10 ms·

I interview regularly. If I wanted to give some tips to candidates: 1. Audio, audio, audio... It doesn't matter how good or good looking you are if I can't und

I interview regularly. If I wanted to give some tips to candidates: 1. Audio, audio, audio... It doesn't matter how good or good looking you are if I can't understand any of your eloquence. Using microphone on your phone or webcam may or may not be adequate, you should test this. There is test call functionality in almost every web conferencing software. In general having microphone close to your mouth and distant from any noises is safest choice. Headsets are cheap and effective. Also turn off any feature that changes volume dynamically, this can cause volume to change suddenly to painful levels. For example zoom can pick up distant voice and increase volume suddenly. As an interviewer I am already setting the volume as high as I can before it becomes uncomfortable because I don't want to miss anything you say, having the volume change suddenly makes my life this much more difficult. 2. Just because it is remote interview doesn't mean savoir vivre is out the window. Be on time. Don't interrupt. Don't insult the interviewer (yes, I had this happen to me recently). 3. Don't be obvious looking up answers to my technical questions on the internet. And if you need to google something, try to put it in your words rather than read word by word, because maybe I can do the search myself, too. Yes, this also happened to me recently. 4. Make sure you have peace and quiet for the duration of the interview, before the interview and also some margin after. Set the time aside and remove any distractions. Try not to create perception you have something more important to do. It doesn't look good if are jumping from one meeting to the interview to another meeting.

