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The hidden costs of engineering time in technical interviewing
- mikece 7y agoI've suggested to recruiting firms that they should hire (or retain) a couple enterprise architects and have them meet with the technical managers looking for developers and let these highly experienced engineers pre-interview candidates based on the hiring company's needs and only refer people who can pass the enterprise arch's review. The time saved by the hiring company to not have their in-house archs, team leads, and engineers tied up interviewing candidates should MORE than make up for the premium such pre-interviewing would demand. (Something else that would help is paying employees a lot more than $500 for making an in-house referral. I know of cases where locally where in-house referrals could have happened but by referring through a chosen recruiter got the referred a $1000 referral fee instead of his company's $500 referral fee... but that's a separate rant.)
- ghaff 7y agoInternal referrals are great. The problem is that, if you increase the fee too much, it's going to get harder and harder for employees to prioritize referring someone they know would be a great fit for a position (and get a nice spiff in the process) versus randomly referring people they vaguely know on the off-chance they'll get a multi-$K payout.
- Traster 7y agoThat very much depends on the company size too. If you're in a 100 person company you'd need a very high referral fee before you start pissing off your colleagues referring crap candidates. Whereas if you're in a megacorp you can pretty much do it with impunity.
- hak8or 7y agoI've never seen a referral bonus come without a requirement of te new employee staying at least 6 montha or a year.
- ghaff 7y agoIn most places, less than 6-12 months implies a pretty serious mismatch of expectations of some sort.
- jkukul 7y agoOne thing to keep in mind with the internal referrals is that people tend to recommend those who they like or with whom they had had a good "cultural fit" before. So if you only rely on internal referrals you might end up having a very homogenous workplace.
- dominotw 7y agoso how many rounds of interviews do i have to endure under this scheme? why would a company take the word of biased party ( recruting companies) about the ability of a candidate?
- mikece 7y agoI was contacted by a recruiter friend (yes, programmers and recruiters can be friends) a few years back because they had a client with a very specific need to find .NET devs who had a deep understanding of threading and parallelism. I told them to contact Joe Smith (name changed, obviously) as he knew more about multi-threading and parallelism than any dev I knew and suggest he pre-screen all candidates for the client (and offer to have Joe talk to the client's architect to prove his knowledge). The client was VERY happy with the improved quality of the candidates (the only thing about which they were unhappy is that Joe Smith didn't want to work for them). It's not idle theory... I've seen this work.
- dominotw 7y agosorry my response was in frustration with rounds and rounds of interviews, screens, leetcode, interviewwhaterver. But this is actually a good idea. Not sure why a service like this doesn't exist.
- cosmodisk 7y agoI've got a connection on LinkedIn, he's a technical guy turned recruiter. He knows the platform he's specialising on pretty well,can talk to devs the same language as opposed to some random guy who doesn't even know half of the things mentioned on candidate CVs. It would be great to see this a more common practice. .
- dpio 7y agoThat's a good question, why don't recruiting firms filter leads through technical guys rather than just looking for term matches?
- lordnacho 7y agoIf there was a platform for doing that, I would offer my interviewing services on it. I bet a lot of high level techs would as well.
- leeny 7y agoOP/author here. This is exactly what interviewing.io does. If you'd like to interview people on our platform, please ping me: aline@interviewing.io.
- pkaye 7y agoOur internal recruiter at my previous company had a CS degree so she was quite capable of identifying candidates with good fit.
- neilv 7y agoRegarding referral fee arbitrage... An organization might want to stop that on ethics grounds: if the employee is making money by redirecting a referral through a recruiter, without disclosing that to the organization... then the employee might have two conflicts of interest: * employee is disregarding an official process, to enrich themselves at a cost to the organization * employee might be involved, officially or unofficially in deciding acceptance of the candidate, without the organization having an opportunity to manage that Besides the immediate impact of each incident, this can lead to a culture in which such things are viewed as OK, which can then escalate to much worse incidents/scandals, bad morale, dysfunction.
- rurp 7y agoOr... the company could just pay their employees a fair price for referrals. Management asking employees to go above and beyond to provide a referral, then short changing them on the value and strong arming them into not getting a better price from a recruiting agency, is a pretty terrible way to build a loyal workforce.
