with grading (like @staunch said)

timsegraves5• 13 years ago

I think this is a good point and something I've thought about a little bit. My thought was most of the basic features such as scheduling and applicant management would carry over to other non-technical roles. I do need to learn a lot more hiring for sales, marketing, etc. to know if there are any special needs from those types of teams.

Having the developer specific stuff an additional purchase option is an interesting idea I hadn't thought of. Thanks again for the feedback.

Ask HN: Need for better technical interviewing tools?

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