Interviewing is Hard
My thoughts on the imbalance between interview preparation resources and the reality that senior professionals spend more time interviewing than being interviewed.
If we compare the time we spend being interviewed versus interviewing others, we could find that the more senior we get, the more time we spend as interviewers. But, when we look at the amount of resources available (articles, tips, videos, etc.), the proportion doesn’t quite match, given it is a space full of content for candidates. It’s an interesting observation (well, at least to me! 😅) Is it an audience thing? Do interviewers always do well and there is no space for growth?
In the highly competitive landscape of 2024, where top tech talent is in greater demand than ever, the role of the interviewer has become crucial in attracting and securing the best candidates. Because in the everlasting quest for recruiting talent, first impressions also matter and there is no presentation letter like a good interviewer.
Interviewers, the unsung heroes
Interviewers bring a lot of value to their companies. And it is a difficult job - interviewing being a role sometimes overseen by organisations which do not incentivise enough in their competencies or promotions, which requires being flexible in your schedule to help candidates, who rarely receive feedback. It is one of the roles critical for the organisation which grooms company culture and sets the bar for new employees, not to mention that in most of the processes interviewers also need to score candidates in a competency matrix within less than a full-working day of time.
It is not difficult to see the impact of a bad interviewer for a company (churn on candidates, bad reputation on the media, and most definitely an invitation to the “wrong” people), and I am definitely not saying that good interviewers are born that way - this is another skill and hence it can be cultivated.
So, why not start investing in having/becoming a better interviewer?
Before the interview
📋 Prepare for the interview. It sounds kinda obvious but in the same way we prepare for a meeting by reading notes, doing some “homework”, reserving a room… The same should apply to interviews. Read the candidate’s profile, get any extra context you need from recruitment (e.g. level expectation), make sure you won’t have to run between phone booths in the office, review which task you are gonna do and even plan some space to write your feedback. Good etiquette for interviews goes both ways.
🎯 Have a clear understanding of what you are asserting in the interview. Whether you are evaluating coding, design, values… Be clear about what are those tangible things that we can observe during an interview. Can they measure trade-offs in their choices? Do their behaviour show experience in certain situations? What have they shared with you to understand their train of thoughts? The more clear it is to you what you want to evaluate, the better questions / exercises you can think about.
During the interview
👥 Be and let candidates be human. Nobody knows everything, people get nervous… An interview is an alien situation, but your job as an interviewer is to observe in the best way possible how a candidate performs in a given scenario. Often times the best way of observing something is by influencing it as little as possible, e.g., acting like a robot with a sheet of questions and a rubric which evaluates from 1 to 5 does not help to make a person feel in a normal situation. Practice smoothly transitioning in the different parts of the interview, asking questions in a natural way, adapt your follow ups…
🛞 Learn how to redirect the course of the interview. When interviews go South and you are starting to incline to a no (unless it is a “This candidate should definitely not join the company”), try to redirect the interview to “What would I need the candidate to do to turn my no into a yes?” and get the candidate there. “Ok, they messed up struggling with this basic, could they quickly overcome a similar obstacle in a follow up?”, “I see they are skipping the Data modelling for this, can I dig deeper about it with a question?”
After the interview
🔎 Less fluffy affirmations, more examples and concrete facts. I have seen scorecards where we state something like “they have good problem-solving skills” without a concrete example, e.g. “they stopped and asked good questions around feature X, then they went with solution Y after measuring if it was a good enough solution”, “The candidate was humble” → “At some point in the interview we were about to talk about X, the candidate clarified that they don’t have hands-on experience”. Make it easy for everyone that was not in the interview to understand your observations.
⭐️ Contribute to improve the interviewing experience. We are also affected by wrongly designed processes: Questions which do not make sense for what we evaluate, unnecessary/redundant steps, unprepared candidates… Do not be afraid of giving feedback and proactively participating in evolving the interviews at your company.
Final thoughts
In the same way the industry and the developer lifecycle is being disrupted (by the AI advancements, tech market waves, remote and back to the office policies…) the interviewing process should be continuously evolving. This does not mean that we should change it every 3 months, but it is good to observe and evaluate candidate and interviewer experience as well as company efficiency over this process. This implies revisiting the task to find better suited assessments, re-evaluating the accuracy of the different interviews, modifying the steps for the candidates and of course, improving the education, impact and visibility of interviewers on this, but that is another story and shall be said on another time.
PS: Eat your veggies 🌱