5 ms·

Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so wi

Dogfooding their process is going to give them adverse results here: Microsoft is paying them to take all the time they want, but good candidates won't be so willing to spend so much time. Already, they're up to a full day of interviews, which is ridiculous. One of the worst parts of current FAANG interviewing is how long it takes to get to the day of interviews, needing to take off from work to attend the interview day, and then getting rejected nonetheless. Not only does this process ask for too much commitment on the part of candidates, it selects for candidates for whom such a commitment is less relatively costly - i.e. people who are currently unemployed, students, etc, and while there are many such people with great talent and potential, respectively, they're also less likely to be strong candidates than people who are currently employed. One of the key issues in recruiting is how to make hiring decisions quickly. Good candidates don't have the patience for your internal politics to resolve over a month or two to figure out whether they're getting an offer or not; they're just going to interview with other places in the meantime who will beat you to the punch. Take a resume off the pile. Email or text to schedule a call. During the call, talk about relevant experience / past projects, what each side is looking for, etc. Make a decision during the call whether you want to invite the person for a two-hour interview, and schedule it during the call, first offering an evening time slot for the interview. In the first hour, talk about culture, problem-solving and teamwork approaches, engineering attitudes. In the second hour, pull out an actual current problem and solve it collaboratively. If all goes well, send an offer, and offer to set up a dinner to talk about / negotiate the offer. It should not take more than a few hours to make a decision on someone; it should not require a candidate to take paid time off. Your hiring pipeline's average lead time should be measured in days.

