
The Art of Job Interviewing - hunglee2
https://www.artofwork.co/job-interviewing
======
simonsaidit
I’m a consultant and somewhat happy about my job. The boss where I’m currently
at wants to hire me permanently and I told him that perhaps if the offer is
good enough and without going into details he says his sure we will work that
out... he has a big budget and only answers to the ceo and are there to build
up everything from scratch and I’m his technical advisor/architect/developer
while we establish platforms and team... so it feels pretty attractive and
usally I ignore recruiting but then HR starts their process as if it’s me
trying to get them and not the other way around... giving references, wants me
to do logic and personality tests and now I kinda regret and already said I’m
opposed that kind of thing and won’t really do testing for a lot of reasons.
They settled with personality test and I said ok I guess I can do that but as
I opened it today it really fustrated me and closed it again and now I’m
pretty much feeling like saying No thanks as this really drains me. Am I being
too difficult?

Edit: thanks for the feedback

~~~
ricardoreis
_Am I being too difficult?_

Nothing of the sort. Hopefully you'll stick to your guns.

~~~
simonsaidit
I did and it wasn’t a problem after all. I also asked for better salary, free
phone and be allowed to use Linux in their windows only environment and they
accepted.

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michael_langdon
_personality test and I said ok I guess I can do that but as I opened it today
it really fustrated me_

-not completing the test is an indicator of your personality. I have had a few of these things shoved at me and it has , in my experience, very little to do with placing you in a personality complementary position. workplace personality testing has more to do with making money from the data that is generated, and that came from some long in the tooth middle management that gave 0fux about the job at the time.

feel it out and maybe turn the table for the interviewer, so its not about how
well you fit and what you bring, make it about how well the employer fits your
capabilities and how much they will lose if you walk away, maybe in mid
interview have someone call you and beg for you to reconsider and come work
for them they need you now. in other words _HAX YOUR INTERVIEW_

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seymour333
"Start with a phone screen interview"

I have to disagree with this point. Phone and screen interviews are awkwardly
paced and some individuals simply don't come across well in this type of
setting. If the qualifications on their resume fit your requirements, just
bring them in!

~~~
ravenstine
I hate phone screenings. And that's not because I hate the interview itself,
but having the interview _over the telecom system_. Most recruiters are using
a cell phone, and cell-to-cell audio quality is pitiful in today's age. No
wonder so many people in my generation don't bother calling anymore! If my
ears are straining to make sure I'm hearing the fuzzy-sounding person on the
other end of the line, that makes the screening a lot less pleasant.

As much as I agree that companies should be more willing to just have people
come in for a quick chat, I'd like for recruiters to reach out through email
or text and then setup a Hangouts chat or such. A video call would be
sufficient in my book.

EDIT: One of the things that sucks about phone screenings, IMO, is when the
interviewer is clearly asking a prewritten set of questions and taking notes
as I speak. What I'd like instead is for the interviewer to record the
conversation so they don't have to take notes, thus freeing their minds up to
having a chill conversation and perhaps getting a better sense of who I am.

~~~
scarface74
As an interviewer, I’m not interested in having a “chill conversation”. I’m
interested in knowing whether you have the minimum set of qualifications to
know whether it’s worth the time to go through the trouble of setting up the
in person interview, reserving a room, setting up the computer with my code
interview, scheduling a block of time with other developers, etc.

~~~
ravenstine
As an interviewee, I'm not interested in only answering questions that are
easily answered by my resume so you can tick boxes. If I can't get a sense on
the company spirit and you aren't going to treat me like a human being over
the phone, why would I want to work for you when there are better companies
looking for culture fits?

The sentiment is mutual.

~~~
braythwayt
You don know that anybody can put anything on a résumé, right?

We can talk about how much we hate doing anything over a voice call, but it’s
ludicrous to think that interviewers should never ask a question that could be
answered by reading the résumé.

For example, we have some Scala code in our analytics stack at my work. I have
worked with it, but I avoid touching it and honestly, I am not a Scala
programmer.

I have been at this company for 3 1/2 years, on this team for one year. Some
people in such a situation will say that they have 3 1/2 years of Scala, an
outright fabrication.

Others will say that they have 1 year of Scala, which is kinda-sorta true on
some bad-faith, you-can’t-call-me-a-liar planet.

If I put Scala on a résumé, I would totally expect someone to drill down and
find out if I was using it every day, whether I was writing big chunks of code
or just fixing the odd bug and so on.