rufus_foreman 5y ago
I bought an expensive microphone just for work, and then people complained that it was taking up all their bandwidth, they asked me to go back to using the phone. No simple answers.
- jagger27 5y ago
  That doesn’t make any sense at all. Wouldn’t that entirely be up to the codec used to encode? Why would shitty audio encoded with the same codec use substantially more bandwidth than cleaner audio? If anything I’d expect noise to be harder to encode.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    I'm just telling you what happened. How would they know I was using the expensive microphone?
    - e40 5y ago
      You can test this with zoom, as it will tell you the bitrate.
  - tomcooks 5y ago
    Maybe zoom detects the frequencies used by your mic and chooses the best performing codec
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Your video takes way, way more bandwidth than audio ever could. You should not believe everything people complain about. Also, you don't need expensive microphone. You need decent one set up correctly. Most microphones are actually pretty decent in that they can record your voice pretty well provided they are set up properly and that is where usually problems are. You need to have correct geometry so that they can do their job of picking your voice and rejecting noise and you need to ensure correct software audio settings because mismanaging these can cause voice to be distorted or sprinkled with clicks and cracks.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yeah, in fact, when I'm recording a podcast and we're having any sort of bandwidth issues, I'll usually have us turn off our video. But I want people to use good mics. (Though the difference once you get to decent is very diminishing.)
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      I would add mics have nothing to do with bandwidth. It is the client / OS settings that decide how much bandwidth is going to be used. Actually a microphone with good noise rejection may help depending on how exactly the audio is being compressed. Less noise will usually cause either less bandwidth used for the same quality or better quality for the same bandwidth.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    >> Your video takes way, way more bandwidth than audio ever could. Then how did they know?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - na85 5y ago
      Perhaps they were mistaken.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  The people complaining have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    I have an expensive microphone and picked "use original audio" in Zoom, which says that it takes more bandwidth and compute resources for the receivers. Of course, you could just not click that if people complained. I haven't heard anyone complain. Rather, everyone else also bought expensive microphones and enabled original audio, and the results are excellent. (Unsolicited tip: some sort of noise gate is really nice so that when you unmute, it doesn't raise the noise floor for the call. I ended up using Krisp, which seems to work quite well. Yeah, it's a subscription service for something your audio interface could theoretically do, and they market it as AI but it's not really AI and that's kind of scummy, but it doesn't take up any space on my desk, and it's not that expensive, so whatever. Sometimes it works too well -- people will apologize for their dog barking, or a fire truck driving by, and it's just met with confusion because that all got filtered out.)
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    How did they know? I didn't tell them, "I'm about to switch to the microphone", I switched to the microphone and they told me to stop and they claimed it was using all their bandwidth and to go back to using the phone instead of the microphone. I'll take the downvotes, that's fine, but how did the people complaining know I had switched to the microphone and what were they complaining about?
    - darkerside 5y ago
      How did they even know you had switched to a microphone if you didn't tell them? How did they know to blame it?
      - rufus_foreman 5y ago
        That's what I'm asking too, how did they know? I get no answer.
- mcstafford 5y ago
  > people complained that [my microphone] was taking up all their bandwidth That's not how I expect your choice of mic to affect anyone else's experience. It would surprise me if additional network load is part of what happens.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  This makes as much sense as astrology.
ashtonkem 5y ago
> Audio, audio, audio... It doesn't matter how good or good looking you are if I can't understand any of your eloquence. Using microphone on your phone or webcam may or may not be adequate, you should test this. There is test call functionality in almost every web conferencing software. If you’re going to be permanently remote, consider buying a low end podcasting or streaming setup. The quality will be fantastic comparative to cheaper options, and it won’t be that expensive to buy.
- zwkrt 5y ago
  Especially considering the recent post on HN showing that higher quality audio makes you more influential
- KozmoNau7 5y ago
  I have a couple of decent microphones, a mixer and mic stands, which were bought second-hand primarily for karaoke at parties. I've got all the input gear, another friend has a big PA setup, good fun. Most of the time, those mics and the mixer just live in a bag in my closet, so I thought "why not use them?" The sound quality from an AKG D5 (a decent, but not fancy mic) through a small mixer with a bit of compression applied is just miles ahead of anything you could get from a headset or a webcam mic. It is a little hard to avoid getting the mic in the picture, but with a bit of creativity, it works well enough when placed just above the top of the frame.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Even just some basic Behringer stuff does well for spoken audio. I don’t bother to keep the mic out of frame though; it never crossed my mind.