- neilv 7y agoThat's one way to look at it, and maybe the most effective, in the current industry environment. You could even add more metrics, like tying amount of referral fee employee closely to some quantified performance of the hire over a meaningful time period. Ideally, I'd prefer a very simple goal alignment, in which the employee doesn't get a referral fee, and instead is motivated by professionalism, wanting the organization to make good hires, of people they'd like to work with, and wanting those hires to further the success of the project/organization. (I realize this is not the situation in many organizations, but it's what I'd prefer, and throwing referral fees into it seems to head in the other direction.)
- eropple 7y agoThis is exactly how my old recruiting sideline (I was a consultant, but recruiter money is great) worked. I spent time not just pre-interviewing candidates, but pre-interviewing companies; it made it pretty easy to connect good candidates with good companies. (Been thinking about getting back into it for local Boston companies. Anyone out there interested in working with me to find you great, Boston-local candidates? Please feel free to drop me a line.)
- traviscj 7y agoSeems like a tough sell to find enterprise architects that want to screen full-time, but maybe it would make more sense to someone that actually liked interviewing... or, as you said, maybe you could just pay them enough!
- emidln 7y agoOne data point here: my employer's in-house referral bonus is $7500 with an additional $7500 to a charity of my choice. This is paid after the referred hire celebrates their six month anniversary. We have 5-10 inside referrals a month.
- gumby 7y agoDon’t forget the candidate’s time as well. You should only bring them onsite if you think (from phone’s screen etc) they’re probably worth hiring so if they don’t work out you should be improving the upstream screening for everyone’s benefit.
- rexpop 7y agoWhy should a company value candidates' time? Edit: To be clear, corporations are morally bankrupt slow AI whose goals are increasingly tangential to ours. However, their proponents must have _some_ justification for valuing what we value (in this case, candidates' time), or else admit the above moral bankruptcy. I am not being sarcastic, I am challenging this forum's many corporatists to reassure me that corporations are motivated to accommodate a basic decency represented by valuing candidates' time. Downvotes on a simple question, as usual, evidence this forum's continued inadequacy as a harbor for empirical discussion. I am not trolling, nor sarcastic. I am simply ignorant of the corporatist argument for valuing candidates time.
- dominotw 7y agofair question. not sure why its downvoted. Airbnb bought me onsite for 2 day interview process and kicked me out after 1 st interview. I went to the beach and museums in SFO for 2 days. Not the best use of my vacation time but not the worst either.
- 7y ago
- maxxxxx 7y agoI don't think that time is very hidden. You have to sift through a ton of resumes and then spend hours and hours interviewing and phone screening. If you have actual work to do it's pure misery. I also don't have time to really think about my interviewing technique. I would much prefer if we had a "hiring department" who are technically knowledgeable, talk to applicants, maybe give them tests and build up a pool of candidates who then can be interviewed by the actual engineering teams.
- robocat 7y agoWhy use the cost of an engineer hour? The correct metric is the opportunity cost of that hour - the lost productivity for that hour. As an approximation take total revenue and divide by total engineering hours. If you are hiring engineering because engineering is a bottleneck (not just hiring due to churn), then the metric is realistic. It would still be an underestimation in his calculation because he isn't including the hours taken to get new hire up to speed (oppositely assuming hire is due to churn).
- cm2012 7y agoAlso, an hour for interviewing costs more than one hour of productivity because it interrupts flow state. A 3 hour free chunk in the schedule is more productive than three one hour chunks.
- onion2k 7y agoTo be fair though, that's just a scheduling problem. Put interviews first thing in the morning or immediately after lunch and there's no way you'll be interrupting an engineer's flow state.
- cm2012 7y agoUsually interviews are all day, with each interviewer going one after another for an hour. So it's not possible to schedule this way.
- onion2k 7y agoAs an approximation take total revenue and divide by total engineering hours. This does assume every hour spent on engineering is equal, and that's not even close to true. In most companies about 50% of the hours account for 99% of the revenue. Companies spend lots of time on things that don't make any money, and in some cases they knowingly spend time on things that lose money. If you can identify the waste then you can easily find engineering time to spend on things like hiring with no impact on the bottom line at all.
