5 ms·
It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes. In my pe
by rb2k_ 10y ago
It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes.
In my personal experience, structured interviews can be very helpful in determining a candidates abilities.
- sverige 10y agoFrom the hiring side, I agree. There's no other way to smoke out those whose creative writing skills extend to their resumes, and you get a pretty good idea of personality differences between candidates if you use the same pool of questions for a given position.
- tptacek 10y agoAre you sure you're using the same definitions as the author? In practice, across a pretty decent sample of large tech companies, I've never seen a truly structured interview outside of Matasano, where I was almost murdered by my employees for instituting them. I think we'd hear far more complaints about them if they were common. It's possible that what you consider to be a structured interview is in fact what this author (and I) would call unstructured. Specifically: if the interviewer has any discretion about questions at all, the interview is probably fundamentally unstructured. In a structured interview, the interview is less an interrogator than a proctor or a referee. Every candidate gets identical questions. The questions themselves are structured to generate answers that facilitate apples-apples comparisons between candidates: they generate lists of facts. The most common interview questions, those of the form "how would you solve this problem", are themselves not well suited to these kinds of interviews. It takes a lot of work to distill a structured interview out of those kinds of problems.
- cwyers 10y agoHow did you feel about your experience using structured interviews for hiring?
- tptacek 10y agoTruly structured interviews are better than even the most rigorous traditional interviews. They are also more expensive to design and much more painful to deliver. Some kind of interview is probably necessary for every serious tech hiring process. Organizations should be realistic about the low quality signal they'll get even from structured interviews. Take time away from interviews and feed that time to off-site work-sample testing.
- mrchicity 10y agoI've tried work-sample testing with middling results: -The more hoops a candidate has to jump through, the more likely they are to bail out of your recruiting funnel. This is especially bad for college/postgrad recruiting when you aren't the #1 employer in your field. Everyone wants to work for the Googles and Facebooks of the world. It's hard getting someone to spend a couple hours for your startup job. -People cheat. We usually issue a short coding project, grade for correctness, then do a code review over Skype or face-to-face. Many candidates turn in the exact same responses. I've even seen people cheat and have a friend do the Skype session with a totally different guy flying out. Do you proctor your test in a secure center? Use an online service to lock down their machine and record? Both are pretty invasive. Switching up the questions constantly is tough and makes your signal noisier. -Industriousness and raw intellect trump skills/knowledge most of the time. Sure there's a baseline level of skill required to train someone quickly enough, like I wouldn't hire someone who didn't know basic data structures, but work-sample tests are often biased to those with a very specific background. I don't want employees who are great at doing what I need today. I want ones who will be great at figuring out what to do years down the line.
- tptacek 10y agoFirst: if you make candidates do work sample tests, you should reduce the amount of in-person interviewing you do to account for it. Up to a limit, most candidates would prefer your selection/qualification process to happen from their homes than from your office. Unfortunately, companies aren't serious enough about their tests to trust them, and do indeed tend to make this just another hoop. Second, incorporate the work sample tests into your in-person (or even telephone) interviews. Now you have a (hopefully interesting) technical problem they ostensibly just solved to talk about. Your evaluation should be by formal rubric, not interview, but it's easy to see if someone actually did it. We had no problems at all with people cheating (of people we hired with this process, over about 4 years, we fired not a single one). Finally, I could not be less interested in the kind of amateur psychoanalysis tech interviewers hope they're accomplishing as a side effect of quizzing people about code in their conference rooms.
- dctoedt 10y ago> Lists of facts This has me mulling whether that might be a better approach to administering law-school exams than the traditional analyze-this-hypothetical-fact-situation approach. (I'm a part-time law professor.) More generally: I wonder to what extent school examinations can draw useful lessons from job interviews.
- eikenberry 10y agoI'm curious in your structured interview process what parts of the interview are setup for the person interviewing with your company to interview your company? Interviews go both ways. I've turned down more jobs than I've accepted due to the company doing poor on the interview.