    - KozmoNau7 5y ago
      My mixer is a small Behringer QX1002USB. Two mic inputs, parametric EQ and one-knob compressors. You can crank them and get that radio host imposing bassy voice, if you want. It's amazingly good and versatile for such an inexpensive piece of gear.
rsyring 5y ago
> Don't insult the interviewer If you are the type of person who insults others at work, please...please insult me in the interview. It's so much better to find out this type of thing earlier rather than later.
- xmprt 5y ago
  I had an interview once where I felt like the interviewer really didn't even know the answer to the question they were asking. I was surprised because of how confidently they were giving me the wrong answer. Instead of insulting them I just took it as a red flag to not work there. Or maybe re-interview a few years later.
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    > confidently they were giving me the wrong answer This cuts both ways. Interviewers are not by default right. So likewise an interviewer that doesn't know what he's talking and doubles down on it, I'd rather find that out at the interviewer because it points to a dysfunctional organization.
    - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
      Seems like exactly the sort of "trick" an interviewer might try to use: 'can this person correct someone in authority who is blatantly wrong?'. Most organisations, it seems, would be served well by people who constructively handle bullshit/misunderstanding from senior people; for some it's absolutely vital.
      - gentleman11 5y ago
        Mind games, great sign that the company will be fun to work for
      - salamanderman 5y ago
        It's gone both ways for me. I had one interview where the interviewer got very mad at me, and another where the interviewer was very impressed and was pleased to learn something. I got an offer from the latter company, and accepted.
bonestamp2 5y ago
> Audio, audio, audio Yes. Even in television broadcasting, they consider audio the most important element. You can got a few seconds without the picture as long as there's audio. For an interview... we're over a year into the pandemic, if you don't have your audio quality figured out by now then you are not getting the job. I tell the person right away at the start of the interview if their audio is not good, giving them the benefit of the doubt to fix it.
- wott 5y ago
  > Even in television broadcasting, they consider audio the most important element. You can got a few seconds without the picture as long as there's audio. I don't know who 'they' are because that's unfortunately opposite to what I have been witnessing for 1 year. Utterly useless but always present pictures, and a terrible, janky sound has become the standard of remote interview/consulting on TVs. Also don't forget that the new generation of field reporters is the generation who grew up used to favour convenience over quality, so they don't see a problem delivering lives which are barely understandable and, even worse, recorded reports which absolutely should be subtitled (the combo facial mask + bad sound take + bad Internet sound transmission) but which aren't. Even worse, even on the national radio (the French equivalent of the BBC) which is supposed to have top sound standards; they obviously started using Internet-based public solutions streaming and they didn't give a damn about the sound: very bad and unstable quality, a LOT of lag causing a catastrophic mess of interactions, unreliable (connections very frequently dropping). It's a blessing when they have to drop to phone as they had been doing for decades, at least you know what to expect and there is no lag. Apparently they didn't consider the pro solutions which have been in use for 10-15 years (even my local associative radio had one!), which gave good sound with no lag, and which are a perfect fit at least for regulars; no, they all went using the crappy public app of the month...
  - bonestamp2 5y ago
    > I don't know who 'they' are because that's unfortunately opposite to what I have been witnessing for 1 year. Agreed. I was speaking from an academic perspective, and you're right -- this past year has been terrible. It seems that all best practices have gone out the window as everyone tries to figure out how to do remotes with consumer grade tools. My point was, even in a medium that we mostly consider visual, audio is still more important to communicating the message than the picture. We can take this (pre-pandemic) best practice from television broadcasting and apply it to zoom conferences/interviews.
cbanek 5y ago
Good audio is really important. It's hard to be taken seriously when they can't understand you. And good audio quality definitely gives you more presence and relatability. I feel like it's the modern equivalent of being well spoken. I got an XLR microphone with a boom arm during the pandemic, and I've also gone full OBS for zoom meetings. It's nice to be able to draw on the screen, share my screen or a picture during a meeting, without having to share screen.
- tkgally 5y ago
  I also bought a microphone with a boom arm and shock mount (something like [1]). The sound quality seems good, and less typing noise is caught by the microphone than with a mic on the desk or monitor. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Condenser-Microphone-eirix-Adjustable-LiveStreaming/dp/B08ZCPHXPM/ https://www.amazon.com/Condenser-Microphone-eirix-Adjustable...
- ProZsolt 5y ago
  > I've also gone full OBS for zoom meetings. It's nice to be able to draw on the screen, share my screen or a picture during a meeting, without having to share screen. It sounds awesome. Could you describe it in more details?
  - cbanek 5y ago
    OBS Studio (runs on linux, mac, windows) has the virtual webcam. This allows you to make your video output into a webcam device to hook up to any video software. Then you can do all the normal stuff like in OBS, like putting images on, overlays, animations, screen sharing, movies, etc.
