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Comment by jdthedisciple | Hacker News Reader

Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?

Seriously. Here is how to do it.

I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions:

1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)

2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state management / routing / styling / responsiveness / SEO / performance / security / validation...?

3. Why do you think, concretely, that you can help solve our problem?

Any experienced interviewer will know by the answers if they're dealing with a pretender or the real deal.

Edit: I know recruiters don't have in-depth technical knowledge they should simply forward the few interesting candidates to tech. If you have time for 5 rounds of nonsense you have time for 1 round of quality interviews.

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There are people who are good at tech, but not good at casual conversation about tech. They may not know your terminology even though they are familiar with the concepts, and they may be afraid to ask for clarification on your terminology. And rightly so, as I've heard people act like I am a moron for asking "What exactly do you mean by TECH_BUZZWORD?"

Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.

> There are people who are good at tech, but not good at casual conversation about tech.

And conversely, there are people who are not good at tech, but good at casual conversation about tech. Those people tend to become your boss :)

>Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.

What types of interviewing styles rank well?

> They may not know your terminology even though they are familiar with the concepts

Would that not imply they aren't a good fit for the OP's workplace? And presumably, a lot of larger tech companies, since communication must be a large part of your job.

I am admittedly not good at talking on the fly if I haven't prepped for it. I try to make up for it by trying to focus on writing well.

> There are people who are good at tech, but not good at casual conversation about tech.

Effective communication skills are also important.

I suspect that you are overconfident and will get fooled by someone who knows the culture well and isn’t so great at coding.

yeah but knowing their high school gpa probably makes that worse rather than better

Recruiters are not technical interviewers. They're testing your communication skills, if anything at all.

And grades or university name makes it easy to rank candidates to present a short list to the actual recruiter.

A short but highly unrepresantative list at that.

Too many counter examples irl who had shit grades but were geniuses at actual work to discount.

Agreed. Some people do not work well in a more structured environment (school), and vice-versa.

I've heard reports that recruiters might spend all of 15 to 30 seconds per resume during a screening exercise. Never mind not having technical expertise to ask technical probing questions, sifting through the top of the funnel is more of an exercise in coping w/ high volumes of resumes than it is about validating depth of expertise at the bottom of the interview funnel.

IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:

1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.

2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.

3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.

> Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?

Firstly because that's not their job, and secondly because recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers and they aren't going to be subject matter experts enough to judge between good answers to questions like that and bullshit.

> recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers

Most companies I've interviewed at over the years (basically all but the smallest startups) have had dedicated recruiters for developers; different people hired sales or marketing or other roles. This doesn't mean that they should be expected to be technical experts, but I do think it's interesting that the box-checking type of interviews rather than just having a genuine conversation also seem to be more common the larger the company is. It's probably not surprising, since the need for standardizing interviews is higher when you have a larger number of people performing the interviews, but it's a little ironic that the most boilerplate interviews I've had were all with recruiters who specifically only interview developers.

Then again, I also tend to get bounced around to different recruiters far more frequently with the larger companies. There have been times I've been passed around to half a dozen recruiters within the span of a month or so; one makes the initial contact, then another talks to me on the phone, then another coordinates my technical interview schedule, and then another actually gives me the offer, who then refers me to one final other recruiter to actually respond yes or no (and maybe negotiate if possible). I know some of these are probably a more entry-level position that I've seen referred to as "recruiting coordinators" rather than full-fledged recruiters (meaning that they often handle the logistics like scheduling but don't perform interviews themselves), but it still feels absurd to have to talk to so many different people for basically the same thing. My impression is that it's somewhat intentionally trying to put me at a disadvantage by making it impossible for me to carry over any expectations from one step to the next (e.g. one recruiter might say something about compensation or benefits and then the next one conveniently doesn't know what I'm talking about and can claim that no one would have told me that).

1. i wrote the flux compensator for it 2. flux compensators are my preferred tool. So powerful. 3. I am a flux compensator builder

A recruiter without technical background will not be able to judge the answers other than „was able to form sentences“ or „couldn’t phrase anything“

> 1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)

YMMY, but I was once interviewed in this style days after Elon mentioned it's his go-to style of interviewing.

Was easily the worst, most pointless interview of my life.

As with everything, it probably depends on the person. A good interviewer can do almost anything and come away with a good signal. A bad interviewer can do the same thing and come away with noise.

The process is less important, I think.

When hosting technical interviews, I deliberately lead with this type of question before we get into high-effort questions. Many candidates will immediately reveal knowledge gaps which set the tone for the whole interview.

Frequently experienced candidates with interview practice will simply ramble for many minutes - listing extensive contributions in excessive detail. Unfortunately when this happens it’s usually pretty awkward for everyone.

The ideal candidate will answer this question very gracefully and enable us to proceed directly into problem solving questions.

Gotta agree with your point about good/bad interviewers. I want to add that good interviewers/interviewees know how to manage the “risk” of such open-ended questions leading to a pointless interview.

The notion of looking for a "React" developer is rather silly to begin with so any employer doing that can expect poor results. Competent hiring managers like look for more general skills plus the ability to quickly learn new technologies as needed. Tomorrow the industry will move on to something else and React will become obsolete.

If you need specific technical skills in React for an urgent project then retain a contractor or consultant, don't hire an employee.

You're right, I forgot.

Competent hiring managers look for folks with 10 years experience with React, C#, Java, DevOps, Embedded C++ Development, Mobile cross platform dev and ofc Rust for good measure, each.

We have long forgotten about doing one thing and doing it right.

You literally just have a conversation about the tech. People's true skills shake themselves out in an in-depth conversation about a technology that the interviewer is familiar with.

The problem is, this initial funnels are just recruiters. They're technologically clueless. They're just putting words on paper and finding people that say those words with the right number of experience attached.

> Why do recruiters have such trouble with such a simple task like gauging a candidate's real skills?

The real question is: Why don't the courts? Everything else is just to cover asses when the discrimination lawsuits appear.

Yeah, agreed with the other comment. Recruiters wouldn't be able to do 1.a of your suggestion, let alone 2, 3.

They aren't engineers. Even engineers rarely solve problems anywhere near the optimal way, due to a million reasons, ranging from political to technical. How do we expect HR and recruiters to optimally solve hiring, a immensely complex problem?

The recruiting industrial complex seems to thrive on creating original obstacles with no consequences for how arbitrary they are. I suspect they benefit from the more work they create.

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