This works both ways right? Would it be fair to say that interview processes don't differentiate good hires from bullshit artists? Feels like framing the problem differently might make it tractable.
I had to take company training in interviewing. The trainer started out by acting out a fake interview. Then he asked us how we felt about him as a candidate. Pretty much everyone agreed that he nailed the interview. Then he began to list all the things he said and how he answered questions, and it slowly became clear that it was all bullshit, and he never said anything that was a direct answer to any of the interview questions. By using deflection and redirection he was able to completely control the interview and give a glowing impression of himself.
I wish I could remember what company was hired to do that because it was one of the best corporate training experiences of my life.
Anyone involved in interviewing really needs to ask themselves "what are we testing for?" In my world, we require anyone who makes it to the full in-person interview to give a technical talk on any topic they want, followed by Q&A from an audience that has a broad collective knowledge base. This has the benefits of:
- Letting the candidate start the interview on strong ground of their choosing
- Giving both the candidate and the team a chance to talk shop in a way that simulates the day-to-day work context
- Offering an opportunity for the candidate to gauge how curious and cordial their potential future colleagues are
- Making it very obvious if the candidate is BSing if they can't answer live questions about something they chose to present
Added: I should acknowledge though that talking about technical topics of interest may get more complicated at some proprietary firms than open source ones.
So I'm not sure that this method works if candidates can give talks on subjects the interviewers are unfamiliar with.
Is your company hiring?
My definition of “senior” is what you will see in the leveling guidelines of most well known tech companies - not “I codez real gud”.
A very common concern, but overblown in my experience. If you notice, I never actually said "judge the candidate's presentation skills" (or anything of the sort) in why I think this process is great. The presenation is really just level-setting; the candidate gets to set the topic and give sufficient context for a conversation to occur. The presentation is at most the first 15 minutes out of a ~3 hour in-person interview process. That's how little it matters.
It's the Q&A and subsequent discussions that matter.
One of the things I like to do on the hiring side is hold interviews in the smallest room people won't complain about. The way we think about public speaking has a lot to do with how close we are to each other.