kluyg 8y ago
Yeah, if only it was all unicorns and rainbows. What you describe is how I imagine they interview for director / VP positions. With hundreds (thousands?) of applications per day for software engineering positions, all with perfect resumes, what you describe just doesn’t scale. Software engineers do 1-2 interviews per week each, it’s part of the job. I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evenings per week interviewing people. I’d rather spend time with my family instead. I think asking candidates to get a day off for interviews, which happens like once per year or even less often for each candidate is more reasonable than asking your employees to work evenings each week.
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  > I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evenings per week interviewing people. I’d rather spend time with my family instead. It seems to me this is an issue with your employer not the interview process.
  - kluyg 8y ago
    I was referring to this: > invite the person for a two-hour interview, and schedule it during the call, first offering an evening time slot for the interview.
- elcomet 8y ago
  Why would you work on evenings? Interviews can and should happen during the day
  - em-bee 8y ago
    it depends on how many candidates you have. a few months ago i was hiring for a position, where i didn't get a single candidate who was able to take time off work. (ok, i had one who took an extended lunch break, but the rest were evening or weekend only)
- em-bee 8y ago
  if i am looking for a different job, i'll not just interview with one company, but several. even more so if i still have a job and i really need to weigh the options to decide if the new offer is really better. there is only so many days i can take off. with two weeks holidays, i might spend all of my holiday budget for this year.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I'm not sure what you think is a reasonable alternative. In general, having some F2F on-site interviews is in everyone's interest. I'll agree that there should be some reasonable pre-screening before everyone makes a significant time investment. But the reality is that if you're job hunting you may well have to take some time off--especially if the opportunities aren't local.
xedarius 8y ago
I completely agree with this. It's a process that's practical, fair and scalable. I'm currently interviewing and so far I have had a 48 hour weekend project, a 3 hour code assessment, and I'm expected to endure 3 days of interviews. I'm fairly close to throwing in the towel and saying I can't be arsed with this.
denzil_correa 8y ago
One company wanted approached to interview me for the position of a "scientist". Their initial step of the interview process was to spend 4-6h on some "challenge" they designed. I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! I made a counter to their proposal as all my research projects are publicly available. My counter was similar to your proposition. I asked them to pick any of my research projects and talk about it, I told them I just need a 5 minute heads up. Of course, they didn't take me up on it because they required "commitment from the candidate". I chuckled on the irony in that last phrase. Interview is a 2-way process and it seems a lot of people have bought into some of the kool aid.
- kamaal 8y ago
  >>I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! You had a lucky escape. I had the same from a company. Which was arguably a 2 full nights worth work if done right. I took the challenge. Did it, it passed their functional test suite which they provided. Unit test cases, git repo, documentation etc etc all in place. They came back saying it was not enough. So it's not like if you do the take home project, they let you in. Also its a tad little irritating to make people work for so long, make them do everything. And even then with perfectly working solution turn them down.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I had one which took a similar effort, passed all their unit tests, then they went into radio silence and after trying to understand what was going on, the only feedback I got was "we were expecting something else". Further inquires about what was wrong, given that it was working as per specification got zero answers.
  - bartread 8y ago
    For a long time I worked for a company that used a coding test as the first stage of the selection process. We advised candidates not to spend more than about 90 minutes on it, although I'm sure spent more. There was also no time pressure: we had some people take weeks to return the completed test due to exams, holidays, family commitments, or whatever, and it was no big deal. Anyway, this all seemed perfectly reasonable until I went for a job I'd been approached about by an agency with a similar test at the beginning of the application process. They'd asked me to build a simple calculator and said it should take no more than 2 hours. No big deal, but it was the weekend before I had 2 hours free where I could do it due to other commitments. Pushy recruiter didn't understand this but, whatever[1]. Should have been a red flag straight away. Anyway, I put together a working solution with comprehensive tests, send it off to the recruiter and on Monday hear... nothing. That's right: nothing. Gave it a few days, got in touch with the recruiter and still nothing. No, "sorry, it wasn't good enough." No feedback on what might have been wrong with it. Nothing. I was absolutely incensed. The whole incident gave me a different perspective on pre-interview tests, to the point where I'm no longer really interested in doing them for "unknown" companies. I made an exception to work with an organisation where I had several friends, so was confident that even if I didn't pass I'd get some decent feedback on why. The most significant effect, however, has been on my own approach to recruitment. At the moment we don't, and I have no plans to introduce, programming homework as a pre-screener. Rather we take a much more personalised approach. We're also in the situation where we get few enough applicants that we can afford to talk to all of them, although this won't scale and will have to change. Still, it's hopefully uncontroversial that before you invest the 5-6 hours (across 2 people) required for a 2 hour technical interview (in our case an exercise where we work together on a problem), you do need to some sort of pre-screener to weed out the people who really can't code: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. I wouldn't say this is 99 out of 100 programmers, nor anything like, but it's certainly the majority. We therefore do a half hour telescreen, which is a fairly informal chat about what the candidate has been working on, what we do, and then - of course - there's a very simple programming task at the end. This takes an investment of roughly 90 minutes on our side (again, 2 people). We're explain the format to candidates in the invitation, which gives them an opportunity to decide whether they want to go through with it or not. Even if candidates don't pass, and it's usually on the technical task that they fall down, we give them feedback, including pointers to how they can improve their skill level. (Apologies, this came out much longer than I intended.) [1] There's some merit to the "well, do you want a new job or not?" mode of thought but not much. E.g., in my current role I advise candidates not to do our technical interview after a full day of work because they're not likely to perform at their best. Obviously not always possible, but it's about ensuring they set themselves up for success: if you dislike your current job enough to be looking for another one don't you want to make sure that when you get an interview you do everything you can to do well in that interview? This is obviously very different to expecting candidates to jump through hoops under time pressure just because "commitment".
C1sc0cat 8y ago
Realistically your not going to schedule interviews in the evening unless its a tap on the shoulder interview for senior roles Any serious interviews will take a day extra traveling, your prep time etc - I agree about having 4-6 interviews in a day is just stupid.
haspok 8y ago
I very much disagree with you: the more experienced the candidate is, the more the interview is about the company and the work environment, not just the candidate. I.e. it is a two way street, and the candidate has to decide in the end whether he/she wants to work for that company or not. There is simply no way a 1 or 2 hour interview can provide this information - this is why you need more time, and this is why I do think the process described in the post is a great way to interview. This may not apply to all companies or situations, but for a Microsoft-sized organization this is the way it should be done.
- solatic 8y ago
  If you're Microsoft-sized, then if anything, your interview process should be less strict, not more strict. At organizational scale, enforcement processes become more important than culture. That means building out custom standardized entrance exams, regular "induction days" with mandatory internal courses for new hires (wherein it is your job in the first few weeks or even months to just go to those courses during normal working hours), deployment pipelines which guide new junior hires by enforcing minimum test coverage, style conventions, passing static code analysis, etc. Your hiring needs should reflect the size of your organization, and your hiring process should reflect your hiring needs. If you hire relatively infrequently then it makes sense to go over individual resumes and have infrequent evening interviews. If you need to hire hundreds of people this month just to negate churn then you have the resources to build out the kind of enforcement-process-oriented above since you surely need that kind of infrastructure anyway. Everything in between is just a matter of degree and where your company is on the process-vs-culture balance as a function of its size.
ghaff 8y ago
I sorta agree on the latency although there are a lot of unavoidable reasons that happens including but not limited to travel schedules of the decision makers and the need to interview multiple candidates. However TBH an in-person day with 4 or so interviews (perhaps post a phone screen) is absolutely standard for all sorts of professional positions and has been for many decades. I can only think of one case where I just had an informal in-person lunch instead--and that was a case where I knew the company's owner very well.
c1sc0 8y ago
I sometimes wonder if a shortcut would be to hire & Fire quickly but only for short-term contract work. After X time as a contractor devs can upgrade to a full position.

