Comment by tignaj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tignaj | Hacker News Reader

Engineer / engineering manager here.

Nicely articulated article. There is one observation that I respectfully disagree with - the one that says interviews are monotonous and boring.

I have done hundreds of interviews in my career and never found them to be boring. Perhaps one the reasons is I don't do scripted interviews. It is always an exploration for me. I will start with simple questions and if I get good answers I will go deeper and deeper into the subject matter or into the adjacent area. If I don't get good answers I will retract and probe another direction. This is sort of a depth-first traversal of candidate's skills with a heuristic to stop traversing a particular branch if I see it is not a promising direction.

My goal is to discover the area where the candidate is the strongest (obviously within the areas I am interested in for the particular role I am hiring for). It is very fun and almost never boring. The experience is always different because people are never the same. Yes, some candidates are just not good, but even bad ones are bad in different ways.

I know common wisdom for using scripts is to have repeatable and comparable evaluations so that you can choose the best candidate. I understand the desire but I prefer to find the best in each candidate and if it means I have to use a lot of gut feeling and intuition to make the final decision then so be it, I believe it still results in better overall results. The idea to choose the person I want to hire based on how many answers to my standard questionnaire they got right was never appealing to me.

I can totally see how if you do scripted interviews it can become boring, so don't. Interviews can be fun and it can be a creative process.

Another way interviews can be fun is if you find someone who has stronger skills than you do in a particular area. I love it when a candidate teaches me something new. Find where their strength is and let them shine.

I agree that scripted interviews can be boring... but it's not just common wisdom that using structured interviews leads to better assessments, there's plenty of research* that shows that too. Of course, you should always take research in this field with a grain of salt, since things are different from industry to industry and company to company. But I think it's safe to assume that unstructured interviews are more prone to unconscious bias. Research also shows that most people think they are better at assessing candidates in an unstructured environment than they actually are. If you're really experienced, you might be calibrated enough to be immune to that to a large extent, but it's still hard.

But yeah, I agree that it can be boring and a poor experience for both candidate and interviewer if interviews are too scripted. It also has other failures, e.g. it can fail to capture different talents that candidates might have. I personally think the best way to handle this is to mix both structured and unstructured interviews.

There are plenty of other ways to make interviewing rewarding. Think of it not as a burden, but as a way to help both the company and the candidate make a possibly life-changing decision as accurately as possible. Empathy can go a long way towards humanizing the process. Honestly, one of the most rewarding things I felt as an interviewer (and then a manager) was seeing someone I interviewed (or hired) later thriving in a role. Being a part of making that happen is really fulfilling.

* http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.172...

Thanks for the link, I haven't seen this before, going to read it.

Google has a few links as well: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/hiring-use-structured-i...

There are also some showing that many people choose unstructured interviews over structured ones because they are overconfident in their ability to assess, and I think one or two that show that unstructured and structured if done properly and together, are better than either method alone. But again, these sorts of studies and metanalyses are very general, so up to you on how seriously to take them. I at the very least found it made me much more cautious of my own assessments in unstructured settings.

It's also true that interviewing isn't just about assessing, it's about giving the candidate information and a good experience. So for instance some studies show that small talk at the beginning of an interview can bias the interviewer. But I still do it because I want interviewee to be as comfortable as possible.

How do you ensure that your reports get objective feedback about their own interviewing?

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