8 ms·

Taking the initial phone screen with candidates

48 points by davidgomes 4y ago

paulpauper 4y ago
And the first call doesn’t have to be very long. 20 to 30 minutes is enough time. The main goal is setting the stage for candidates: That seems very long. I cannot recall ever being on the phone that long at once.
- crysin 4y ago
  I’ve been doing the job hunt grind since being laid off in early December. If my initial phone screen is with a recruiter it’s usually 15 to 20 minutes. They usually just reconfirm what’s on my resume and validate I can legally work in the US. If my initial screen is with a hiring manager it’s always been over 45 minutes long. One screen I had which was over zoom, mind you I had no prior contact with anyone at this company other than applying to a job posting, turned into a technical interview that went on for over an hour and the call had been scheduled for only 30 minutes, that was fun…
  - charlie0 4y ago
    Did you get an offer?
- jameshart 4y ago
  I’m not sure what to make of this. If this is coming from the perspective of a young person who has only ever been in an academic environment and never worked in a collaborative job, I would say “okay, well welcome to work, where half an hour is considered a ‘brief call’. Sorry if it comes as a surprise, but you’ll get used to it” If it’s coming from someone who has workplace experience.. then I am both confused as to how you have managed this feat, and also surprised that you would be unaware that other people consider half an hour to an hour to be a fairly normal length for a conversation.
higeorge13 4y ago
As a candidate i consider having the EM taking the first call a positive sign for the company i am interviewing to. As a hiring manager, i would even take the opportunity to quickly assess whether their experience and cv is close to reality. Hence i suggest the author also asking candidates to quickly go through their recent experience and describe in some adequate technical depth something they are proud of. From my experience this one question can be a very good filter for candidates that can be a good company and role fit.
- Kwpolska 4y ago
  The place to go through the candidate’s recent experience is the interview, not the phone screen. The point of phone screens is to quickly filter out obviously inadequate candidates.
  - blitzar 4y ago
    The place to go through to quickly filter out obviously inadequate candidates is the CV.
    - higeorge13 4y ago
      Cv is usually 90% buzzwords and things the person didn’t actually contribute to. Why not figure this out on the first call with him, asking a couple experience related questions instead of letting hr do this (but have zero idea how to interpret them)? And obviously you are supposed to have read and filtered candidates from their CVs, and have this final step before committing to them for the next steps in the process.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      This never made much sense to me. Either the candidate could be filtered out by a better application process. Or if the candidate is straight up lying, they wont be filtered out at this step. At least in my experience job hunting, a lot of filtering at the call screen stage happens when the recruiter misunderstands the job (e.g. conversations like: How much experience do you have doing X, where X is clearly unrelated to the job you thought you were applying for)
Kwpolska 4y ago
This “list of resources” email seems intimidating. As a candidate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Should I read all the blog posts and watch all 7 talks, each of which about 30 minutes long? The manager says they will ask what the candidate read or watched, which is unreasonable to me. I have a full-time job, and yours is not the only company I’m applying to, there is no time for me to read and watch everyone’s propaganda.
- thinking4real 4y ago
  Honestly, this is kinda cringey. You’re a stranger to me at this point. You think I should spend potentially hours of homework studying you, in the off chance that this phone screen will land a job? I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average. How many hours is a candidate expected to do homework for you? What are you doing as an equivalent investment in the candidate? Maybe you should stop and reflect why no one is responding to this email and what that means…
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    A stranger that took time out of his busy schedule to offer to answer all your questions
  - brd529 4y ago
    I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Personally they would fail my initial screen for employers unless they were very upfront about paying a quite higher than market salary. If you send me that reading list and everyone else is just doing normal interviews without all the homework, you are asking for a lot more and I expect that trend to continue after you hire me, so I'll expect a lot more out of you. So far I haven't found anyone with these high expectations willing to pay more (got plenty of people who want me to drive into their office wearing a suit for less than what remote jobs are offering for example), generally the offers tend to be lower than normal companies with standard expectations. Another clue is the "we are looking for passionate people, they need to be excited" stuff, those things in tandem smell like a low baller.
thinking4real 4y ago
