4 ms·

Interviewing is hard, requires skills precisely zero people are trained to do, and has huge long-term upsides and downsides to a business. I'm a programmer. I

Interviewing is hard, requires skills precisely zero people are trained to do, and has huge long-term upsides and downsides to a business. I'm a programmer. I trained for years to do that. Then I'm asked to hire someone. A task I have zero experience or training at. Spoiler alert - any actual competence is a fluke. At my peak I was hiring maybe 2 or 3 people in a year. Mostly I hired people I'd heard about who came with a recommendation. Results varied. Most were OK, some were exceptional, some didn't last long. Some companies are hiring tens, hundreds or thousands of people a week. Presumably they have full-time interviewers. But "good judgement" isn't a scaleable property, so you end up with filters and processes to try and narrow the field to "good candidates". Maybe thats "must have degree", maybe that's leetcode problems. Hiring into a big company is painful. They have a process which probably makes no sense, adds little value, and appears to be arbitrary and doesn't lead to significantly different outcomes. But how else could it look? It's a sausage factory churning out sausages. Hiring into a small company can be turgid - they're a small company but it seems like everyone there has to sign off on the interview first. They're scared of making a mistake, so they never seem to get to a decision. Or it can be simple. There's one guy. He either likes you or not. He either thinks you can do the job or not. Takes an hour, and there's an offer on the table. But this guy hires 1 person every now and then, not 100 per week. Hiring us hard [1]. It should be done by professionals. There should be degree programs training people how to do it. But even then, companies growing at severe pace may as well just pick every 3rd CV and save themselves, and applicants, a lot of time and effort. Yes it would be random, but you shouldn't hire unlucky people anyway. [1] hiring for skilled people, where actual skills are hard to measure, to work in a team environment, where their output is disproportional to their rank, status of pay.

djmips 4y ago
Maybe I'm accidentally good at interviewing and hiring. At least, all my hires have worked out well. I've never hired anyone who didn't last long and all ended up being great. I don't trust 'professionals' to do that hiring. Maybe what I'm trying to say is we should train the people on the team on whatever it is they are missing in order to hire people better. The people on the team know best what they are looking for and what they need. It's not much different than being a GM at a pro sports team and drafting and getting free agents.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  I'm the same, I can't relate to the tons of posts I see about people struggling to filter for good candidates. I think part of it might be my autism. Since I can't read non-verbal communication I can't be "tricked" by it like a neurotypical person would. I have to consciously observe/analyze their non-verbal behavior in a totally unfeeling way. I would normally struggle detecting if someone was lying in a social setting, but with technical questions a person is either correct or incorrect.
- jiveturkey 4y ago
  that doesn’t make you good at interviewing! it might mean the opposite! you might be too loss averse
hotpotamus 4y ago
I think I've been fairly successful as an interviewer by having a few basic rules. Basically, do your homework, which I'm routinely surprised is so lacking in the adult world. For interviews, that means read their resume and probably have it with you in print form or other when you interview them. Print feels more sociable than staring at them over a laptop and clicking a bunch of keys while they talk - though I do type on video interviews. The resume should somewhat align with the job they're interviewing for - that's on HR to get that far. Basically, I want to know if the person is going to be OK to work with and isn't full of shit. Hopefully you can get that much out of an interview because otherwise they aren't really that useful. Basically I just ask a few normal interview questions mostly focusing on projects or accomplishments people have done. Cross reference with their resume and ask them about some points on it and make sure that their answers make sense. Ideally HR can verify that their work history at least matches their resume. I never interviewed that much, but as far as I know, I never had any serious bozos let through, so I think I did OK.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  As an interviewee I've always been flattered when the interviewer shows up with a copy of my resume covered in notes and we have a good conversation about my background. The most offended I've been in an interview was a senior manager who, despite having had the interview rescheduled for his schedule - pushed up by a week - still had apparently never glanced at my resume until he was sitting across from me, and repeatedly misread details, which made things even more awkward. I had spent probably 8 hours reading up about the company, the CEO, and this senior manager. I really wish I hadn't needed the job as badly as I did, because otherwise I would have stood up and asked to be shown out the second it was obvious he was reading my resume for the first time. It was deeply insulting.
- jeffrallen 4y ago
  +1 for paper, you can even point to things on their c.v. to direct their attention to something you want to discuss... this is a good way to put them at ease, after all, if they don't know their own c.v. what do they know?
sofixa 4y ago
Isn't it standard practice to have staff participating in interviews be trained for that? I would have thought it is given the gravity of the task. At my current job interviewer training is one of the mandatory (pretty sure it's the last one, but still) trainings as part of the onboarding process. It's a function of how distributed the interviewing process is, but even in a classical HR+hiring manager+team member process why wouldn't there be any training on what to do?