skatanski 5y ago
> make sure you have piece and quiet I think I’m ok, when some life trickles through, while I’m interviewing others. With people not always having the comfort of a separate room to hide in. A remote setup with 2 toddlers running around is sometimes a necessity. And I wouldn’t want to reject someone solely on that basis.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Peace and quiet is so that you, candidate, can focus on the answers. I personally don't care if your kids organize the party in the same room, but I care if it causes you, candidate, to not be able to fully focus on the interview and then me, the interviewer, to have trouble understanding whether your behavior was due to disturbance. Interviewing is an expensive investment. I spend a lot of time doing the interview and I want to use what little time we have to the fullest extent.
philjackson 5y ago
Please tell us how exactly the candidate insulted you!
- lmilcin 5y ago
  Couple of months ago I got a candidate that, if you just looked at his CV, was well overqualified for the position. We were looking for a senior Java dev, we got a guy who had two degrees, 25 years of experience, and started no less than 3 companies. He also never sticked to anything for more than 2 years. The insults started with his first sentence, before he or we even got a chance to greet each other. We had some conferencing issues, the company just changed conferencing technology. In the previous any person could start the meeting but in the new one only the person who set up the meeting could start it. So there was some commotion to change the room. When we joined (about 4-5 minutes after planned start) he said something to the effect that we must be new to this interviewing thing. Nevermind, I continue the interview. I ask him why he wants to work as a developer, given so much experience. He said he hasn't been programming a lot recently and wants to "dirty his hands" again. Hmm... So we go to the technical part where he started manufacturing some false answers and after I pointed out what he says is factually incorrect he decided to critique the difficulty of questions he was getting. I explained that we give same questions to all candidates for the position. I reminded I said at the start that candidates are not expected to know answers to all questions and that it is perfectly fine to tell us and to skip to the next question. I sometimes tell the candidates (jokingly) that I give 5 points for telling me he doesn't know the answer. Though I did not say this in this case. It only got downhill from there after couple more questions. After he gave another nonsense answer I did not say anything but he looked at me and said "WHAT NOW!" And then started tirade that I am not qualified to interview him and can we maybe set up an interview directly with my manager.
  - solarengineer 5y ago
    At my employer, we deliberately have a junior person interview senior candidates. It helps us understand how stuck the candidate is about their seniority, whether they can explain something to an interviewer who clearly doesn't have the same exposure as the candidate.
Aeolun 5y ago
> It doesn't look good if are jumping from one meeting to the interview to another meeting. My day is full of other responsibilities. If you don’t like that I don’t think we’ll be a match regardless. That said, I’d like to add. Nr 5: Do not use a custom zoom video background, seriously, I do not want to see you sitting in the middle of a city with people walking by, repeating the same pattern every 10s. Eventually I end up paying more attention to that guy with the hat than you.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  > My day is full of other responsibilities. If you don’t like that I don’t think we’ll be a match regardless. Why are you looking for another job then? Are you the type that is just all motion and can't ever stop and focus on something properly? Why do you want to join our company? If you want to join us why is this interview that you have with us less important than the two meetings you have around the time? Yes, you are right, we would probably not be a right match. We are looking for candidates that want to get the job. Imagine you ask a girl for a date. You are 2 minutes late telling her you had to clean up your flat. Then at the end of the meeting you say you can't stay longer because you need to do some shopping. Two perfectly valid reasons and 2 minutes late is not that much late in itself. But if I was the girl I would think "this guy is probably not a good match, he just doesn't care about me".
  - buzzwordninja 5y ago
    What are you talking about? People are probably taking time off out of their workday for the interview. They might very well have other meetings, especially is they are in a senior position. Taking their current job responsibilities seriously is a good sign for when they'll later work for your company.
    - lmilcin 5y ago
      That isn't how I see it. I don't want you to work for me if you don't want to work for me. If you do not want to work for me, that is fine. I don't mind. But if you come to interview I want to see that you really want to work for me. You, yourself, probably would want to see the company wants to hire you rather than being completely lukewarm about it. People want to see they are taken seriously and they are wanted. Would you come to a company that organized your interview in some dinky place in the basement with unkempt junior dev who got late to the meeting and at the prescribed time tells you he doesn't have more time for you and you are maybe going to hear from them? Why do you think companies like Google pamper their candidates and later developers at every possible occasion?
Doxin 5y ago
A great thing to set up for yourself is audio feedback. Hearing yourself back with the levels as they are in the outgoing mix basically eliminates half of the talking-over-each-other problems. It's quite amazing how much it improves communications.

