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I think its the opposite. I would much rather had only my and the candidate's 5 minutes wasted, versus a whole hour, when its very apparent in those first 5 mi
by cozuya 12y ago
I think its the opposite. I would much rather had only my and the candidate's 5 minutes wasted, versus a whole hour, when its very apparent in those first 5 minutes they don't have the technical skills we need for the job.
- tptacek 12y agoPresumably you consider how drastically your whole process has failed if you bring someone in for an on-site interview who demonstrates within 5 minutes that they lack all the technical skills required for the job.
- collyw 12y agoI have heard much the same about dating, so I don't think it is necessarily about a process failing, as the way we judge people based on first impressions.
- cozuya 12y agoWell mistakes happen - a phone screen can only get you so far, especially in a seller's market where your talent pool is pretty shallow. Though I think a shared google docs interview is probably the best way to go for the initial screen, I just haven't given or taken one like that yet so it must still be relatively rare.
- tptacek 12y agoWe came to the conclusion that phone screens are pretty close to worthless. We'd still have been very upset if we ended up in a face-to-face interview with someone who had no business interviewing for the job. You need to do more than just phone screen (actually: you should eliminate phone screens). (I don't know who's downvoting you but I upvoted.)
- JohnBooty 12y agoI'm really fascinated by your replies on this thread; seems you build a really solid process there. I'm curious about the phone screens - how do you screen out the candidates that are grossly unqualified so that they don't progress to the interview stage? In other words, how do you screen out candidates like those Joel describes here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePhoneScreen.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePhoneScreen.html
- tptacek 12y agoBy my last year at Matasano we were literally discarding the results of phone screens. We did them largely as a pro-forma exercise, and because they made team members more comfortable with the process as a whole. We virtually never selected out candidates based on phone screens. We had a work sample process that kicked in after phone screens, and that cost us almost nothing to run. So we never had an incentive to prevent a candidate from going through that process. Unlike phone screens, the work sample results were strongly predictive. You could bomb phone screens, ace work samples, and end up coming in for in-person interview. (We did "nudge" candidates we felt wouldn't do well on the work sample tests, solely out of concern for not wasting their time, but anyone who wanted to proceed was able to). Phone screens are a waste of time. Spolsky did a really good job of documented the best practices within the framework of unstructured interviews as they were practiced 10 years ago. The problem isn't Spolsky's tactical suggestions; it's that the strategy they're a part of is being discredited.
- timv 12y agoI'm curious how often you had people voluntarily drop out of the process without completing the work sample, and whether that frequency would change if you didn't have a phone screen. (I take it from your questions that you never actually stopped doing phone screens). If my first contact with a company is them asking me to put in hours of my time, when it costs them "almost nothing to run" (your words) then I'd be inclined to pass. The company I work for has a work sample exercise, and we intentionally place it after a phone screen and first interview, because we feel it is (and appears) more fair to the candidates. From our point of view, we'd love to put it up front, as it is the best source of information we get, but if it caused us to lose good candidates before we even started (and we believe it would) that would be a show-stopper.
- nostrademons 12y agoCurious how you could judge that a candidate doesn't have the technical skills you need for the job in 5 minutes? Can all the tasks your employees do on the job be completed in 5 minutes?
- JohnBooty 12y agoSometimes you get applicants that literally don't know what a compiler is, don't know what a variable is. That sort of thing. That kind of person can probably be ruled out in the first 5 minutes for sure. Of course I think everybody would agree that if such a person progressed to the interview stage, there was a failure somewhere.