Recently, I’ve had the privilege (and sometimes burden) of conducting first-round interviews. After participating in quite a few, I thought I’d talk about my experience.
Yes is the Default
Interviews are a series of filters, with each a bit more granular than the last. The first round isn’t to determine if we should hire someone, it’s to filter out those who we clearly should not. Yes is my default answer, because I believe if we have to have a reason to be excited about a candidate, it significantly increases the likelihood of making a biased decision based on personal factors instead of objective ones. I have my own biases and a judgment call will undoubtedly be influenced by them, no matter how much I try to avoid it. Fortunately, relying purely on objective factors is not as difficult as it sounds, because most candidates who fail do so in ways that don’t require deliberation. The sole reason for almost every rejection is failing the code exercise.
Programming is the Great Differentiator
You might be shocked to find out that about 2/3 of candidates can’t complete a basic code exercise; I certainly was. We’re not asking candidates to balance a binary search tree here; we’re asking basic data structure problems about as difficult as FizzBuzz. The candidates we are interviewing all have senior titles and 8+ years of experience, yet a number of them have struggled to find the max value in an array, and one couldn’t even start because of the inability to use a for-loop. After seeing this, I requested we move the programming exercises to the start, because all else becomes irrelevant if they fail there. Moving them has helped us reject candidates earlier when it becomes clear they haven’t passed through our filter. All of our candidates had great looking resumes, fancy titles, and can easily recite their job history with a smile, but put them in front of an IDE and all pretense quickly falls away.
I Don’t Want to Fail You
Interviewing takes a lot of time out of my day, but it also takes far more energy than a regular meeting. I want that time and effort to be valuable to me as much as the candidate, so rejection feels like a waste to both sides. In a perfect world, I would say yes to every candidate and we could hire someone right away, because every day I have to spend doing more interviews is a day that takes my time, and especially my energy, away from other tasks. By being the first filter, outside of the recruiter screen, I am helping to save time for the rest of the team who will not have to do subsequent interviews. Our goal is to hire someone, not endlessly run interview loops, so the incentive for me to vote yes on a good candidate is there.
We Can Move Fast
The standard process to move a candidate to the next round is 3-5 business days, depending on the team’s schedule, but if we find a candidate we really love, we can and will shift whatever we need to for that person. We will move the entire team’s day around to make sure they can attend the interviews. We will move quickly and be highly communicative to make sure we don’t miss out on a great person when we like them enough. Moving at our normal pace does not mean we dislike a candidate, but simply being in the second round does not mean we will say yes; it simply means we have no reason to say no. We will not show our hand outright, but the speed at which we move can be an indirect indication of interest.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to interview many candidates and improve my interviewing skills. I understand the privileged position it puts me in compared to our candidates and the power differential that can exist from it, so I aim to be sensitive to the challenges of those who are currently unemployed, even more so for those who have been laid off from Tebra. At the time of posting, my team is still hiring for a Senior Front End Engineer, for those who may wish to reach out.
Adam Lif 