rufus_foreman 5y ago

I bought an expensive microphone just for work, and then people complained that it was taking up all their bandwidth, they asked me to go back to using the phone. No simple answers.

jagger27 5y ago
That doesn’t make any sense at all. Wouldn’t that entirely be up to the codec used to encode? Why would shitty audio encoded with the same codec use substantially more bandwidth than cleaner audio? If anything I’d expect noise to be harder to encode.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  I'm just telling you what happened. How would they know I was using the expensive microphone?
  - e40 5y ago
    You can test this with zoom, as it will tell you the bitrate.
- tomcooks 5y ago
  Maybe zoom detects the frequencies used by your mic and chooses the best performing codec
lmilcin 5y ago
Your video takes way, way more bandwidth than audio ever could. You should not believe everything people complain about. Also, you don't need expensive microphone. You need decent one set up correctly. Most microphones are actually pretty decent in that they can record your voice pretty well provided they are set up properly and that is where usually problems are. You need to have correct geometry so that they can do their job of picking your voice and rejecting noise and you need to ensure correct software audio settings because mismanaging these can cause voice to be distorted or sprinkled with clicks and cracks.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yeah, in fact, when I'm recording a podcast and we're having any sort of bandwidth issues, I'll usually have us turn off our video. But I want people to use good mics. (Though the difference once you get to decent is very diminishing.)
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    I would add mics have nothing to do with bandwidth. It is the client / OS settings that decide how much bandwidth is going to be used. Actually a microphone with good noise rejection may help depending on how exactly the audio is being compressed. Less noise will usually cause either less bandwidth used for the same quality or better quality for the same bandwidth.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  >> Your video takes way, way more bandwidth than audio ever could. Then how did they know?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - na85 5y ago
    Perhaps they were mistaken.
ashtonkem 5y ago
The people complaining have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
- jrockway 5y ago
  I have an expensive microphone and picked "use original audio" in Zoom, which says that it takes more bandwidth and compute resources for the receivers. Of course, you could just not click that if people complained. I haven't heard anyone complain. Rather, everyone else also bought expensive microphones and enabled original audio, and the results are excellent. (Unsolicited tip: some sort of noise gate is really nice so that when you unmute, it doesn't raise the noise floor for the call. I ended up using Krisp, which seems to work quite well. Yeah, it's a subscription service for something your audio interface could theoretically do, and they market it as AI but it's not really AI and that's kind of scummy, but it doesn't take up any space on my desk, and it's not that expensive, so whatever. Sometimes it works too well -- people will apologize for their dog barking, or a fire truck driving by, and it's just met with confusion because that all got filtered out.)
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  How did they know? I didn't tell them, "I'm about to switch to the microphone", I switched to the microphone and they told me to stop and they claimed it was using all their bandwidth and to go back to using the phone instead of the microphone. I'll take the downvotes, that's fine, but how did the people complaining know I had switched to the microphone and what were they complaining about?
  - darkerside 5y ago
    How did they even know you had switched to a microphone if you didn't tell them? How did they know to blame it?
    - rufus_foreman 5y ago
      That's what I'm asking too, how did they know? I get no answer.
mcstafford 5y ago
> people complained that [my microphone] was taking up all their bandwidth That's not how I expect your choice of mic to affect anyone else's experience. It would surprise me if additional network load is part of what happens.
spoonjim 5y ago
This makes as much sense as astrology.

ashtonkem 5y ago

> Audio, audio, audio... It doesn't matter how good or good looking you are if I can't understand any of your eloquence. Using microphone on your phone or webcam may or may not be adequate, you should test this. There is test call functionality in almost every web conferencing software. If you’re going to be permanently remote, consider buying a low end podcasting or streaming setup. The quality will be fantastic comparative to cheaper options, and it won’t be that expensive to buy.

zwkrt 5y ago
Especially considering the recent post on HN showing that higher quality audio makes you more influential
KozmoNau7 5y ago
I have a couple of decent microphones, a mixer and mic stands, which were bought second-hand primarily for karaoke at parties. I've got all the input gear, another friend has a big PA setup, good fun. Most of the time, those mics and the mixer just live in a bag in my closet, so I thought "why not use them?" The sound quality from an AKG D5 (a decent, but not fancy mic) through a small mixer with a bit of compression applied is just miles ahead of anything you could get from a headset or a webcam mic. It is a little hard to avoid getting the mic in the picture, but with a bit of creativity, it works well enough when placed just above the top of the frame.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Even just some basic Behringer stuff does well for spoken audio. I don’t bother to keep the mic out of frame though; it never crossed my mind.
  - KozmoNau7 5y ago
    My mixer is a small Behringer QX1002USB. Two mic inputs, parametric EQ and one-knob compressors. You can crank them and get that radio host imposing bassy voice, if you want. It's amazingly good and versatile for such an inexpensive piece of gear.

rsyring 5y ago

> Don't insult the interviewer If you are the type of person who insults others at work, please...please insult me in the interview. It's so much better to find out this type of thing earlier rather than later.

xmprt 5y ago
I had an interview once where I felt like the interviewer really didn't even know the answer to the question they were asking. I was surprised because of how confidently they were giving me the wrong answer. Instead of insulting them I just took it as a red flag to not work there. Or maybe re-interview a few years later.
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  > confidently they were giving me the wrong answer This cuts both ways. Interviewers are not by default right. So likewise an interviewer that doesn't know what he's talking and doubles down on it, I'd rather find that out at the interviewer because it points to a dysfunctional organization.
  - pbhjpbhj 5y ago
    Seems like exactly the sort of "trick" an interviewer might try to use: 'can this person correct someone in authority who is blatantly wrong?'. Most organisations, it seems, would be served well by people who constructively handle bullshit/misunderstanding from senior people; for some it's absolutely vital.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Mind games, great sign that the company will be fun to work for
    - salamanderman 5y ago
      It's gone both ways for me. I had one interview where the interviewer got very mad at me, and another where the interviewer was very impressed and was pleased to learn something. I got an offer from the latter company, and accepted.

