With the waves of layoffs and the large numbers of developers looking for work there is a lot of frustrating and venting about interviewing and hiring processes. I have my own horror stories and that is part of the problem of writing about this topic. Interviewing generally and especially in tech is broken but writing about it when you’re going through it looks like the complaints of someone inadequate to the requirements of the role. Even when you have a job then where is the wisdom in criticising the process that brought you that job?

The recruitment process for developers has been pretty terrible for years but at least during the hiring boom the process tended to err on the side of taking a chance on people. Now employers seem to feel pretty confident that whatever bar they set they will find a suitable candidate or whatever conditions they apply will be accepted. That means that often the reasons you get back for not proceeding during an interview are often pretty flimsy. The interviewers are the gatekeepers into the roles and they don’t really have to justify themselves too much.

The fundamental problem

At its heart though the problem has always been and remains that most people are really bad at interviewing. Often people spend more time interviewing other people rather than going through interviews themselves. When conducting interviews they are mostly isolated from feedback unless another interviewer takes objection to what they are doing.

Therefore virtually every developer I’ve known who does interviews thinks they are really good at interviewing (including me, I’m really good at conducting interviews (I’ve also had some feedback from agents that I’m really terrible at interviewing, who are you going to believe?)). However most of them are really bad. They don’t really know how to frame open questions, they don’t stick to the scripts or they stick too literally to the scripts, they don’t use any scoring criteria or objective marking and they often freestyle some genuinely awful questions.

One of my favourite pieces of recent interview feedback was that I didn’t have a lot of experience in a particular area. Now while it might be true that I didn’t exhibit much evidence of that experience in the interview I would also have found it easier to do that if I had been asked questions about it. If an area of expertise is vital to the role then you need to have formulated some questions about it and also importantly make sure you allocate enough time in the interview to ask them. Flirting may require mastery of the tease but interviewing usually benefits from a very direct approach.

People who do interviews need to be trained in doing interviews. In an ideal world that would also mean doing some mock interviews where it is known whether the candidate has the skills to do the job. Their interviewing needs to be reviewed by managers from time to time and the easiest way to do that review is by having managers and managers of managers in the actual interviews.

In a previous role some engineering managers who reported to me did a little live roleplay of what they thought a good interview would look like, one taking the part of the interviewer and one the interviewee. Naturally the stakes were low but the exercise gave a template for the rest of the interviewers to set their expectations and give them a sense of where we thought good was.

Interviews, interviews, interviews

Employers confidence in being able to pick and choose is nowhere more exemplified by having loads of interview rounds. For more responsible roles I get that you often have to meet up and down the chain along with peers and stakeholders. In recent processes though I wouldn’t have been surprised to be interviewed by the office cat, probably just to see if I was desperate enough to put up with this kind of treatment. A personality fit with key stakeholders is important but I feel that previously this was done in a single call with multiple people at a time.

Candidate experience surveys

How can you try to improve the interviewing process and allow candidates to provide the feedback to the interviewers that they so desperately need? Some places have used candidate surveys. I’ve tried using these myself and occasionally you got some good feedback, in particular on how someone felt about the way communicated with them as a corporate body. However as a candidate (and in the current economy) I would never fill one out since it doesn’t help you secure an offer and seems in most cases to actually be positively risky as you can either give a high rating and look like a kiss-ass or a low rating that will automatically put the organisation on the defensive, especially those people who interviewed you.

Even after accepting a job I find it really hard to talk to the people who interviewed me about the interviewing experience. In some ways the only safe time to give feedback on the interview process is after you’ve received an offer and have decided not to accept it. At that point it truly does depend on how willing to learn an organisation is.

At a previous role I added a closing question to our script: “What question do you think we should have asked you?”. This was originally intended to be a way for candidates to draw attention to experience that they thought was relevant (even if maybe our scoring system did not take it into account). For a few candidates though it became an opening into discussing the interview process and their thoughts on it. It is the closest thing I’ve found to an effective feedback mechanism I’ve been able to find.

To sum it up

Interviewing generally sucks, right now it sucks even more because without the benefit of the doubt bad interviewing practices make it difficult to succeed as a candidate and enjoy the experience. A negative candidate experience causes brand issues for an employer and while they may not care about it now if the market tightens or visas stop being so easy to acquire then it might start to matter again. As an industry we should do better and genuinely try to find ways to improve how we find a fit between people and roles and make the hiring process less hateful.

Other posts in this area

• Jason Yip (Medium, sorry)
• Chris Heilmenn
• Anders Borch