interview .. pt. 2

Interviewing is hard. I would say the biggest challenge in the interview process is time. The interviewee has a small amount of time to prove that they are worthy of hiring, and the interviewer has a small amount of time to deduce whether or not a person is hireable. If you think about it, the current interview process essentially requires the interviewer to decide if the interviewee is worth 100,000+ dollars within the span of a few hours. This is the challenge that presents itself in the current system of hiring. Companies want employees that will, grow and thrive at the company for months/ years +. And yet, they the current interviews generally only test your abilities over an hour. How do you assess someone’s ability to succeed over months/ years at a company in such a short period of time? It’s no wonder interviews are so hard for everyone. The current tech interview is analogous to having someone sprint a 100 meter sprint and trying to decide how good they would be at running a marathon. So, why not test the candidate’s ability to run marathons?

I propose a new interview process to find the marathon runners, the people who will help the company grow and succeed for long durations of time. The key pieces that it hopes to assess is the person’s smarts, willingness and drive to work, and their ability to work on a team. You can assess ability to work on a team with some behavioral questions, and you can decide on culture fit by bringing them out to office. A lot of companies already do this. These pieces are not absent in the current interview process. What is absent is an ability to test candidates want to succeed and want to work for your company. To fix this, I propose an open ended coding challenge, open to the general public. This gives anyone the chance to prove themselves. An interview process where an applicant has the opportunity to showcase their skills and willingness to work at the company will attract the marathon runners, and allow them to stick out from the crowd. An interview process that is based on side projects, and the amount of effort that an interviewee is willing to put in to impress a company will attract better candidates. It also serves as a more efficient means of weeding out people who are sprinters with no endurance. Analogously, it weeds out the smart people who can perform well on coding interviews, but are actually lazy/ unmotivated. I don’t even think this is a question of ethics, it is about logic. It is simply a more logical way of attracting candidates. It searches for the marathon runners and not the sprinters, like every company should.