Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens

Re:Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens by GiorgioG on Saturday December 11, 2021 @09:47AM (#29521204)

This is how I got a job with a bunch of really smart folks in the early 2000s (they were all MIT grads and I was a graduate of a state liberal arts college in NY.) It was several rounds of interviews and a couple of the folks interviewing me (who clearly liked me) warned me that the interview at the end would be the hardest because the interviewer was an old non-nonsense engineer (MIT CS degree and MIT MBA.) It was intense for sure, but I had read somewhere that (as you stated) if you can get them to talk about themselves and engage them: A) they will love you and B) you'll run out the clock. I can't recall how I got him to talk about 'the good old days' of programming, but I did and I don't think I had to answer more than a handful of questions in that hour.

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Re:Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens by more_corn on Saturday December 11, 2021 @12:37PM (#29522669)

His feedback read like this: “Good culture fit, good soft skills. I really liked them. They seemed to understand and appreciate difficult and interesting topics.”

I assure you there are worse ways to behave in an interview. I’ve passed on people who were smart as a whip but nobody wanted to work with. And nobody wants a dead fish who just sits there waiting for the next problem to solve.

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Re:Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens by heavenlyblue on Saturday December 11, 2021 @11:18AM (#29521967)

So that engineer was a full-nonsense interviewer :)

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Re:Ten years of experience, still failing phone screens by GiorgioG on Saturday December 11, 2021 @03:05PM (#29523799)

I suppose in my case he might have been less effective at assessing my technical abilities (there were multiple technical interviewers throughout the day.)

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