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Thanks for being open about your perspective on the interviewing process, and for taking the time to follow up on these threads. Do you believe that technical

Thanks for being open about your perspective on the interviewing process, and for taking the time to follow up on these threads. Do you believe that technical phone pre-screens are ineffective in general? From what I've read Matasano doesn't pre-screen candidates, but provides complementary study materials instead. Is that because the subject matter is specialized? Would you approach hiring web dev roles differently? From your remarks, it sounds like you would reject the practice of asking open-ended interview questions (e.g. describe your workflow, describe a typical day, describe a recent project) due to interference from the interviewer's bias. What, if any, value do you place on open-ended questions?

jerematasno 12y ago
In general, my feeling is that the Matasano process (which I currently manage) works outstandingly well where there isn't a flood of qualified candidates. If you have a glut of folks who are ready to start working, you can get away with a terrible process. We do free-form technical interviews, but only to try to detect candidates who really aren't ready for the work-sample challenges. Our in-person interviews are standardized and try to evaluate consulting/architecture skills that are hard (impossible?) to measure without people. These involve open-ended intermediary questions, but the final answers are structured. The bottom line is this: you cannot compare candidates using free-form interviews. You must compare candidates who are going to be doing similar work. Thus, free-form interviews have no evaluative value.