kluyg 8y ago

Yeah, if only it was all unicorns and rainbows. What you describe is how I imagine they interview for director / VP positions. With hundreds (thousands?) of applications per day for software engineering positions, all with perfect resumes, what you describe just doesn’t scale. Software engineers do 1-2 interviews per week each, it’s part of the job. I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evenings per week interviewing people. I’d rather spend time with my family instead. I think asking candidates to get a day off for interviews, which happens like once per year or even less often for each candidate is more reasonable than asking your employees to work evenings each week.

denzil_correa 8y ago
> I might be a minority, but I would refuse to spend two of my evenings per week interviewing people. I’d rather spend time with my family instead. It seems to me this is an issue with your employer not the interview process.
- kluyg 8y ago
  I was referring to this: > invite the person for a two-hour interview, and schedule it during the call, first offering an evening time slot for the interview.
elcomet 8y ago
Why would you work on evenings? Interviews can and should happen during the day
- em-bee 8y ago
  it depends on how many candidates you have. a few months ago i was hiring for a position, where i didn't get a single candidate who was able to take time off work. (ok, i had one who took an extended lunch break, but the rest were evening or weekend only)
em-bee 8y ago
if i am looking for a different job, i'll not just interview with one company, but several. even more so if i still have a job and i really need to weigh the options to decide if the new offer is really better. there is only so many days i can take off. with two weeks holidays, i might spend all of my holiday budget for this year.
- ghaff 8y ago
  I'm not sure what you think is a reasonable alternative. In general, having some F2F on-site interviews is in everyone's interest. I'll agree that there should be some reasonable pre-screening before everyone makes a significant time investment. But the reality is that if you're job hunting you may well have to take some time off--especially if the opportunities aren't local.

xedarius 8y ago

I completely agree with this. It's a process that's practical, fair and scalable. I'm currently interviewing and so far I have had a 48 hour weekend project, a 3 hour code assessment, and I'm expected to endure 3 days of interviews. I'm fairly close to throwing in the towel and saying I can't be arsed with this.

denzil_correa 8y ago

One company wanted approached to interview me for the position of a "scientist". Their initial step of the interview process was to spend 4-6h on some "challenge" they designed. I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! I made a counter to their proposal as all my research projects are publicly available. My counter was similar to your proposition. I asked them to pick any of my research projects and talk about it, I told them I just need a 5 minute heads up. Of course, they didn't take me up on it because they required "commitment from the candidate". I chuckled on the irony in that last phrase. Interview is a 2-way process and it seems a lot of people have bought into some of the kool aid.