I wouldn’t highlight Scala, personally, but what if I put JavaScript down?
Given how tenuous Scala might be, wouldn’t an interviewer want to know if my
JavaScript experience is “real” or not? I know that I use JS almost every day
and Scala almost never, but my interviewer doesn’t know that I have such
scruples, so they are supposed to ask me questions about JavaScript that my
résumé answers, then drill down and corroborate.

~~~
ravenstine
There seems to be a misunderstanding with what I'm talking about. I'm not
saying that phone screenings shouldn't be about qualifications. My point is
that if through that process I'm made to feel like a number, that gives me a
bad impression of the rest of the business relationship. If the person doing
the screening comes off as friendly, maybe enthusiastic, and we can have a
pleasant 2 way chat, then I'm much more likely to move forward with the
process.

To provide contrast, I had a phone screening yesterday where the screener was
only asking yes/no questions that were easily answered by my resume, didn't
want me to go into much detail, and didn't seem friendly at all. Why would I
want to move forward with that company? There are others where I can tell off
the bat that they'd be a better culture fit. First impressions _do_ matter.

One of the things I like about a video screening is it usually changes the
tone of the conversation towards being a bit less formal.

~~~
scarface74
_My point is that if through that process I 'm made to feel like a number_

You are a number as an employee, we are all just disposable pieces of the cog.
The business transaction is simple. I’ll stay there as long as they are
putting money in my account twice a month that is commensurate with my market
value and I know they will keep me employed as long as it is in their best
interest.

You are just one of a pile of resumes that they are filtering at any one time.

------
azangru
I am super bad at interviewing — I just want to see how well the candidate can
code :-(

~~~
bluejekyll
> I am super bad at interviewing

Then read some (maybe this, I didn't look at it in detail, but at first glance
looks reasonable) and practice.

> I just want to see how well the candidate can code :-(

All this tells you is if the candidate can code. If you want that, give them a
test, look at their Github history (if they have it). Ask for code samples
from any project they can share that they're proud of.

I personally find it much more valuable when interviewing someone to talk
about what they've done. How they've solved problems. What their interests are
both in and outside software.

Setting up a non-stressful experience and using behavioral interview type of
questions and form is my personal favorite. Something I think is really
important, that many people forget, is that the interviewee is also
interviewing _you_. If you come across disorganized, unprepared (didn't even
read their resume), etc., then you may fail the interview and even if you want
to hire them, they'll say no.

~~~
azangru
> All this tells you is if the candidate can code. If you want that, give them
> a test, look at their Github history (if they have it).

I try to get all information I can about the candidate, including reading
through their Github or Linkedin profile, or looking them up on StackOverflow
or on social media just to get a deeper understanding of what kind of person
(and coder) they are. But I was consistently surprised by how difficult it may
be to find relevant information about a candidate before an interview. Many do
not include links to their code (Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, whatever, just
show me how you think) in their resumes (admittedly, we did not have it as a
hard requirement, but one would assume that a programmer would include them).
Resumes often contain spelling or grammar mistakes that bias me against the
applicants (and I need to tell myself that these mistakes don't necessarily
matter).

Our process is a screening interview over Skype with a simple coding
challenge. Followed by an hour-long in-person interview, also coding-heavy,
but relevant to the work that the candidate will be doing (no brain teasers,
no CS algorithms). I feel that at least this gives me some objective
datapoints to assess and rank the candidates. Asking about previous work or
interests in and out of software feels too subjective to be useful for
subsequent comparison, and is prone to false-positives (we once talked to a
candidate with an interesting background and all the right buzzwords in their
social network who did not even pass the screening challenge). Although we
certainly do ask.

~~~
watwut
Most developers I know don't have github account or use it as place to dump
half baked unfinished projects and ideas (as a free backup essentially). That
is why it is so hard to find it.

If you job is really coding most of the time and challenging/interesting
enough on itself, you have less reason to do projects on the side (and it
might not be effective use of time). Same for those working in competitive
positions where either maximum time or output is expected.

~~~
crdoconnor
On the flip side, I have a solid GitHub and as far as I can tell, nobody on
the hiring side has looked at it except for one guy who just saw that there
was a lot of green. He didn't look beyond that though.

I've been given tests galore though. Last week I was given one and told while
I was halfway through it that somebody had accepted an outstanding offer.

Hiring is so broken.

------
steven2012
This sounds like it was written by a complete amateur. "Try and avoid bias"
isn't even grammatically correct.

Their part on bias is woefully inadequate. "We’re all human, and we’re all
biased, so the best thing to do is just accept this." sounds like they have no
idea what unconscious bias actually is.

The worst unconscious bias is "this person isn't like me, so they can't
possibly be good." People unconsciously would rather be around people similar
to themselves. This creates groupthink and monocultures, and the reason why
there are so many issues in tech. They see a candidate who is a female or a
different race, and maybe they approach problems differently, and the
interviewer rejects this because it wasn't THEIR way of thinking, which
obviously to them is the best.

There are many ways to solve problems, and the best interview problems are the
ones where people are free to use their own creativity to solve a problem, not
regurgitate the exact same CTCI answers ad nauseum.

------
alexashka
This is really long.

Interviewing is not an art - it's a means to an end. A very pragmatic event,
the focus of which, is to minimize wasted time.

This very document is an invitation to waste people's time. The length of it
and its contents.

It'd really help if people who've actually run companies, managed, hired and
fired, would be the ones speaking on these topics, not some middle-man
recruiting agency doing content-marketing.

