
Ask HN: What is the best interview experience you have had? - brettlangdon
The company I work for is currently in the process of making some of our first hires (we are a team of 4 right now). We always want to strive for providing the best interview experience for everyone we talk to.<p>What is the best interview experience (whether you were hired or not) that you have had?
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cmuir
I went for a jog with an ex-colleague who was starting a new company in NYC.
He had asked to meet up to get my advice on how to interview people for a
research project that his company was working on. After 45 minutes of me
explaining how a candidate would ideally approach the work, he offered me the
job. I basically said yes on the spot.

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kat
The best interviews have been interviews where I have been warned ahead of
time what to expect. Ie in the phone screening interview I was given an
informal hint that I should add unit tests to my programming task (the next
step of the interview process). Or the time I was told that my in-person
interview would include a hello-world with a certain IDE and a certain
language (which I had no previous experience in). I felt comfortable because I
knew what to expect and I could prepare ahead of time. I think it also showed
I was listening and I was willing to learn new things.

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theaccordance
My favorite interview experience was with my current company. Highlights:

 __1st Interview: __

Lunch interview with my boss. Conversation was casual, covering my background
& goals, the leadership's background, and the tech stack. After lunch we
expanded a little on our conversation with a showcase of certain features of
the company's product.

 __2nd Interview: __

Met with the company 's founder for about an hour, followed by individual
meetings with a few engineers. During the meeting with the founder we
exchanged some background information and I was shown some info on the
company's performance thus far; this was huge personally as transparency had
become a huge pain point with my previous employer. The engineering meetings
went smooth; I'd consider them casual but the technical discussion was more
in-depth than the 1st interview.

 __Code test: __

After the 1st Interview I was given a take-home code test; building a simple
card game using the MEAN stack (shuffle deck, deal cards, score game based on
card 's position relative to a brand new deck, store results & calculate
ongoing average). It took me about 12 hours over the course of a week
(evenings mostly - I was employed during this interview) to complete. Since
our product has no relation to card games, IMO the code test sought to prove
that:

1\. I was capable of taking a spec to code completion

2\. I was capable of working within the confines of the company's tech stack
(MEAN)

It took my boss less than a day to review my submission before offering me a
position on his team.

Aside from my best interview experience, I've had some not-so-great
experiences, here's a few that I encourage avoiding:

\- No call, no show. Be mindful of your schedule and if you can't keep the
commitment, inform the candidate. Candidates hate wasting their time,
especially if they're still employed since it usually means taking time off.

\- Impromptu skill evaluations. If you tell a candidate that the 1st round
interview is going to be non-technical, then they're going to prepare
accordingly. Shotgun questioning is not well received.

\- Surprises on code tests. If your code test is going to measure one's
ability to work within your stack, make sure the technologies come up during
the interview conversations prior to issuing the code test.

~~~
fsk
You lost me at "12 hour unpaid coding homework project". There's no way I
would do that, and it's disrespectful of the candidate's time.

~~~
theaccordance
My wallet disagrees with "unpaid" and "disrespectful"

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gt565k
I had a phone screen, 2 quick coffee meetups with CEO (<30 mins).

I was then given access to github and told to implement a fairly simple
feature in the next few days. This was with a stack I didn't know, so I had to
prove that I can navigate my way through the code base. I sat down on the
weekend, learned the basics of Rails, and implemented the feature. I then
pushed upstream to github and was told I was hired a few days later.

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mrcold
My best interviews were the ones where money wasn't an issue. They focused on
getting talent first and dealing with bad hires later. So the process went
like this:

\- _" I see you have done this and that, have some years of experience and
seem to know how to do things. Here is what you would do in our company ..."_

\- _" Still interested? Great. Can you please reverse a string?"_

\- _" Well, looks like you can code. Let's talk salary."_

\- _" Welcome aboard. :)"_

Whenever someone turned out to be bad, they simply asked them to leave.
Usually with severance. So easy and simple. I really can't understand why only
a few companies work like this. No tests, no homework and definitely no hazing
and grilling. Just some guys that want to build some stuff.

~~~
yitchelle
> I really can't understand why only a few companies work like this.

Highly dependent on the legislation the company is operating in. "At will"
companies, if I understand the term correctly, certainly have that flexibility
where they can let the bad hire goes. In other countries where firing is less
flexible, more hoops needs to be jumped through.