You know good on you for doing the screen instead of an hr standin. Someone who will also happily ask what questions there are, but then fail to be able to answer anything but trivial non questions which are the same for all screens But honestly, what’s actually the point of this call? “What do we do here? How do we work? What will the rest of the interview process look like?” Is any of that really worth it’s own call? The interview process should already have been established in the damn job posting. Why 99% of job postings in an industry that prides itself on intelligence is beyond me… It’s not complicated. X rounds, y and z hoops, done. As for what we do and how we work, I imagine you can either express it in the posting or you’ll need a real call I just don’t see the point of this step that everyone wants to do. It seems like a giant waste of time, inefficiency, and I can’t help but feel it’s interviewers flexing some weird ego thing
- skibidibipiti 4y ago
  [dead]
- ozim 4y ago
  Unfortunately no one reads job descriptions. Basically second half of 2022 I was doing initial calls. All the information has to be repeated at least twice. I always sent an email to ask for best time to have 15min intro call. People send CVs to multiple companies and even if I sent email that they could prepare by checking the posting lots of time I was having the same conversation. People don’t care about my job posting, lots of times I have to sell them position/company. Initial call is also to make sure they understand the offer like compensation/perks and work arrangement. Even if it is written out in the job posting people had sometimes weird ideas that needs to be addressed before we waste everyone’s time.
  - thinking4real 4y ago
    Ok and do you know why people don’t read job postings? Because the attitude you and OP and honestly nearly 100% of companies and hirers out there take is “fuck it, we don’t want to do this the right way. we don’t want to respect potential employees time, we want to be vague about what we’re seeking and unreasonably selective as we put candidates through a meat grinder” No I won’t read the 500th repetitive job posting with business hr speak and no clue what actually lies ahead I’m not blaming you in particular, this is an industry wide thing. But the problems didn’t start with people seeking a career, they started with entitled hiring practices that are more often than not outright abusive
ktrnka 4y ago
I made a similar change in my last role and it was a great experience. The big difference is that I took about 30 minutes and also asked a bit about work on their resume to check basic things like whether their work had actually been deployed and used, awareness of user impact, double checking technical experience, etc. The biggest benefit of taking more ownership of your own hiring pipelines is that you can use the results of each stage to improve the others. If many fail the formal tech assessment, you can dive into more tech in the screen or adjust the minimum qualifications. If candidates are rude in the full loop, you can check for that earlier. Or if most candidates pass the full loop, you can loosen up on earlier stages or reduce the loop
plugin-baby 4y ago
After working in software industry for 20 years I’ve never had a phone screen. Is my experience unusual?
- dudul 4y ago
  How is "20 years in the industry" relevant to your observation/question? How many times have you changed job during these 20 years? When was the most recent time? If the last time you took a new job was 15 years ago then yeah, not surprised.
- ajb 4y ago
  Many companies do a phone screen for cold applicants, if you have got jobs by networking you might have skipped them.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I believe that initial phone screens are de rigueur, these days. They seem to usually be done by recruiters or HR people. In my experience, I’ve always done quite well, with initial phone interviews. It’s usually when I first encounter a tech person, that the process goes off the rails. I doubt it had anything to do with my tech cred. I have a very young-sounding voice, and I’m personable and enthusiastic. I learned to quickly establish my age, up front, and that seemed to reduce my effectiveness at initial screens, but also reduced the “techie no likee boomer” thing that seemed to happen, later. In any case, it’s all water under the bridge, these days. I just stopped looking for work, and everyone is happier.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
  So what is the first point of contact from you or from the company?
jillesvangurp 4y ago
This is great. All hiring should work like this. The issue with many companies is that they alienate good candidates and routinely waste a lot of time on bad candidates. Basically, you waste several rounds of interviews before the candidate even gets to talk to somebody that has decision power (or even a clue). It's very expensive to reject people late into the process. And it's stupid to have good candidates walk away from you because your process is prioritizing your convenience at the cost of their time. The trick is dealing with the signal to noise ratio. If you have recruiters feeding you an endless stream of mediocre, vaguely buzzword compatible resumes, it's not feasible to stay on top of that. IMHO, that kind of process is in any case unlikely to produce good candidates other than by accident. I've interviewed plenty of people this way and you can end up