« Experiences as an interviewee

In the last few years, I have to admit, I barely interviewed, thanks to my network I often joined companies thanks to a friendly chat rather than a rigorous hiring process.

In the last month, however, with a few days only of runway left, I’ve put myself in the market, seeking for reassurance, in case our startup wouldn’t sell.

As the interviewer I always followed the classic approach (which I’ve learnt at my days at ThoughtWorks):

• screening call, mostly to explain the opportunity to the candidate
• code test, to verify programming skills
• on-site interview, which in the last year became a day in the office, working together on some feature, aiming to push to production the code on the interview day

The fallacies of this approach

As a candidate I’ve realised a few things:

• The code test can give more false negatives than benefits, in my case I found myself unmotivated (so the ‘sell’ phase wasn’t good enough), tired (I had to do 3 code tests in 3 days on top of usual work, personal, family duties), which ended up in failing a few interviews. 
  I might not be the best coder in town but I am still very hands-on, I co-wrote a whole platform in the last couple of years, so those tests didn’t really work. I also found especially dull the tests using libraries or with long READMEs or hard to solve problems. If the objective is this person can code an in a clean readable manner, then what is the point of using libraries?
• The best way to understand a company is to breathe the air of the current employees, work together on some real problem, spend a day, including lunch, coffee breaks with existing teams, meet the founders. Only after a candidate should be introduced to the next level. Exchanging way of working, knowing for real (not hearing the polished version at conferences or on blog posts) how a company works it’s a fantastic exchange of knowledge, an exercise that shouldn’t be just limited to the job hunting days, but something to do every so often
• Phone calls, emails: you are doing it all wrong, timing is an issue, but there’s plenty of software to do either one-way-interviews or remote face to face interviews.
• Interviews are great to understand yourself, who you are, where you are and where you want to be.

Whenever I’ll be back in a position to hire I hope I will leverage this experience, trying to get the candidate closer to my venture before assessing them. I think it’s fair to say that hiring should be more focused on the candidate assessing the company and not the other way round.