I've accumulated so much material about interviewing I've thought about writing a book. No one would read it, of course, because everyone thinks they're an expe

I've accumulated so much material about interviewing I've thought about writing a book. No one would read it, of course, because everyone thinks they're an expert at it already. In my experience, 9 out of 10 interviewers are terrible. They come up with assumptions before talking to a candidate, then come up with even more assumptions during the interview. These assumptions are almost always unchecked, meaning that they never ask a single question to verify their guesswork. Perhaps the most critical failure, which this article touches on, is that people can't adequately describe why their hiring successes were successes and why their hiring failures were failures. If they did, they'd understand just how many of their interview process (such as it is) is a crapshoot. They have no conscious understanding of what it takes to be successful at their company, because they've never thought about it in any serious way. They ask for code samples, but never look at them. What's really important is that you know all of their current technologies and use them in exactly the way that they do currently. So to determine that they sometimes give out poorly-conceived coding assignments that are either testing something completely irrelevant or are so large in scope that you are basically rebuilding half their product. They ghost candidates, even candidates that have gone through multiple rounds of interviews, forgetting that people who interact with their company go out into the world and form opinions and things to say about them. This is especially true of candidates who are really engaged with your company's mission. (Besides, it's just rude.) The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, except when being interviewed, where anything you accomplished at a previous company is viewed with the detached impatience of someone eager for you to stop talking so long so they can get to their questions. Listening to what people actually say, instead of just your impression of what they say, means listening to the motives, emotions, and body language surrounding what they're saying and asking questions that get at the heart of those. It's the single most effective interviewing method, but almost no one does it. Because I hire others, when I am being interviewed, a popular question is "How do I hire?" Everyone is looking for a solution with the appearance of a rigorous methodology. If I wrote that book, I'd have to sell a snake oil solution that guarantees great hires, because no one wants to hear the reality: that it requires experience, empathy, and active listening, and there's no one-size-fits-all solution for each person. People don't like nuance; they want a simple, step-by-step guide, not some amorphous process that might take a lot of self-work.