Rethinking The Hiring Process
Most interviews reward interviewing ability instead of the ability to do the job
A few years back, a really talented engineer I worked with asked me to conduct a mock interview. I obliged and he bombed it pretty badly. What resolution did you just think of?
He immediately chastised himself at interviewing poorly. It's likely what most people in hiring positions would believe. Candidates are expected to put their best foot forward and make a good impression. They're expected to do what's necessary to impress the interviewers.
What does that involve? Practicing interview type questions. Trying to think of questions that make you sound insightful. Learning how to word smith a resume.
How much of that is useful once you get the job? Does being good at writing resumes improve your ability to do your job?
Only if your job is teaching people to write resumes.
Interview type questions also don't reflect the actual work most of the time. I was once in an interview where the interviewer literally said "Yeah most people find this hard because no one uses it in real life." So why was it in the interview? (I actually flat out asked that because I can't help myself sometimes)
The common notion of candidates needing to learn to present themselves better is fundamentally broken. It asks them to develop a skillset that is completely different from the one required to do the job well. Is the goal of a job interview to make a hiring manager feel good or is it to actually test if a candidate can do the job?
In that mock interview I conducted, I realized that the fault was not with the engineer. I worked with him. I knew he was a good engineer. If he bombed my interview, then the fault was with me. I needed to do better at crafting an interview that reflected a candidate's ability to do the job.
Unfortunately, having an interview that reflects on the job performance is easier said than done. How can you condense the experience of working with someone for weeks or months into a handful of hours? The best I have come up with so far is to take a project that has been worked on and use that as the interview. To account for the fact that the project took months, I try to conduct the interview as a pseudo kick off meeting for that project with the candidate being lead (even if they're fresh out of college). The decision ends up being a simple "would the project have been easier or harder with this person on staff?"
While this has worked out for me pretty well over the past decade, there are some notable issues with it. Since it is open ended, the candidate can come up with anything. I as the interviewer need to be prepared to riff on ideas that can be technology I've never heard of. I have to come up with followup questions on the fly for things I have little experience with. Conducting an interview like this requires a lot of an interviewer and requires them to be in peak mental state (I need at least two cups of coffee before I conduct an interview). It is really easy to miss important nuances in a candidate's responses.
The other problem is the fact that it is still a "job interview". There is a formality that creates a lot of pressure on a candidate. I'm not hiring sales people. I'm hiring engineers. I don't need them to deal with social pressure on the job. Maybe I need them to solve problems quickly if there are issues with production, but technical pressure is very different from social pressure. I have definitely taken a flyer on people who have bombed interviews. While it usually works out, those were massive gambles.
I don't know if I will ever have those problems solved or if there's a better way to conduct an interview. I keep trying to think of one though. Why is that though? Why spend so much effort on creating a better job interview when so few places try?
If everyone else has the same faulty interview process, they're going to compete over the same candidates who excel at interviewing. That leaves a rather large pool of talented people that are being overlooked and struggling to find a job. Those people are likely better engineers than the people who excel at interviewing. Better engineers that no one is competing for. This isn't a moral issue about giving people a chance. It's arbitrage and good business. People in hiring positions should consider that.