Re:Red flags I saw while doing technical interviews
by jjav on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @07:51PM
(#24488040)
> I will interview at the very least 50 candidates.
Why? IMO this is about an order of magnitude too many. I typically interview about 3-4 people, on rare occasions a few more. I've been interviewing candidates for about 25 years now.
If your recruiter is sending you 50+ mismatched resumes for a role, get a better recruiter. But even in that case, you should notice and weed these out while reviewing the resumes yourself, before getting to the interview stage.
I literally cannot imagine any scenario where I'd interview over 50 people for a role. Or even ten people.
A few startups ago we had to grow the team from 20 people to ~120 in a year. Your approach would result in interviewing well over 5000 people in a year. That would be over 20 people a day, every single day, zero work getting done meanwhile! I suggest a re-think of your hiring strategy.
> being obviously unfit after the first 10 minutes of a technical interview
Which one is more likely:
1. Senior people who have built many successful products don't actually know how to do what they've done.
or
2. Interview techniques that focus on skills unrelated to the job (e.g. whiteboard puzzles, algorithm trivial pursuit) have an inordinately high false negative rate.
Why? IMO this is about an order of magnitude too many. I typically interview about 3-4 people, on rare occasions a few more. I've been interviewing candidates for about 25 years now.
If your recruiter is sending you 50+ mismatched resumes for a role, get a better recruiter. But even in that case, you should notice and weed these out while reviewing the resumes yourself, before getting to the interview stage.
I literally cannot imagine any scenario where I'd interview over 50 people for a role. Or even ten people.
A few startups ago we had to grow the team from 20 people to ~120 in a year. Your approach would result in interviewing well over 5000 people in a year. That would be over 20 people a day, every single day, zero work getting done meanwhile! I suggest a re-think of your hiring strategy.
> being obviously unfit after the first 10 minutes of a technical interview
Which one is more likely:
1. Senior people who have built many successful products don't actually know how to do what they've done.
or
2. Interview techniques that focus on skills unrelated to the job (e.g. whiteboard puzzles, algorithm trivial pursuit) have an inordinately high false negative rate.