~~~
mrcold
I didn't say anything about firing. In Europe it's very hard to fire someone.
But give them a stack of cash in exchange for pursuing other opportunities and
almost everybody will take it. It's actually a common practice for non-tech
jobs. Layoffs are not possible, but getting a year's salary for quitting is.

~~~
yitchelle
You're right. I made a bad assumption that getting rid of bad hires means
firing them. Like the saying goes, there are many ways to skin a cat.

~~~
S4M
In Europe there is normally a probation period, during which new employees can
fired easily. After that it gets harder to fire.

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pattu777
I recently had an interview for an intern position. I think it was one of the
best interviews I have ever been.

The interview was for an hour or so with two developers. We chatted casually
for the first 20 minutes. They introduced themselves and briefly discussed
about their product. After going through my CV, they asked about my experience
with the startup I had mentioned, the challenges I faced, why I choose that
particular technology etc.

As per the technical part, the questions involved basic sql queries and schema
design. Then we discussed about various data structures. I wasn't given any
problems though. I was just asked to explain various data structures(array,
list, stack, queues, trees and hash tables) and their complexity with an
example on a whiteboard.

The best thing was that it felt like a casual conversation between a couple of
friends.

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brettlangdon
For myself. I think the best interview experiences I have had are when the
interviewer is honest or when they provide constructive observations about my
abilities.

For example, one of the best interviewers I have interviewed with would answer
my questions about the company and their culture straight away without
hesitation or himming-and-hawing about the response. It helped me feel like I
could trust what he was saying. As well at the end of the interview he took
the time to lay out his thoughts about me, my abilities and how I could
contribute to the company. When I left the interview I had no doubts in my
mind about what he was thinking and I was left sweating for days while waiting
on a response about the position.

Since that interview has always left a lasting impression on me, I always try
to do the same with anyone that I interview now.

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akg_67
At my last workplace, we had an interesting approach to interviewing candidate
in person. We focused on personal compatibility more than technical skills.
Our team view was that technical skills can be taught/learnt but social and
emotional maturity is hard to teach and learn. This philosophy wasn't unique
to the company just to our team.

We typically will have 4-5 hour day setup for series of interviews, preferably
before lunch and during lunch. By this time remote team workers already have
interviewed the candidate on phone and shared their impression to boss. First
interview and last interview was by the Boss, in between we alternated between
junior and senior members of the team as well as a few people from teams that
we closely worked with in our job. Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes.
Everyone was free to structure and cover whatever they wanted to explore
during the interview. There were no prescribed method or feedback forms.

We provided verbal feedback to the boss as we walked by his cubicle after the
interview. The typical feedback was "S/he reminds me of XYZ or s/he is strange
or something along these lines, sometime politically incorrect." The XYZ
typically being a current or ex-team worker or someone we all have/had known.
Sometime we will have little bit more to say but not much. The feedback
typically ended with "thumbs up," "thumbs down," or "thumbs sideways".

Even though, we schedule one person to take the candidate out for lunch, by
the time lunch comes around, boss has pretty good guess whether candidate is
hirable or not. If he is getting consistent thumbs up, we decide to take him
out for lunch with the whole team. During the lunch, there is no discussion
about interview or questioning candidate, just having a good time and treating
the candidate as one of the team member. Of course everyone enjoys as we go
for lunch to a nicer place and it is on company dime.

We continue the scheduled interviews after the lunch. Once interviews are
over, we huddle for a quick 15 minute meeting with remote team members on the
conference call and comment on the candidate. By that evening or early next
morning boss lets everyone know the hiring decision he made.

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partisan
The best interview I had was one where they brought in the whole team of 8 or
so people to interview me. They asked me questions but there was a lot of
joking around as well and it gave everyone in the room a good sense for
whether I would fit in with the group. I have a small fear of public speaking
so it was very much not what I would have picked for myself but it turned out
to be pretty great.

