The two questions I ask every interviewer
Each time I read a post like this I say to myself “they’re not wrong, but something is also missing.”If there was a way to evaluate a candidate based on how well they would do at their actual job, in an hour or less, that couldn’t be games or cheated, we’d all be using it.That isn’t to say we shouldn’t work on improving the hiring process, but how much time, both from the perspective of the candidate and the company, is too much time to invest in a potential hire?Would we get better signal if you came to work for us for a week and paired with everyone on the team? Sure! But how many candidates can take a week off from their current job? The author talked to 11 companies. Could they invest 11+ weeks in their job search full time in order to find their next role? What about the loss in productivity? Can you have more than one candidate in the office in a given week? What if your ramp up time for full time employees is actually longer than a week? Are you biasing for people who ramp up fast instead of people who will be ultimately more productive and impactful?I often feel that engineers write these posts because they know that they themselves are good at their job, but feel it is silly to have to develop an alternative set of skills in order to signal that they are a good hire. Or they get rejected and blame the process or those alternative skills. I’ve felt the same way and wanted the system to be better tailored for my skill set, but balanced against the time investment for some alternatives, I see why we have the process we do.