I'm sure the HN collective have seen some particularly interesting and educational moments in recruiting. I'd love to avoid making mistakes and learn how to make better selections.
Not a recruiter, but this is from the candidate side. Please read the resume before inviting anyone.
Far too many times I have shown up to an interview and been expected to know about tech I have never used, nor do I mention on my resume.
Plenty of other times (albeit most often from external recruiters), I have gone into interviews where they apparently wanted only senior developers and within the first 3 minutes been told "you are a lot more junior than we thought."
One time this has kind of worked out for me, but the rest of the time, it was just a waste of everyone's time.
There’s lots of stuff I don’t put on my résumé. Lots of things I’ve had to deal with over the years that I don’t want to have to deal with anymore.
I’m thinking about chopping off the first twenty years or so of my experience and listing that as “more information on request”.
Where I have gotten better lately is writing down and rehearsing more of the good stories I’ve built up over the years, and following the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format for organizing them. There’s some good write-ups I’ve seen for STAR, so I won’t try to link them here, but it’s a good process. I also try to include links that show more information about the stories, and I tie them back to principals that I’ve been told that the company cares about.
Many years ago at a company somewhere, I was forming a new engineering team - recruiting is job 1 at this point and time. We had a new-ish grad come in and interview.
I conducted a behavioral interview with questions that were pre-determined. I thought their answers were pretty bad and felt the 1 hour interview didn't tell me much of what I was looking for. I ended up scoring them pretty low and being over-ridden by my manager as they liked this person.
Turned out that this person got hired and became one of the folks on the team I most liked, respected and got along with. At the same time, their work output had high quality and they were driven.
Lesson: you can't have a confidence of 100% from a 1 hour interview (negative or positive)
My solution is now to have a characterize their performance using a confidence interval. It makes choosing the score much harder, but results in really thinking about grading the candidate in a clearer way.
The multiple times that Rackspace kept contacting me to interview for “Sr. Unix/Linux Administrator” type jobs, where “senior” meant someone with more than two years of experience? Whereas I have more years of experience in the business than their CTO or their CEO? When you say “senior” is two years, how do you deal with someone who has been in the business for over 30 years?
Where every question they asked me in the phone interview was wrong, and so it wasn’t possible for me to give the “right” answer because it was also wrong?
That slapstick comedy ended when I somehow managed to connect with their Director of HR, and he paid for my lunch while I told him and his assistant everything that was wrong with the approach Rackspace was taking towards hiring. And he agreed with everything I said. A couple months later, and he was gone, too.
Far too many times I have shown up to an interview and been expected to know about tech I have never used, nor do I mention on my resume.
Plenty of other times (albeit most often from external recruiters), I have gone into interviews where they apparently wanted only senior developers and within the first 3 minutes been told "you are a lot more junior than we thought."
One time this has kind of worked out for me, but the rest of the time, it was just a waste of everyone's time.