Tips for Interviewing over Zoom
Just like being late to a physical interview is a bad signal (sure there was traffic but what does it say about your planning skills?) I feel totally justified &quot;reading&quot; into how people are on their zoom interviews.<p>Recently I interviewed someone and kept hearing another conversation at the same time. I finally asked him about it and he said &quot;oh yeah that&#x27;s my wife doing a meeting, let me go to another room.&quot; It&#x27;s hard for me to imagine someone&#x27;s throught process that led them to think it&#x27;s fine to have the conversation with another meeting in the room when there was another option easily available, but it was a quick &quot;tell&quot; that this person has bad judgement, low empathy or simply doesn&#x27;t care - none of which made me want to hire him.<p>To a smaller degree I judge people&#x27;s technology. I am interviewing for technical roles and if you are a year+ into WFH and you are still having silly wifi issues or haven&#x27;t figured out how to sound clear on your mike, it&#x27;s a bad sign about your ability to troubleshoot and solve problems (or again, low empathy - if you care that your video constantly stutters and your colleagues can&#x27;t make you out, you&#x27;d figure out a wired solution or upgrade your router or whatever)<p>An interview is an assessment of your capabilities and there&#x27;s such a thing as basic competence. If you can&#x27;t nail Zooming after so much time, the whole thing is a little suspect.<p>I&#x27;d take a very different attitude if I was hiring for a non technical roles where solving tech problems is far remote from the job.