wasting a lot of time like this. The way out is to fix the lead pipeline to be less desperate than that. I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference. The next best thing is people applying to a job and reaching out. If they look remotely legit, talk to them. Ten minutes is enough to figure people out. This doesn't actually happen a lot. If you must use recruiters, make them work for a living and push back when they waste your time with a lot of poorly fitting candidates. Buzzword compatibility is not good enough. Make sure they can tell the difference between a good and a bad candidate. There's no better way than selling good people on the notion of working for you than just escalating really quickly and having them talk to a decision maker. Have a quick call to verify key assumptions, fit, and expectation management (salary, skills, seniority, eagerness, etc.). First impressions matter. If that's all fine, immediately set up interviews with key stake holders and make an offer if everyone still agrees. Coding interviews don't really factor into this process. I don't use them and I decline to take them. If you've had multiple conversations and then still are wondering if the person can actually code, you messed up. Badly. If you do have a coding interview as part of your process and you get people reluctant to take those, escalate and talk to them immediately. IMHO nothing qualifies a person more than being mature enough to walk away from a bad deal. Chances are that those are the best leads coming through your filters. And you can find out at the cost of a ten minute screening call.
- floydian10 4y ago
  > I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference. I completely agree. However, at my current job, referring someone for an open position just means throwing their CV in the mix along with everyone else's. There is no way to bypass even a single step in the weeks-long hiring process. And I suspect this is slowly becoming the norm.
lawgimenez 4y ago
Damn I have no idea what to do if I receive that email with all the tech blogs and talks.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  Open a few of them and see if you are interested in the type of work this company seems to pride itself on.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
imagine reading all that shit just to be filtered by an @no-reply email after a leetcode test.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Yeah, it’s like learning something at school only for it not to come up on the test. What a waste of time.
the_gipsy 4y ago
I used to do that when I did hiring, with a very positive impression. Both sides can instantly get a feeling and can cut it off early if the expectations are wrong. HR can't really do that.
ExxKA 4y ago
I would advocate screening with the very technical questions up front. There is no need to drag a large set of people through a funnel that only eliminates them at the very end on the hard requirements. I built Trovinto.com to generate technical questions and evaluate candidates answers on a quick questionnaire. Save everyone's time, and when you know there is a fit on skills then I think you should spend even longer on the soft questions. Getting a new job is a huge decision, not something that should be concluded in 3 hours over 2 interviews and a call.
petodo 4y ago
What's your spam filter success rate with that email containing that many links? Whole email seems unnecessary, also initial phone call lasting 20-30 minutes is not short by any means. But respect for doing interview instead HR, I despise clueless HR you can't talk to and where you need to switch to chatbot mode answering phrases they wanna hear based on few keywords they say instead of having actual conversation.
- munchor 4y ago
  (Author here) I think the spam filter success is 100% (I am on the call and confirm with candidates that they receive it), but I agree I need to make the email much shorter and more appealing. I also plan to try 15-20 minutes for this soon.
fdye 4y ago
Do this same thing for my hiring pipeline. Pretty much same percentages for how I weed down resumes, etc. I usually go a bit over an hour as I like to discuss the company, our tech, and get specific about what the job will entail. At the end I ask if they are still interested, and if yes we dig into their specific history, questions, etc. I also make crystal clear the salary range and benefits and get a verbal confirmation this band is acceptable to the candidate. We don't have to decide right then, but we need to be in the same ballpark and they need to understand the upper end isn't likely to move. No point in getting through a long interview process and then having to pass cause they want to much money. Then I make a decision if the candidate is a waste of time for my engineers to proceed on a technical evaluation. Three rounds, with three separate people on the team, usually only two of those rounds are true coding, one is more technical discussion/team fit. Anyone in the hiring committee can veto for essentially any reason. Works as well as any process I've seen in my decade+ career. Three rounds is also coincidentally my max to give a company I am interviewing. If you can't make up your mind on a candidate after 3 rounds then you don't know what your doing. This 5+ round crap FAANG convinced us all was good is such a waste of time and honestly costs more in time suck then just giving the candidate a shot.

