Ask HN: Need for better technical interviewing tools?

There's a <i>lot</i> of friction to getting people to use new tools to manage the entire process. It could be quite profitable, but it probably requires someone who's really good at selling to companies.<p>The low hanging fruit I see is for standardizing part of the interview process. If you ask every candidate the same 20 questions, and then rate their responses on a scale from 1-10, you get a really nice and <i>somewhat</i> objective measurement.<p>It's just one signal, it doesn't solve the whole problem, but it's something every company should probably do every time. HR loves it because it's documentation (for any potential discrimination lawsuits). In fact, that could be half your sales pitch. Sell it to HR as a tool to protect the company legally and to hiring managers as a way to more objectively measure candidates.<p>It could be useful for phone screens or in-person interviews. Provide lots of pre-made questions for each job type, but let people customize them. Maybe have each interviewer rate the candidate separately on the same questions, so you can make it even more objective.

I run hiring for Matasano, which is one of the hiring-est companies (in its size tier, I guess) on HN. We've looked at a couple tools like this and none of them have kept us too engaged.<p>A feature idea for you: when you do the scheduling, have contact information for all the interviewers enrolled in the system, and the candidate, and (optionally) SMS them 15 minutes in advance of the interview.

<a href="http://interviewsy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://interviewsy.com/</a><p>I like the board layout and how you pull the social info. But I don't understand focusing on "technical interviews" - that's just illogical to me. A typical 100+ person company's technical interviews happen much less frequently than their non-technical interviews, don't they? Maybe that's not clear - in other words, for your typical company that has technical employees, don't those same companies also need to hire non-technical employees as well? Of course they do. So... if I, the hiring person, use your tool for the technical interviews, what tool do I use for the non-technical interviews? If the answer is, "Uhhhh..." or "A different site", then that's it - I won't use you. I don't want to have to use multiple sites/tools during hiring; I want to either use one site or no sites.<p>Here's an idea - maybe you open up the board layout/social part for all interviewees, and make the coding/testing aspects an in-site purchase/option? I don't know - it's your business and all - but it seems to me that people will pay a premium for those extra features:<p>* Coding tests<p>* Intelligence testing<p>* Custom Q&#38;A with grading (like @staunch said)

at the angelhack last weekend, my partner created streetcodr.com. it was well accepted and seemed like a cool way to code.

personally I am also the part of hiring process. and same level of frustration I got as you got while interviewing them. I think its a good idea what you going to do and I totally suport it. There must be a common platform for each applicant where all the corporate information is available there, where any one can host the interview, call for interview, scheduling of interview and many more things can be handled there.