Lessons from Interviewing 400 Engineers Over Three Startups
Having learned this myself over a few decades through both trial and error and also researching best practice, I have to say this guy gets a ton of stuff right. I also read a few new things I now want to try.<p>Just to reiterate one of the more important points from the article in my own words: resumes (CVs) have almost zero correlation to the quality of candidates. Pre-screening calls can really only screen out people who are completely unqualified due to not actually having the skills listed on their resume. So I will pre-screen with some very basic tech questions. Or more likely, I&#x27;ll just use a recruiter to pre-screen for me.<p>I&#x27;m going to finish up with a copy paste from a past comment I made to a different article with some tips that have helped me over the years:<p>1. Unless you&#x27;ve been trained to interview people, you are probably really bad at it. Think about how bad someone is at coding who never did it before and has no training. Interviewing people is no different: it is a skill that takes time and effort to learn. Get trained up and practice. As much training as you have time for. Educate yourself in your free time on a regular basis with articles about best practice. Adding more words won&#x27;t make this sink in more, but I will end by saying I can&#x27;t stress this point enough. You are bad at interviewing. You need to fix that before anything else if you want to hire good devs.<p>2. How are you measuring success as an interviewer? This is a really difficult thing to measure because how can you find out that your interview process is rejecting candidates who would make great employees? I&#x27;m not going to try to answer this here, but it&#x27;s an excellent question to think about. One thing that might help is the next point.<p>3. Whatever your first impression is of the candidate, spend a good part of the interview trying to prove yourself wrong. Candidate seems like a perfect fit for the team and a great coder? Instead of relaxing because you&#x27;re sure you already found the right person, see if you can figure out why they might be a bad fit or if their coding skills aren&#x27;t as good as first impressions. Same for someone who seems weak at coding. Maybe they are just nervous. Can you make them relaxed enough so their awesome skills can come through? Maybe in both cases your first impressions will be proven correct. But if not you might have just found a diamond in the rough that other companies are skipping over.