- e_ameisen 7y agoGreat article! Add to it the moral cost of interviewing multiple subpar candidates and improving the fit of candidates at the top of the interview process has a huge impact. This is one of the reasons that many companies work with us at Insight (insightdatascience.com), as the interviews to join the program are done by Data Scientists and Engineers.
- ChrisCinelli 7y agoYou could say: "It is a funnel, you look at the stages, and at the end there is a great engineer that is usually working for a long period for the company. Each level has expenses and conversions. Go an optimize keeping in mind the constraints." But what I noticed is that is all about your company specifics and how you overcome the trade off... For example the average new startup in unsexy industry has problems to get any body in the funnel. Getting somebody that know how to write some code can be a challenge... interview is more about persuading them to accept the job. Great "sexy" companies have ton of people applying and would do everything they ask them to do. The problem for the company is to efficiently select those people. When you have enough candidates, somebody may think: "We can save time and make accurate evaluations by giving a screening test offline to evaluate most of the relevant skills of the person!". Unfortunately the test takes on average 10 hours to finish. Result: mediocre candidates desperate for a job try so hard to get everything done, but the great engineer has plenty of options and does not want to spend 10h on a test. In the end all great people that you would like to hire quit in the process.
- pryelluw 7y agoIt's why I prefer quick phone interviews. It gives me enpugh of a glimpse into their culture.
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- zahreeley 7y agoResult: mediocre candidates desperate for a job try so hard to get everything done, but the great engineer has plenty of options and does not want to spend 10h on a test. In the end all great people that you would like to hire quit in the process.
- ebiester 7y agoI always wonder... Would you take a job if you heard 20-40% of people who accepted the job were fired within the first month? If an organization was good at firing fast, would people be willing to take a job there? Would you be able to truly assess an engineer within a month in a way you wouldn't in an hour? The first two weeks are usually a wash. But you might be able to get more signal in that second two weeks? Does that same equation hold true if it's contract to hire? Would you take such a job?
- Justsignedup 7y agoTo be fair... $150 an eng hour? That's a 312k salary. I don't think that is accurate. And a recruiter makes 200k salary on average? These numbers are a bit nuts. Agree with a lot of what is written tho, but not this crazy number.
- a_t48 7y agoIncluding benefits/facilities costs/ etc this isn't entirely unreasonable.
- twblalock 7y ago312k total compensation (not just salary, but stock and bonuses also) is not uncommon at FAANG and unicorn startups for senior people. The cost to the company is higher than that due to benefits, office space, and other HR costs. I don't know much about what recruiters earn, but for a senior engineer that is not crazy.
- dasil003 7y agoIt's not a $312k salary unless the person takes no holidays, sick days, vacation and has no benefits or other fixed costs associated with their employement.
- mouldysammich 7y agoAre holidays and sick days not paid in the US?
- abrugsch 7y agoOften not unless they are negotiated or the company is really pushing it's work/life balance as a job perk
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- village-idiot 7y agoHiring manager here: we talk about the opportunity cost of interviewing a lot.
- diNgUrAndI 7y agoSometimes interviewing a candidate as a team can have small benefits such as strengthening / making explicit what values are important to the team among the participants. This assumes that the team is operating in a full transparency, which is often seen in a small startup. I had the experience that after being eng. interviewer a few times I felt more glued and aligned with the team.
- speedplane 7y agoA bigger question about recruiting and engineer time, is whether they are effective at weeding out unproductive candidates. I'm not a recruiter, but I have interviewed a number of folks, and I still find it very difficult to determine if someone is good or bad. Folks that sound good during the interview, may just be good at communicating ideas, which is an important trait, but is still just one trait. Even after you hire them, and you see them under-perform, it can be difficult to know if it's because of some intrinsic problem (e.g., just not so smart, or laziness), or if the problem is with the employer (e.g., not managing work, lack of communication, poor team integration). Yes, there are obvious stars and duds, but the middle is a vast gray area. As engineers, we naturally try to turn hiring and performance assessment into an analytical questions that have clear answers, or that at least can follow a clear process. However, it still seems like voodoo.