djmips 4y ago

Maybe I'm accidentally good at interviewing and hiring. At least, all my hires have worked out well. I've never hired anyone who didn't last long and all ended up being great. I don't trust 'professionals' to do that hiring. Maybe what I'm trying to say is we should train the people on the team on whatever it is they are missing in order to hire people better. The people on the team know best what they are looking for and what they need. It's not much different than being a GM at a pro sports team and drafting and getting free agents.

Consultant32452 4y ago
I'm the same, I can't relate to the tons of posts I see about people struggling to filter for good candidates. I think part of it might be my autism. Since I can't read non-verbal communication I can't be "tricked" by it like a neurotypical person would. I have to consciously observe/analyze their non-verbal behavior in a totally unfeeling way. I would normally struggle detecting if someone was lying in a social setting, but with technical questions a person is either correct or incorrect.
jiveturkey 4y ago
that doesn’t make you good at interviewing! it might mean the opposite! you might be too loss averse

hotpotamus 4y ago

I think I've been fairly successful as an interviewer by having a few basic rules. Basically, do your homework, which I'm routinely surprised is so lacking in the adult world. For interviews, that means read their resume and probably have it with you in print form or other when you interview them. Print feels more sociable than staring at them over a laptop and clicking a bunch of keys while they talk - though I do type on video interviews. The resume should somewhat align with the job they're interviewing for - that's on HR to get that far. Basically, I want to know if the person is going to be OK to work with and isn't full of shit. Hopefully you can get that much out of an interview because otherwise they aren't really that useful. Basically I just ask a few normal interview questions mostly focusing on projects or accomplishments people have done. Cross reference with their resume and ask them about some points on it and make sure that their answers make sense. Ideally HR can verify that their work history at least matches their resume. I never interviewed that much, but as far as I know, I never had any serious bozos let through, so I think I did OK.

KennyBlanken 4y ago
As an interviewee I've always been flattered when the interviewer shows up with a copy of my resume covered in notes and we have a good conversation about my background. The most offended I've been in an interview was a senior manager who, despite having had the interview rescheduled for his schedule - pushed up by a week - still had apparently never glanced at my resume until he was sitting across from me, and repeatedly misread details, which made things even more awkward. I had spent probably 8 hours reading up about the company, the CEO, and this senior manager. I really wish I hadn't needed the job as badly as I did, because otherwise I would have stood up and asked to be shown out the second it was obvious he was reading my resume for the first time. It was deeply insulting.
jeffrallen 4y ago
+1 for paper, you can even point to things on their c.v. to direct their attention to something you want to discuss... this is a good way to put them at ease, after all, if they don't know their own c.v. what do they know?

sofixa 4y ago

Isn't it standard practice to have staff participating in interviews be trained for that? I would have thought it is given the gravity of the task. At my current job interviewer training is one of the mandatory (pretty sure it's the last one, but still) trainings as part of the onboarding process. It's a function of how distributed the interviewing process is, but even in a classical HR+hiring manager+team member process why wouldn't there be any training on what to do?