48 points by davidgomes 4y ago

And the first call doesn’t have to be very long. 20 to 30 minutes is enough time. The main goal is setting the stage for candidates: That seems very long. I cannot recall ever being on the phone that long at once.

crysin 4y ago
I’ve been doing the job hunt grind since being laid off in early December. If my initial phone screen is with a recruiter it’s usually 15 to 20 minutes. They usually just reconfirm what’s on my resume and validate I can legally work in the US. If my initial screen is with a hiring manager it’s always been over 45 minutes long. One screen I had which was over zoom, mind you I had no prior contact with anyone at this company other than applying to a job posting, turned into a technical interview that went on for over an hour and the call had been scheduled for only 30 minutes, that was fun…
- charlie0 4y ago
  Did you get an offer?
jameshart 4y ago
I’m not sure what to make of this. If this is coming from the perspective of a young person who has only ever been in an academic environment and never worked in a collaborative job, I would say “okay, well welcome to work, where half an hour is considered a ‘brief call’. Sorry if it comes as a surprise, but you’ll get used to it” If it’s coming from someone who has workplace experience.. then I am both confused as to how you have managed this feat, and also surprised that you would be unaware that other people consider half an hour to an hour to be a fairly normal length for a conversation.

higeorge13 4y ago

As a candidate i consider having the EM taking the first call a positive sign for the company i am interviewing to. As a hiring manager, i would even take the opportunity to quickly assess whether their experience and cv is close to reality. Hence i suggest the author also asking candidates to quickly go through their recent experience and describe in some adequate technical depth something they are proud of. From my experience this one question can be a very good filter for candidates that can be a good company and role fit.

Kwpolska 4y ago
The place to go through the candidate’s recent experience is the interview, not the phone screen. The point of phone screens is to quickly filter out obviously inadequate candidates.
- blitzar 4y ago
  The place to go through to quickly filter out obviously inadequate candidates is the CV.
  - higeorge13 4y ago
    Cv is usually 90% buzzwords and things the person didn’t actually contribute to. Why not figure this out on the first call with him, asking a couple experience related questions instead of letting hr do this (but have zero idea how to interpret them)? And obviously you are supposed to have read and filtered candidates from their CVs, and have this final step before committing to them for the next steps in the process.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    This never made much sense to me. Either the candidate could be filtered out by a better application process. Or if the candidate is straight up lying, they wont be filtered out at this step. At least in my experience job hunting, a lot of filtering at the call screen stage happens when the recruiter misunderstands the job (e.g. conversations like: How much experience do you have doing X, where X is clearly unrelated to the job you thought you were applying for)

Kwpolska 4y ago

This “list of resources” email seems intimidating. As a candidate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Should I read all the blog posts and watch all 7 talks, each of which about 30 minutes long? The manager says they will ask what the candidate read or watched, which is unreasonable to me. I have a full-time job, and yours is not the only company I’m applying to, there is no time for me to read and watch everyone’s propaganda.

thinking4real 4y ago
Honestly, this is kinda cringey. You’re a stranger to me at this point. You think I should spend potentially hours of homework studying you, in the off chance that this phone screen will land a job? I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average. How many hours is a candidate expected to do homework for you? What are you doing as an equivalent investment in the candidate? Maybe you should stop and reflect why no one is responding to this email and what that means…
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  A stranger that took time out of his busy schedule to offer to answer all your questions
- brd529 4y ago
  I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”
- willcipriano 4y ago
  Personally they would fail my initial screen for employers unless they were very upfront about paying a quite higher than market salary. If you send me that reading list and everyone else is just doing normal interviews without all the homework, you are asking for a lot more and I expect that trend to continue after you hire me, so I'll expect a lot more out of you. So far I haven't found anyone with these high expectations willing to pay more (got plenty of people who want me to drive into their office wearing a suit for less than what remote jobs are offering for example), generally the offers tend to be lower than normal companies with standard expectations. Another clue is the "we are looking for passionate people, they need to be excited" stuff, those things in tandem smell like a low baller.

