3 ms·

There are tons of alternatives, anywhere from take home tests to just gauging their general experience and answers to some technical questions.

lisper 5y ago
Personally I like the idea of hiring a prospective employee as a contractor to do a small but real task. That will give you a more reliable read than any interview. I don’t understand why this is not a more common practice.
- oconnor663 5y ago
  That does seem like a great approach when it works, but I expect it wouldn't work for the majority of people/positions. A few thoughts off the top of my head: - You need to be available for contracting work, but many people prefer to go from one full-time job to another. Or they might not want to leave their current job, unless they get a much better offer. - You need to be in the right location. Relocating without a job offer is risky. - Especially strong candidates are likely to get many offers when they go looking, which is a good position to be in for salary negotiations. But work-as-interview arrangements make it hard to interview with more than one company at a time. - Anything resembling visa support is probably off the table.
Hermitian909 5y ago
> gauging their general experience and answers to some technical questions This plus a very easy coding question (think fizzbuzz) works really well at a small enough company that you can ensure that all interviewers: 1. Are far enough above the hiring bar that they can comfortably tell when other people are (people near the bar have a harder time distinguishing whether someone is a bit above or below the bar) 2. Are invested enough in the company to want to do a good job interviewing 3. Are thoughtful enough to gauge the competencies the company needs for the role. Those needs are not universal, I know developers who thrive in super technical no-nonsense roles who flounder in product-y work. If a company is very large or growing rapidly it is nearly impossible to guarantee these things. My experience is that companies that don't adopt something like the industry norms lose control of their hiring bar. In some cases this is fine (sometimes you need quantity, not quality) but if the business relied on that high technical bar there's generally a cascading effect of initiatives failing, good engineers leaving, and more initiatives failing because of it. I've seen this tank a few startups in the 50-100 engineer rage.

lisper 5y ago

Personally I like the idea of hiring a prospective employee as a contractor to do a small but real task. That will give you a more reliable read than any interview. I don’t understand why this is not a more common practice.

oconnor663 5y ago
That does seem like a great approach when it works, but I expect it wouldn't work for the majority of people/positions. A few thoughts off the top of my head: - You need to be available for contracting work, but many people prefer to go from one full-time job to another. Or they might not want to leave their current job, unless they get a much better offer. - You need to be in the right location. Relocating without a job offer is risky. - Especially strong candidates are likely to get many offers when they go looking, which is a good position to be in for salary negotiations. But work-as-interview arrangements make it hard to interview with more than one company at a time. - Anything resembling visa support is probably off the table.

Hermitian909 5y ago

> gauging their general experience and answers to some technical questions This plus a very easy coding question (think fizzbuzz) works really well at a small enough company that you can ensure that all interviewers: 1. Are far enough above the hiring bar that they can comfortably tell when other people are (people near the bar have a harder time distinguishing whether someone is a bit above or below the bar) 2. Are invested enough in the company to want to do a good job interviewing 3. Are thoughtful enough to gauge the competencies the company needs for the role. Those needs are not universal, I know developers who thrive in super technical no-nonsense roles who flounder in product-y work. If a company is very large or growing rapidly it is nearly impossible to guarantee these things. My experience is that companies that don't adopt something like the industry norms lose control of their hiring bar. In some cases this is fine (sometimes you need quantity, not quality) but if the business relied on that high technical bar there's generally a cascading effect of initiatives failing, good engineers leaving, and more initiatives failing because of it. I've seen this tank a few startups in the 50-100 engineer rage.