#interview management

[tracknhire]

In today's diverse workplace, promoting inclusive hiring practices is crucial. At Tracknhire, we prioritize creating opportunities for individuals from diverse backgrounds."

[sukanyap-blog]

Event recruiting has changed. As organizations are becoming more focused on hiring new graduates, competition for these candidates has increased. An easy candidate experience is key in hiring the best talent.

Event recruiting has changed. As organisations are becoming more focused on hiring new graduates, competition for these candidates has increased. An easy candidate experience is key in hiring the best talent.

[road2dev-blog]

Interview abuse

During the process of interviewing candidates and finding good talent, many companies make missteps that can put employees off and even cause lawsuits. In general, the best policy is to treat potential employees like you would want to be treated but even then, if you think that in a few years, that candidate may want to work with you even though you reject them now, being extra nice and open pays. In addition, there is Glassdoor and other web sites and candidates really do pay attention. If you earn the ire of a candidate, you can count on a negative review on Glassdoor and that will reduce the talent pool from which you can recruit. The very good employees do pay attention to these kinds of sites.

Recently, I had the chance to evaluate the interview process from the side of the candidate. I can’t say that it was pleasant at all. How can companies hope to attract or keep good talent when the experience for candidates is so bad. In the computer games industry, this is doubly bad. Here are a few of the most eggregious examples.

1) Ignoring the potential of the candidate.

I am always uncomfortable with disqualifying a candidate because s/he doesn’t know a certain set of facts. I do, however, appreciate a set of questions that require problem solving skills. Focusing on knowledge-based questions automatically eliminates very good candidates who may have a different vocabulary from you or face linguistic challenges. Not everyone will speak the way you do or even know the exact same set of facts. Sometimes, I can’t remember the right word or catch phrase.

In fact, the best candidates are usually those that have similar skills but very different viewpoints. If you are searching for a clone of yourself, you are ignoring the fact that good candidates may have a very different background, education, and upbringing but still be as good or even better than you are.

Try to see who that person is, what his/her strengths may be, and how s/he responds to pressure. Interviews are a pressure cooker. No one is a professional interviewee, so expect people to be nervous, unpracticed, and is probably only able to perform at around 50% of their normal ability during an interview.

Great questions to try to assess the potential of a candidte can be found here: http://www.morganhunter.com/2012/09/25/4-interview-questions-to-evaluate-a-candidates-growth-potential/

2) six or more interviews in the same day or too many rounds of interviews

People tire during interviews. If you have more than 4 hours scheduled to talk to the same candidate, you are most certainly not going to see the best alertness or potential of the candidate. I have been the victim of this a few times myself with some interviews stretching as long as 12 hours. Also, just meeting with a lot of different people can be exhausting. When a candidate is forced to remember interactions with 6 or more people and their names, the candidate can become exhausted. Bringing people in for an interview is great, but even taking him or her to lunch doesn’t provide the kind of mental break that a candidate needs to be expressive, talk openly, or share novel problem solving techniques.

Shorter discussions with fewer people is going to give you a much clearer picture of the person and what s/he is capable of doing.

http://www.kennedyexecutive.com/how-many-job-interviews-are-too-many/

“If the interview process gets too long, you risk losing the momentum – and the candidate.“

3) Making an offer and then retracting it

This is a horrible experience for the candidate. Even the “probable offer” idea sets people up for disappointment and candidates may invest energy, time, and money getting ready for the move to the new job. Some companies say things like “you have the offer, we just need to check references” and before the references are checked, retract the offer.

Often times, a candidate will stop looking for another job because of the promise of employment from a company only to find that the offer was invalid, the budget was not approved, or the internal communications of the company were poor. If you do this, you are almost asking the candidate to provide a negative review on Glassdoor.

4) Expecting the perfect candidate

Some notice has been made that “only hiring the best” is a fools errand and costs your company missed opportunities and a lot of money. This is very different than hiring the “wrong candidate” which can happen, but mostly, we as developers or leadership need to recognize that interviewing is a horrible experience for you and the candidate and is frought with errors, bias, and is not likely to give you the result that you seek. Some people find, Google, and others, that problem solving is the only valuable testing during an interview. Measuring for fit is next to impossible unless the candidate is obviously unsuited.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/

5) Asking for references before time

Is your budget approved? Has the company evaluated the position to make sure that you really need it? Does your boss know how much money that you have allocted to hire for this position.

Generally, unless you can aswer all of the previous questions, then asking for references is a big no no. It waste the candidate’s time digging up references, and the references will eventually get tired from endless requests for a background on the candidate. If you want an overview, look at linkedin recommendations, the profile of the candidate, the resume, and so on. Once you have a contract ready to sign, then you can ask.

6) Trick questions or tests

I have had some of the most interesting discussions in this area with potential employers. Most of the time, I do great on my feet, but this is not a strength of most programmers. Most are thoughful, take their time, and need to work out strategies on how to solve problems. When I take a minute or so to think through an issue, invariably, the interviewer starts offering solutions, or strategies. It’s like they want good engineers, but they can’t wait for a good answer.

“We like to make a candidate think on his/her feet”

“We like to challenge candidates”

“We want creative problem solvers”

At a whiteboard, not a lot of people are comfortable inventing new strategies, approaches, or code. But does anyone honestly think that a candidate, who hasn’t already solved a dozen similar types of problems before, is going to be able to provide novel answers during an interview under pressure? Even if s/he can, is that really a trait that wou want from a candidate? Or do you want more thoughtful, creative, methodical problem solvers. Get back to me when you’ve decided.

7) Ignoring your own bias toward diversity

I sometimes forget about the importance of diversity this too, but I have gotten better at it... For a powerful team, diversity really matters. That woman who is applying for your team who is from Bangladesh will have a very different point of view and expect to do things a little differently, which is exactly what you want. If we ignoring race and culture, selecting people based on ‘fit’ is also a bad approach unless the candidate is “obviously a bad fit” because no one performs well in interviews.

When selecting for fit, what you are actually doing is selecting for your own biases, not the candidate’s abilities. This type of bias is our own instinct to select people who are most like ourselves which prevents many teams from hiring from other cultures or even from other genders.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/books/review/thinking-fast-and-slow-by-daniel-kahneman-book-review.html?_r=0

Recruiters know about this problem all too well but everyone thinks that they are smart enough to prevent their own biases: they are wrong.If you are selecting candidates for fit, especially based on a ‘hunch’ or a ‘feeling’, then you are simply expressing a bias and you are not interested in the candidate at all.

https://www.recruiter.com/i/4-types-of-interviewer-bias-and-how-to-eliminate-them/

What you should be looking for is someone to round out the team, to provide a different perspective, a different approach. If you are looking for candidates who go-with-the-grain and can fit-in, then your company will stagnate and begin to fail.

http://www.dailyherald.com/storyimage/DA/20120930/business/709309986/AR/0/AR-709309986.jpg&updated=201209300706&MaxW=800&maxH=800&updated=201209300706&noborder