I know how difficult it is to walk a candidate out early; I've had to do it myself before. I'm curious to know from the rest of HN:
Does your company have an official process for ending onsite interviews early, and under what circumstances (if any) is that okay?
The rationale is partially "Even if this particular candidate does not end up working for our organization, our treatment of them will be repeated to their friends, who -- since birds of a feather flock together -- likely include other people who we may be interested in hiring."
(And partially it is just that I cannot contort my mind into believing that any serious professional could think that "Our multinational telecommunications company lost your interviwer. Whoops! Happens all the time -- door's on the left, security will see you out" is acceptable outside a Dilbert strip.)
Have you met these bay area social media people?
I applied at twitter a few years ago (a direct referral from ev). The first technical phone interviewer tweeted part of my resume along with a sarcastic comment before the call. He then proceeded to not be very friendly on the phone screen (and called 15 minutes late). A few days later, the second phone interviewer asked half the same questions as the first interviewer.
The recruiting staff was excellent, and the people I met on-site for interviews were great.
"Professional" to the engineering staff seems to mean "I'll do whatever makes me feel good as quickly as possible."
Conversely: the message behind the incredibly popular "bum's rush" technique of flushing sub-optimal candidates seems to be "aww, you sucked so bad, most likely your friends all suck, too -- so we might as well deter them from applying, also."
This is clearly disingenuous, and accomplishes nothing other than to to convey a palpable sense of contempt and disregard for the candidate. It's an insult to their intelligence, basically.
Not giving candidates a set schedule of interviews beforehand prevents these awkward lies and interactions. This may be an acceptable level of honesty because rejecting someone on the spot can be very difficult, both for the interviewer and the candidate.
Since then, seems like everyone's just making it up as they go. Hiring, evals, reqs, QA/test, whatever. The pinnacle of methodology may have sucked, but at least we all pretended to try.
When I interview candidates now, when it's a "no", I chop it off asap. I give precise reasons why, as nicely as possible. It's fair, honest, constructive, and is how I would want to be treat. I also believe in the Roman Evaluation Method, where anything less than a yes by everyone is a no.
Alas, I'm a solo act in a large organization. eg, Another interviewer, even after it's a clear "No" (we compare notes via IM), let's things drag on, always doing the "do you have any questions for us?" bit, and then wraps up with a "our people will contact you..."
in the past, when i've been the interviewer, i've "kept going to the end". i've not interviewed people recently, but if that changes in the future i will try this approach.
(vaguely related - thinking back, at least twice, as the candidate, i've volunteered myself as not suitable for the job. one resulted in an early exit; the other limped awkwardly on.)
The real answer of course was to fix the phone screens, but that requires actual energy be put into thinking hard about the hiring process, and the hiring process is deeply, fundamentally unsexy.
Not that we need to slow down and make some kind of special accommodation when this happens -- because indeed, such episodes may fairly be viewed as signs of a lack of experience and confidence.
But it still surprises me how often people fail to see the basic humanity at play in these situations: instead of thinking "poor guy, he seemed really nervous", all that comes to mind is "What a loser! He couldn't solve that Euler problem with me staring and grinning impatiently at him the whole time. How did he ever make it through the phone screen?"
But there's no point to giving a transparently dishonest, "the dog at my homework"-style response, like was apparently done at Twitter in the two occasions cited above.
What's the most important part of your job if you're a software developer in a pre-revenue startup? Hiring people who are smarter than you.
If you don't believe that, do your colleagues and investors a favor and quit.
I'm serious.
I felt pretty terrible about it since it was 100% my fault that they wasted their time by coming in, but time is too valuable to throw good after bad...
They don't need to know that there were other interviewers lined up after. And the others are thankful the "guaranteed no's" don't get to them.