kamaal 8y ago
>>I told them, I can't spend 4h of my time on the 1st step where I have no clue what my hiring manager even does! You had a lucky escape. I had the same from a company. Which was arguably a 2 full nights worth work if done right. I took the challenge. Did it, it passed their functional test suite which they provided. Unit test cases, git repo, documentation etc etc all in place. They came back saying it was not enough. So it's not like if you do the take home project, they let you in. Also its a tad little irritating to make people work for so long, make them do everything. And even then with perfectly working solution turn them down.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I had one which took a similar effort, passed all their unit tests, then they went into radio silence and after trying to understand what was going on, the only feedback I got was "we were expecting something else". Further inquires about what was wrong, given that it was working as per specification got zero answers.
- bartread 8y ago
  For a long time I worked for a company that used a coding test as the first stage of the selection process. We advised candidates not to spend more than about 90 minutes on it, although I'm sure spent more. There was also no time pressure: we had some people take weeks to return the completed test due to exams, holidays, family commitments, or whatever, and it was no big deal. Anyway, this all seemed perfectly reasonable until I went for a job I'd been approached about by an agency with a similar test at the beginning of the application process. They'd asked me to build a simple calculator and said it should take no more than 2 hours. No big deal, but it was the weekend before I had 2 hours free where I could do it due to other commitments. Pushy recruiter didn't understand this but, whatever[1]. Should have been a red flag straight away. Anyway, I put together a working solution with comprehensive tests, send it off to the recruiter and on Monday hear... nothing. That's right: nothing. Gave it a few days, got in touch with the recruiter and still nothing. No, "sorry, it wasn't good enough." No feedback on what might have been wrong with it. Nothing. I was absolutely incensed. The whole incident gave me a different perspective on pre-interview tests, to the point where I'm no longer really interested in doing them for "unknown" companies. I made an exception to work with an organisation where I had several friends, so was confident that even if I didn't pass I'd get some decent feedback on why. The most significant effect, however, has been on my own approach to recruitment. At the moment we don't, and I have no plans to introduce, programming homework as a pre-screener. Rather we take a much more personalised approach. We're also in the situation where we get few enough applicants that we can afford to talk to all of them, although this won't scale and will have to change. Still, it's hopefully uncontroversial that before you invest the 5-6 hours (across 2 people) required for a 2 hour technical interview (in our case an exercise where we work together on a problem), you do need to some sort of pre-screener to weed out the people who really can't code: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/. I wouldn't say this is 99 out of 100 programmers, nor anything like, but it's certainly the majority. We therefore do a half hour telescreen, which is a fairly informal chat about what the candidate has been working on, what we do, and then - of course - there's a very simple programming task at the end. This takes an investment of roughly 90 minutes on our side (again, 2 people). We're explain the format to candidates in the invitation, which gives them an opportunity to decide whether they want to go through with it or not. Even if candidates don't pass, and it's usually on the technical task that they fall down, we give them feedback, including pointers to how they can improve their skill level. (Apologies, this came out much longer than I intended.) [1] There's some merit to the "well, do you want a new job or not?" mode of thought but not much. E.g., in my current role I advise candidates not to do our technical interview after a full day of work because they're not likely to perform at their best. Obviously not always possible, but it's about ensuring they set themselves up for success: if you dislike your current job enough to be looking for another one don't you want to make sure that when you get an interview you do everything you can to do well in that interview? This is obviously very different to expecting candidates to jump through hoops under time pressure just because "commitment".

C1sc0cat 8y ago

Realistically your not going to schedule interviews in the evening unless its a tap on the shoulder interview for senior roles Any serious interviews will take a day extra traveling, your prep time etc - I agree about having 4-6 interviews in a day is just stupid.

haspok 8y ago

I very much disagree with you: the more experienced the candidate is, the more the interview is about the company and the work environment, not just the candidate. I.e. it is a two way street, and the candidate has to decide in the end whether he/she wants to work for that company or not. There is simply no way a 1 or 2 hour interview can provide this information - this is why you need more time, and this is why I do think the process described in the post is a great way to interview. This may not apply to all companies or situations, but for a Microsoft-sized organization this is the way it should be done.

solatic 8y ago
If you're Microsoft-sized, then if anything, your interview process should be less strict, not more strict. At organizational scale, enforcement processes become more important than culture. That means building out custom standardized entrance exams, regular "induction days" with mandatory internal courses for new hires (wherein it is your job in the first few weeks or even months to just go to those courses during normal working hours), deployment pipelines which guide new junior hires by enforcing minimum test coverage, style conventions, passing static code analysis, etc. Your hiring needs should reflect the size of your organization, and your hiring process should reflect your hiring needs. If you hire relatively infrequently then it makes sense to go over individual resumes and have infrequent evening interviews. If you need to hire hundreds of people this month just to negate churn then you have the resources to build out the kind of enforcement-process-oriented above since you surely need that kind of infrastructure anyway. Everything in between is just a matter of degree and where your company is on the process-vs-culture balance as a function of its size.

ghaff 8y ago

I sorta agree on the latency although there are a lot of unavoidable reasons that happens including but not limited to travel schedules of the decision makers and the need to interview multiple candidates. However TBH an in-person day with 4 or so interviews (perhaps post a phone screen) is absolutely standard for all sorts of professional positions and has been for many decades. I can only think of one case where I just had an informal in-person lunch instead--and that was a case where I knew the company's owner very well.

c1sc0 8y ago

I sometimes wonder if a shortcut would be to hire & Fire quickly but only for short-term contract work. After X time as a contractor devs can upgrade to a full position.