4 ms·

My worst tech interview was with me as the interviewer. An applicant was a friend of a coworker and forwarded the candidate's resume to HR. HR set up a round of

My worst tech interview was with me as the interviewer. An applicant was a friend of a coworker and forwarded the candidate's resume to HR. HR set up a round of interviews. He went through the five interviews. After, we met for 20 minutes to express our thoughts. Pretty uniformly we agreed: the candidate was middling and we'd be better off waiting for someone better. We rejected him. A day later the rejected candidate called my phone (how did he get it?) and said something like: "Hey, this is <candidate>. Why the hell wasn't I given an offer? The recruiter said that you (that is me, personally) had rejected me. Explain why." He insisted he had done great and we should reconsider. The candidate hadn't reacted well to the rejection, and rather than being the firewall that shields the interviewers, the HR guy passed the buck and blamed me. We didn't reconsider, and I gave the HR guy hell about it.

antisthenes 5y ago
Out of curiosity, what made him middling and not good? Surely someone at your org could have determined that it's better to stop wasting each other's time before going through 5 interviews? Sounds like there's more to the story than you're having us believe and the candidate had very good reasons to be upset (the exact wording and tone he used was not appropriate). If he insisted he had done great, I venture to say that he was led on during interviews and not given honest feedback.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  What made him middling? It was 15 years ago so I don't recall the details. The usual reasons are things like: didn't answer some questions well, or maybe their resume oversold their accomplishments (eg, "Proficient in verilog, C, C++, pascal, fortran, javascript, java" "OK, describe one of the programs you have written in java." "Well, uh, this one time there was this program that was already written, and I had to add some better error messages when it received bad input.") Why did he go through the full round of interviews? Because (1) he was referred by an existing employee so interviewer were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and (2) he wasn't terrible, just nothing special; it sometimes happens that one person gets a low impression and the others think they are great and we hire them anyway. You surmise I must be telling part of the story because his reaction doesn't fit my description of the process. Yes, that is exactly the point of telling the story -- his response wasn't appropriate. Had I felt he had a reason to react that way, I wouldn't be retelling the story.

antisthenes 5y ago

Out of curiosity, what made him middling and not good? Surely someone at your org could have determined that it's better to stop wasting each other's time before going through 5 interviews? Sounds like there's more to the story than you're having us believe and the candidate had very good reasons to be upset (the exact wording and tone he used was not appropriate). If he insisted he had done great, I venture to say that he was led on during interviews and not given honest feedback.

tasty_freeze 5y ago
What made him middling? It was 15 years ago so I don't recall the details. The usual reasons are things like: didn't answer some questions well, or maybe their resume oversold their accomplishments (eg, "Proficient in verilog, C, C++, pascal, fortran, javascript, java" "OK, describe one of the programs you have written in java." "Well, uh, this one time there was this program that was already written, and I had to add some better error messages when it received bad input.") Why did he go through the full round of interviews? Because (1) he was referred by an existing employee so interviewer were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and (2) he wasn't terrible, just nothing special; it sometimes happens that one person gets a low impression and the others think they are great and we hire them anyway. You surmise I must be telling part of the story because his reaction doesn't fit my description of the process. Yes, that is exactly the point of telling the story -- his response wasn't appropriate. Had I felt he had a reason to react that way, I wouldn't be retelling the story.