thinking4real 4y ago

You know good on you for doing the screen instead of an hr standin. Someone who will also happily ask what questions there are, but then fail to be able to answer anything but trivial non questions which are the same for all screens But honestly, what’s actually the point of this call? “What do we do here? How do we work? What will the rest of the interview process look like?” Is any of that really worth it’s own call? The interview process should already have been established in the damn job posting. Why 99% of job postings in an industry that prides itself on intelligence is beyond me… It’s not complicated. X rounds, y and z hoops, done. As for what we do and how we work, I imagine you can either express it in the posting or you’ll need a real call I just don’t see the point of this step that everyone wants to do. It seems like a giant waste of time, inefficiency, and I can’t help but feel it’s interviewers flexing some weird ego thing

skibidibipiti 4y ago
[dead]
ozim 4y ago
Unfortunately no one reads job descriptions. Basically second half of 2022 I was doing initial calls. All the information has to be repeated at least twice. I always sent an email to ask for best time to have 15min intro call. People send CVs to multiple companies and even if I sent email that they could prepare by checking the posting lots of time I was having the same conversation. People don’t care about my job posting, lots of times I have to sell them position/company. Initial call is also to make sure they understand the offer like compensation/perks and work arrangement. Even if it is written out in the job posting people had sometimes weird ideas that needs to be addressed before we waste everyone’s time.
- thinking4real 4y ago
  Ok and do you know why people don’t read job postings? Because the attitude you and OP and honestly nearly 100% of companies and hirers out there take is “fuck it, we don’t want to do this the right way. we don’t want to respect potential employees time, we want to be vague about what we’re seeking and unreasonably selective as we put candidates through a meat grinder” No I won’t read the 500th repetitive job posting with business hr speak and no clue what actually lies ahead I’m not blaming you in particular, this is an industry wide thing. But the problems didn’t start with people seeking a career, they started with entitled hiring practices that are more often than not outright abusive

ktrnka 4y ago

I made a similar change in my last role and it was a great experience. The big difference is that I took about 30 minutes and also asked a bit about work on their resume to check basic things like whether their work had actually been deployed and used, awareness of user impact, double checking technical experience, etc. The biggest benefit of taking more ownership of your own hiring pipelines is that you can use the results of each stage to improve the others. If many fail the formal tech assessment, you can dive into more tech in the screen or adjust the minimum qualifications. If candidates are rude in the full loop, you can check for that earlier. Or if most candidates pass the full loop, you can loosen up on earlier stages or reduce the loop

plugin-baby 4y ago

After working in software industry for 20 years I’ve never had a phone screen. Is my experience unusual?

dudul 4y ago
How is "20 years in the industry" relevant to your observation/question? How many times have you changed job during these 20 years? When was the most recent time? If the last time you took a new job was 15 years ago then yeah, not surprised.
ajb 4y ago
Many companies do a phone screen for cold applicants, if you have got jobs by networking you might have skipped them.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I believe that initial phone screens are de rigueur, these days. They seem to usually be done by recruiters or HR people. In my experience, I’ve always done quite well, with initial phone interviews. It’s usually when I first encounter a tech person, that the process goes off the rails. I doubt it had anything to do with my tech cred. I have a very young-sounding voice, and I’m personable and enthusiastic. I learned to quickly establish my age, up front, and that seemed to reduce my effectiveness at initial screens, but also reduced the “techie no likee boomer” thing that seemed to happen, later. In any case, it’s all water under the bridge, these days. I just stopped looking for work, and everyone is happier.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 4y ago
So what is the first point of contact from you or from the company?

