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A brief screening chat with a principal engineer. A follow-up chat with the CEO. Then a day of one-on-one interviews with each principal engineer. Sentences 1+
by vanusa 5y ago
A brief screening chat with a principal engineer. A follow-up chat with the CEO. Then a day of one-on-one interviews with each principal engineer.
Sentences 1+2 together easily sound like a good chunk of a full day (considering breaks). As in, just from that description: "I don't know how long these 'brief' chats will take - sometimes they go on for hours and hours. And how many principal engineers? 2, 3, 4? I guess I'll find out when it all happens. So to be on the safe side, and considering time gaps, I'm going to essentially have to block of most of my day to talk with these people."
And then sentence 3 is another full day, by your own acknowledgement. Which won't be just any day, either:
"We will grill you on your core competencies, we’ll look at your github if you have one, and we will crawl all through those github repos that belong to you, we’ll look at projects you’ve created and worked on, both personal and professional, and we’ll ask penetrating questions about your past work."
So that's 2 days. Plus whatever other overhead before/after. What I'm trying to get at here is that - taken all factors together - some companies seem to have a cavalier attitude about accessing the candidate's time. I don't think that's your intention here. But it's something to be aware of.
So to be more charitable: you could do well to explicitly "timebox" the request for the candidate's time. Like this, for example:
"Round 1 (2 hours max) will consist of introductory chats with 2-3 principal engineers, and then with our CEO. Round 2, scheduled for another day, or spread over 2 days if that's easier for your, will consist of three 60-90 minute sessions again with the engineers, in which <blah, blah> but hopefully taking no more than 5 hours max."
The point is you should convey the impression that you understand that the candidate's time is extremely valuable to them (which of course it is). And not the opposite impression (as so many companies do), that the candidate's time is essentially "on tap".
- justinlloyd 5y agoI wasn't reading it that way. But I'll take the feedback and fix the text so that it isn't ambiguous. Generally our interview loop is a "brief chat", i.e. 15 to 20 minutes, a brief chat with the CEO, which might be anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour. Those two chats will happen on different days because there needs to be an internal discussion about "do we move forward with this candidate?" And then three or four principal engineers will speak with the candidate, for at most, 1 hour each, all on the same day. But that said, I also don't want to explicitly state "this is how long it will take" because it will depend on the candidate. I also didn't clarify anything further, other than asking questions, until you had stated your reasons, because I want it picked apart. We're aiming for a reasonably light touch interview, because we're aiming at senior people, who obviously won't have a lot of time, who we're also not expecting to do take home tests, or leetcode. Again, thanks for the feedback, we'll work on our delivery.
- vanusa 5y agoI appreciate your clarifications. And in eschewing brain teasers and leetcode, you're definitely on the right track.