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Having learned this myself over a few decades through both trial and error and also researching best practice, I have to say this guy gets a ton of stuff right.

Having learned this myself over a few decades through both trial and error and also researching best practice, I have to say this guy gets a ton of stuff right. I also read a few new things I now want to try. Just to reiterate one of the more important points from the article in my own words: resumes (CVs) have almost zero correlation to the quality of candidates. Pre-screening calls can really only screen out people who are completely unqualified due to not actually having the skills listed on their resume. So I will pre-screen with some very basic tech questions. Or more likely, I'll just use a recruiter to pre-screen for me. I'm going to finish up with a copy paste from a past comment I made to a different article with some tips that have helped me over the years: 1. Unless you've been trained to interview people, you are probably really bad at it. Think about how bad someone is at coding who never did it before and has no training. Interviewing people is no different: it is a skill that takes time and effort to learn. Get trained up and practice. As much training as you have time for. Educate yourself in your free time on a regular basis with articles about best practice. Adding more words won't make this sink in more, but I will end by saying I can't stress this point enough. You are bad at interviewing. You need to fix that before anything else if you want to hire good devs. 2. How are you measuring success as an interviewer? This is a really difficult thing to measure because how can you find out that your interview process is rejecting candidates who would make great employees? I'm not going to try to answer this here, but it's an excellent question to think about. One thing that might help is the next point. 3. Whatever your first impression is of the candidate, spend a good part of the interview trying to prove yourself wrong. Candidate seems like a perfect fit for the team and a great coder? Instead of relaxing because you're sure you already found the right person, see if you can figure out why they might be a bad fit or if their coding skills aren't as good as first impressions. Same for someone who seems weak at coding. Maybe they are just nervous. Can you make them relaxed enough so their awesome skills can come through? Maybe in both cases your first impressions will be proven correct. But if not you might have just found a diamond in the rough that other companies are skipping over.

richardking 8y ago
Regarding your first point - any recommendations on articles to read on best practice?
- tchaffee 8y ago
  I just went through my bookmarks and quite a few of the links are dead... I've been doing this for decades so that's not a surprise. And not really a big deal. Most of the progress I've seen has been made in the last five or so years. Technical interviews might be horrible now, but they used to be way worse! A LOT of the articles I've read over the years I have not bookmarked because my idea of a good technical interview is the opposite of what those articles recommended. I normally read everything interview related I come across in HN or Reddit programming subreddits but I'll also do a search every six months or so and see if anything interesting comes up. Although I have cherry-picked advice from reading many articles over the years, more importantly I've tried really hard to come up with an interview process I myself would enjoy as a candidate. That factor is very important to me because I think the interviewing process sucks at many companies. It's painful for everyone involved and ineffective. I would tolerate painful and effective. But I think it can be somewhat painless and effective. I remember getting at least a few valuable ideas from these: http://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect-technical-interview-from-a-former-Amazon-VP/ http://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect-tech... https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-analyzed-thousands-of-coding-interviews-heres-what-we-learned-99384b1fda50 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-analyzed-thousands-of-cod... Also ask someone in HR what soft skills you need to improve related to interviewing. And then take classes based on that. Most importantly, and as the article suggested, interview candidates with another person who has more experience interviewing. With a variety of people. You'll learn the most by doing interviews alongside people who are better at it than you. Practice really is what makes perfect. Especially if someone can coach you. One final thought, recruiters aren't going to give away the store and teach you how to be a great interviewer, but you can pick their brain with questions. If your company will pay for a recruiter then always go back to them with doubts about your process after every interview. They want you to hire their candidates so they will help out a little with advice. I've heard some great advice from recruiters themselves.
  - richardking 8y ago
    I haven’t had a chance to look through all the links yet but thanks for following up! Will definitely review.

richardking 8y ago

Regarding your first point - any recommendations on articles to read on best practice?

tchaffee 8y ago
I just went through my bookmarks and quite a few of the links are dead... I've been doing this for decades so that's not a surprise. And not really a big deal. Most of the progress I've seen has been made in the last five or so years. Technical interviews might be horrible now, but they used to be way worse! A LOT of the articles I've read over the years I have not bookmarked because my idea of a good technical interview is the opposite of what those articles recommended. I normally read everything interview related I come across in HN or Reddit programming subreddits but I'll also do a search every six months or so and see if anything interesting comes up. Although I have cherry-picked advice from reading many articles over the years, more importantly I've tried really hard to come up with an interview process I myself would enjoy as a candidate. That factor is very important to me because I think the interviewing process sucks at many companies. It's painful for everyone involved and ineffective. I would tolerate painful and effective. But I think it can be somewhat painless and effective. I remember getting at least a few valuable ideas from these: http://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect-technical-interview-from-a-former-Amazon-VP/ http://firstround.com/review/The-anatomy-of-the-perfect-tech... https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/ https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-analyzed-thousands-of-coding-interviews-heres-what-we-learned-99384b1fda50 https://medium.freecodecamp.org/we-analyzed-thousands-of-cod... Also ask someone in HR what soft skills you need to improve related to interviewing. And then take classes based on that. Most importantly, and as the article suggested, interview candidates with another person who has more experience interviewing. With a variety of people. You'll learn the most by doing interviews alongside people who are better at it than you. Practice really is what makes perfect. Especially if someone can coach you. One final thought, recruiters aren't going to give away the store and teach you how to be a great interviewer, but you can pick their brain with questions. If your company will pay for a recruiter then always go back to them with doubts about your process after every interview. They want you to hire their candidates so they will help out a little with advice. I've heard some great advice from recruiters themselves.
- richardking 8y ago
  I haven’t had a chance to look through all the links yet but thanks for following up! Will definitely review.