jillesvangurp 4y ago

This is great. All hiring should work like this. The issue with many companies is that they alienate good candidates and routinely waste a lot of time on bad candidates. Basically, you waste several rounds of interviews before the candidate even gets to talk to somebody that has decision power (or even a clue). It's very expensive to reject people late into the process. And it's stupid to have good candidates walk away from you because your process is prioritizing your convenience at the cost of their time. The trick is dealing with the signal to noise ratio. If you have recruiters feeding you an endless stream of mediocre, vaguely buzzword compatible resumes, it's not feasible to stay on top of that. IMHO, that kind of process is in any case unlikely to produce good candidates other than by accident. I've interviewed plenty of people this way and you can end up wasting a lot of time like this. The way out is to fix the lead pipeline to be less desperate than that. I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference. The next best thing is people applying to a job and reaching out. If they look remotely legit, talk to them. Ten minutes is enough to figure people out. This doesn't actually happen a lot. If you must use recruiters, make them work for a living and push back when they waste your time with a lot of poorly fitting candidates. Buzzword compatibility is not good enough. Make sure they can tell the difference between a good and a bad candidate. There's no better way than selling good people on the notion of working for you than just escalating really quickly and having them talk to a decision maker. Have a quick call to verify key assumptions, fit, and expectation management (salary, skills, seniority, eagerness, etc.). First impressions matter. If that's all fine, immediately set up interviews with key stake holders and make an offer if everyone still agrees. Coding interviews don't really factor into this process. I don't use them and I decline to take them. If you've had multiple conversations and then still are wondering if the person can actually code, you messed up. Badly. If you do have a coding interview as part of your process and you get people reluctant to take those, escalate and talk to them immediately. IMHO nothing qualifies a person more than being mature enough to walk away from a bad deal. Chances are that those are the best leads coming through your filters. And you can find out at the cost of a ten minute screening call.

floydian10 4y ago
> I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference. I completely agree. However, at my current job, referring someone for an open position just means throwing their CV in the mix along with everyone else's. There is no way to bypass even a single step in the weeks-long hiring process. And I suspect this is slowly becoming the norm.

lawgimenez 4y ago

Damn I have no idea what to do if I receive that email with all the tech blogs and talks.

DangitBobby 4y ago
Open a few of them and see if you are interested in the type of work this company seems to pride itself on.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

imagine reading all that shit just to be filtered by an @no-reply email after a leetcode test.

dan-robertson 4y ago
Yeah, it’s like learning something at school only for it not to come up on the test. What a waste of time.

the_gipsy 4y ago

I used to do that when I did hiring, with a very positive impression. Both sides can instantly get a feeling and can cut it off early if the expectations are wrong. HR can't really do that.

ExxKA 4y ago

I would advocate screening with the very technical questions up front. There is no need to drag a large set of people through a funnel that only eliminates them at the very end on the hard requirements. I built Trovinto.com to generate technical questions and evaluate candidates answers on a quick questionnaire. Save everyone's time, and when you know there is a fit on skills then I think you should spend even longer on the soft questions. Getting a new job is a huge decision, not something that should be concluded in 3 hours over 2 interviews and a call.

petodo 4y ago

What's your spam filter success rate with that email containing that many links? Whole email seems unnecessary, also initial phone call lasting 20-30 minutes is not short by any means. But respect for doing interview instead HR, I despise clueless HR you can't talk to and where you need to switch to chatbot mode answering phrases they wanna hear based on few keywords they say instead of having actual conversation.

munchor 4y ago
(Author here) I think the spam filter success is 100% (I am on the call and confirm with candidates that they receive it), but I agree I need to make the email much shorter and more appealing. I also plan to try 15-20 minutes for this soon.

fdye 4y ago

Do this same thing for my hiring pipeline. Pretty much same percentages for how I weed down resumes, etc. I usually go a bit over an hour as I like to discuss the company, our tech, and get specific about what the job will entail. At the end I ask if they are still interested, and if yes we dig into their specific history, questions, etc. I also make crystal clear the salary range and benefits and get a verbal confirmation this band is acceptable to the candidate. We don't have to decide right then, but we need to be in the same ballpark and they need to understand the upper end isn't likely to move. No point in getting through a long interview process and then having to pass cause they want to much money. Then I make a decision if the candidate is a waste of time for my engineers to proceed on a technical evaluation. Three rounds, with three separate people on the team, usually only two of those rounds are true coding, one is more technical discussion/team fit. Anyone in the hiring committee can veto for essentially any reason. Works as well as any process I've seen in my decade+ career. Three rounds is also coincidentally my max to give a company I am interviewing. If you can't make up your mind on a candidate after 3 rounds then you don't know what your doing. This 5+ round crap FAANG convinced us all was good is such a waste of time and honestly costs more in time suck then just giving the candidate a shot.