bonestamp2 5y ago

> Audio, audio, audio Yes. Even in television broadcasting, they consider audio the most important element. You can got a few seconds without the picture as long as there's audio. For an interview... we're over a year into the pandemic, if you don't have your audio quality figured out by now then you are not getting the job. I tell the person right away at the start of the interview if their audio is not good, giving them the benefit of the doubt to fix it.

wott 5y ago
> Even in television broadcasting, they consider audio the most important element. You can got a few seconds without the picture as long as there's audio. I don't know who 'they' are because that's unfortunately opposite to what I have been witnessing for 1 year. Utterly useless but always present pictures, and a terrible, janky sound has become the standard of remote interview/consulting on TVs. Also don't forget that the new generation of field reporters is the generation who grew up used to favour convenience over quality, so they don't see a problem delivering lives which are barely understandable and, even worse, recorded reports which absolutely should be subtitled (the combo facial mask + bad sound take + bad Internet sound transmission) but which aren't. Even worse, even on the national radio (the French equivalent of the BBC) which is supposed to have top sound standards; they obviously started using Internet-based public solutions streaming and they didn't give a damn about the sound: very bad and unstable quality, a LOT of lag causing a catastrophic mess of interactions, unreliable (connections very frequently dropping). It's a blessing when they have to drop to phone as they had been doing for decades, at least you know what to expect and there is no lag. Apparently they didn't consider the pro solutions which have been in use for 10-15 years (even my local associative radio had one!), which gave good sound with no lag, and which are a perfect fit at least for regulars; no, they all went using the crappy public app of the month...
- bonestamp2 5y ago
  > I don't know who 'they' are because that's unfortunately opposite to what I have been witnessing for 1 year. Agreed. I was speaking from an academic perspective, and you're right -- this past year has been terrible. It seems that all best practices have gone out the window as everyone tries to figure out how to do remotes with consumer grade tools. My point was, even in a medium that we mostly consider visual, audio is still more important to communicating the message than the picture. We can take this (pre-pandemic) best practice from television broadcasting and apply it to zoom conferences/interviews.

cbanek 5y ago

Good audio is really important. It's hard to be taken seriously when they can't understand you. And good audio quality definitely gives you more presence and relatability. I feel like it's the modern equivalent of being well spoken. I got an XLR microphone with a boom arm during the pandemic, and I've also gone full OBS for zoom meetings. It's nice to be able to draw on the screen, share my screen or a picture during a meeting, without having to share screen.

tkgally 5y ago
I also bought a microphone with a boom arm and shock mount (something like [1]). The sound quality seems good, and less typing noise is caught by the microphone than with a mic on the desk or monitor. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Condenser-Microphone-eirix-Adjustable-LiveStreaming/dp/B08ZCPHXPM/ https://www.amazon.com/Condenser-Microphone-eirix-Adjustable...
ProZsolt 5y ago
> I've also gone full OBS for zoom meetings. It's nice to be able to draw on the screen, share my screen or a picture during a meeting, without having to share screen. It sounds awesome. Could you describe it in more details?
- cbanek 5y ago
  OBS Studio (runs on linux, mac, windows) has the virtual webcam. This allows you to make your video output into a webcam device to hook up to any video software. Then you can do all the normal stuff like in OBS, like putting images on, overlays, animations, screen sharing, movies, etc.

skatanski 5y ago

> make sure you have piece and quiet I think I’m ok, when some life trickles through, while I’m interviewing others. With people not always having the comfort of a separate room to hide in. A remote setup with 2 toddlers running around is sometimes a necessity. And I wouldn’t want to reject someone solely on that basis.

