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I agree with some of what you say, but: > Standardize your process. If an elite candidate balks, then you've learned something about them: they'd rather your p
by rwallace 10y ago
I agree with some of what you say, but:
> Standardize your process. If an elite candidate balks, then you've learned something about them: they'd rather your process suck and keep sucking than take any time to help fix it. That sounds to me like someone who isn't prepared to invest their time and energy in your team.
... huh? A candidate has no power to change your process. They aren't employed by your company yet. Even if they do go through the process and become an employee, it probably won't be in the capacity of senior manager, which is the rank that has some power to change the process.
If you ask the candidate 'okay, what do you see as the problem with our process, what do you think should be changed?' I'm sure you'll get some answers. Granted, if a candidate replied 'I'm not going to tell you. Looks like your process will just have to keep sucking!' then you could reasonably conclude that grape was sour anyway. I would be surprised to actually encounter that reaction; have you ever encountered it?
- tptacek 10y agoYou missed the implication that interviewing a candidate you know in advance you want to hire helps true up your interview process. Just doing the interview improves the team's hiring.
- x0x0 10y agoI dunno, "you're great, I would love to work with you again" and "come pay a day of vacation time ($500+ cash; actual value much higher value due to scarcity) and jump through these hoops like everyone else" are somewhat hard to square with each other as a pitch to my former coworkers. I get why a calibration process is useful to the company, but it's not particularly useful to the person who pays the costs.
- rwallace 10y agoAh! I did indeed miss that implication. Okay, the logic of wanting to test your interview process does hang together, but still... this is at the stage where you are trying to convince the candidate to join your company; requiring them to test your interview process might end up being an expensive way to gather data points, if it gives some candidates a bad first impression. Are you sure it wouldn't make more sense to ask people to do interview process testing after they've already been in the company for a few months?
- inimino 10y agoHaving random existing employees go through the interviewing process as a test of the process itself is an interesting idea, though you'd have to be a big enough company to choose interviewers who don't know the "candidate" and there are probably other reasons why it would be difficult to pull off.
- ubernostrum 10y agoThrowing in an observation from one of the successful processes I've seen: Before a new session or technical question gets added to your company's tech interview corpus, you require the team to dogfood it on in-house engineers. If the people you've already hired have poor feedback on the question/session, it may be in need of serious work or may just be something you shouldn't use.