Personally, I think these sort of approaches are the problem with the tech job market. We currently have a massive shortage in talent to do the job, yet complains seem to think we need to prove we're worth their time when in realitiy there are more companies looking to hire than developers so the competition is not with developers with other developers for jobs but with companies for talent. So that is the first part I think is fundmentally wrong. I've literally had companies tell me people spend days on their tech test, I instantly told them I wouldn't be doing that tech test and if they wanted to test me I could come in again and they could give me a production issue to fix, code review, etc but any test would need to have a reasonable time limit. They never got back to me and honestly I'm really happy they didn't.<p>The next part is the entire tech screening process. I remember back in the day when we used to just ask people if they could do FizzBuzz now we're looking at if they used an interface to wrap their ORM usage. That's something that can get picked up at code review and taught. Not everyone is going to code by default at the style of a company but they can learn to do the things the company wants.<p>Then there is the obivous, lets test people for things they aren't going to do. Google and co made this the in thing and the fact we now have books upon books just designed so people who are good at tech can pass a tech interview is a sign in itself that there is something rotten. Hell, there was one guy that took almost a year off to study for the Google exam, err I mean interview. In a world where the shortage of tech employee means they're on the eligble for a visa list in pretty much every country in the world.<p>I've literally had someone be failed on a test before they did far more than expected therefore didn't have time to finish the test. No, that's the person you 100% want. They exceeded expecations.<p>I've made pretty much every mistake in interviewing others, I've had these mistakes while I was interviewing. I've come to realise what is important is, can they do the basic level programming required? If so get them in and if they really suck let them go during the trial period. Our worst developer at the company I work for interviewed amazingly, he falls asleep during meetings.<p>A bunch of companies keep trying to improve the hiring in tech, the problem is, they are the problem.
Please don’t implement this in your hiring pipeline. What’s missing from this is an analysis of the candidates that didn’t make it past the screens of these superscreeners. What kind of bias are these superscreeners introducing into the candidate pool? Are they good predictors because they inadvertently exploit a bias in the interviewers?
Phone screens are tests of sociability. Sociability is an inherently bipolar or multipolar activity, where participants speech, body language and tone are interpreted by other participants, digested, then fed back to the original participant in the form of more speech, body language and tone. We deem those who would score high in sociability to be charming, to have charisma. We deem them so because they have the ability to raise the sociability of those around them. By dent of their mannerisms, they make others feel confident in expressing themselves, and they are willingly to let minor faux pas slide.<p>We would thus expect a candidate being interviewed by a charismatic interviewer to score more highly than they would in the presence of a social dolt. This state of affairs brings into question the utility of phone interviews as measures of job performance.
“Was this statistically significant, or are you conducting pseudoscience? Definitely pseudoscience.”<p>That’s all you need to know. They quantified interviewer quality in terms of offer rate. This article is about self-celebrating a hiring binge without regard to the impact on the team or company.
I wonder how much of this comes down to problem selection, rather than effectiveness of the interviewer? Interviewers usually stick to a couple of problems, so their predictive power might depend primarily on the problem set.<p>I've been going through some technical phone screens lately, and am pretty surprised by how bad the questions are that some people choose. Questions that I wouldn't think would provide any signal whatsoever for hiring
So they selected phone screeners with the same bias as the on-site screeners? Shouldn't the aim be to reduce correlation in order to increase the signal? Doing the same interview 5 times would make hiring even cheaper, but that isn't really the most important metric you should optimize for.