• she/her

Principal engineer at Mercury. I've authored the Dhall configuration language, the Haskell for all blog, and countless packages and keynote presentations.

I'm a midwife to the hidden beauty in everything.

💖 @wiredaemon


discord
Gabriella439
discord server
discord.gg/XS5ZDZ8nnp
location
bay area
private page
cohost.org/newmoon

fullmoon
@fullmoon

… is that you only need to administer one technical interview and one non-technical interview (each no more than an hour long).

In my opinion, any interview process longer than that is not only unnecessary but counterproductive.

Obviously, this streamlined interview process is easier and less time-consuming to administer, but there are other benefits that might not be obvious.


fullmoon
@fullmoon

the funniest part about the comments on social media is that half the replies are "this is not a spicy take at all" and the other half are "you're naive OP"


fullmoon
@fullmoon

there was one insightful thing i learned from reading the comments, though:

quite a few people pointed out that prevailing interviewing practices assume that all interviewers are created (roughly) equal, but a commonly cited improvement to the interviewing process is to recognize that some people are good interviewers and some people are bad interviewers and to only let the good interviewers administer interviewers


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @fullmoon's post:

This correlates with my experience too. The company I worked at who was worst at hiring was Apple (12+ interviewers over 6+ hours, after which every candidate was indistinguishable mush)

My general theory is I need to learn three things:

  • do they know something about the stuff they’re purporting to, (least important)
  • can they communicate and discuss their knowledge clearly and efficiently,
  • when they don’t know something, how do they react? (most important)

None of that takes more than 90min, tops. An hour is usually fine.

An unfortunate additional factor we've had to add: make sure at least one of the interviewers is a woman (fortunately, we have a few on the team to spread this job around), as a "will the candidate tend to creep women out or automatically be condescending to them" check.

in reply to @fullmoon's post:

How do you turn bad interviewers into good interviewers?

In general, how do you onboard and train new interviewers if only good interviewers administer interviews?

I guess effectiveness in this kind of training and development already pre-supposes that an organization can tell the difference between a trained, skilled interviewer and a bad one.

Shadowing another interviewer is the usual way; start with them just observing another interview, and gradually shift them to asking some of the questions to being the main interviewer while the more experienced interviewer observes. I think that still works fine with a cut down interview process.