lmilcin 5y ago
Peace and quiet is so that you, candidate, can focus on the answers. I personally don't care if your kids organize the party in the same room, but I care if it causes you, candidate, to not be able to fully focus on the interview and then me, the interviewer, to have trouble understanding whether your behavior was due to disturbance. Interviewing is an expensive investment. I spend a lot of time doing the interview and I want to use what little time we have to the fullest extent.

philjackson 5y ago

Please tell us how exactly the candidate insulted you!

lmilcin 5y ago
Couple of months ago I got a candidate that, if you just looked at his CV, was well overqualified for the position. We were looking for a senior Java dev, we got a guy who had two degrees, 25 years of experience, and started no less than 3 companies. He also never sticked to anything for more than 2 years. The insults started with his first sentence, before he or we even got a chance to greet each other. We had some conferencing issues, the company just changed conferencing technology. In the previous any person could start the meeting but in the new one only the person who set up the meeting could start it. So there was some commotion to change the room. When we joined (about 4-5 minutes after planned start) he said something to the effect that we must be new to this interviewing thing. Nevermind, I continue the interview. I ask him why he wants to work as a developer, given so much experience. He said he hasn't been programming a lot recently and wants to "dirty his hands" again. Hmm... So we go to the technical part where he started manufacturing some false answers and after I pointed out what he says is factually incorrect he decided to critique the difficulty of questions he was getting. I explained that we give same questions to all candidates for the position. I reminded I said at the start that candidates are not expected to know answers to all questions and that it is perfectly fine to tell us and to skip to the next question. I sometimes tell the candidates (jokingly) that I give 5 points for telling me he doesn't know the answer. Though I did not say this in this case. It only got downhill from there after couple more questions. After he gave another nonsense answer I did not say anything but he looked at me and said "WHAT NOW!" And then started tirade that I am not qualified to interview him and can we maybe set up an interview directly with my manager.
- solarengineer 5y ago
  At my employer, we deliberately have a junior person interview senior candidates. It helps us understand how stuck the candidate is about their seniority, whether they can explain something to an interviewer who clearly doesn't have the same exposure as the candidate.

Aeolun 5y ago

> It doesn't look good if are jumping from one meeting to the interview to another meeting. My day is full of other responsibilities. If you don’t like that I don’t think we’ll be a match regardless. That said, I’d like to add. Nr 5: Do not use a custom zoom video background, seriously, I do not want to see you sitting in the middle of a city with people walking by, repeating the same pattern every 10s. Eventually I end up paying more attention to that guy with the hat than you.

lmilcin 5y ago
> My day is full of other responsibilities. If you don’t like that I don’t think we’ll be a match regardless. Why are you looking for another job then? Are you the type that is just all motion and can't ever stop and focus on something properly? Why do you want to join our company? If you want to join us why is this interview that you have with us less important than the two meetings you have around the time? Yes, you are right, we would probably not be a right match. We are looking for candidates that want to get the job. Imagine you ask a girl for a date. You are 2 minutes late telling her you had to clean up your flat. Then at the end of the meeting you say you can't stay longer because you need to do some shopping. Two perfectly valid reasons and 2 minutes late is not that much late in itself. But if I was the girl I would think "this guy is probably not a good match, he just doesn't care about me".
- buzzwordninja 5y ago
  What are you talking about? People are probably taking time off out of their workday for the interview. They might very well have other meetings, especially is they are in a senior position. Taking their current job responsibilities seriously is a good sign for when they'll later work for your company.
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    That isn't how I see it. I don't want you to work for me if you don't want to work for me. If you do not want to work for me, that is fine. I don't mind. But if you come to interview I want to see that you really want to work for me. You, yourself, probably would want to see the company wants to hire you rather than being completely lukewarm about it. People want to see they are taken seriously and they are wanted. Would you come to a company that organized your interview in some dinky place in the basement with unkempt junior dev who got late to the meeting and at the prescribed time tells you he doesn't have more time for you and you are maybe going to hear from them? Why do you think companies like Google pamper their candidates and later developers at every possible occasion?

Doxin 5y ago

A great thing to set up for yourself is audio feedback. Hearing yourself back with the levels as they are in the outgoing mix basically eliminates half of the talking-over-each-other problems. It's quite amazing how much it improves communications.