Two of the biggest challenges facing technical recruiting today is that, first, recruiters are often, by definition, not engineers. We don’t know how to code. We are like black box testers that ask certain questions and hope for answers that resolve within a certain range and often have to parse the result into something we can translate to technical ability. And, like working with any human, ymmv.

Second, engineers and their recruiting counterparts often do not synchronize or collaborate as well as they could. Engineers, if they are involved in interviews, are key members of a company’s technical staff. Having them disconnect from coding to talk with a candidate is a huge mental shift that can often drive to undesirable outcomes such as less debrief/after-action-review time, unspecific feedback, or general animosity between recruiter and engineer as the engineer feels, consciously or subconsciously, that their life is busy and stressful partly because they are sick of asking Front End Devs to implement BFS algorithms cold (see what I did there?).

What you have are two insufficient measuring tools (recruiters attempting jedi mind tricks and engineers using Algorithmic Gymnastics ) trying to somehow out-hack and outrun the fearful prospect of hiring someone who got the interview crib sheet from Glassdoor a day before the onsite and fakes their way to a fat sign-on bonus and stock grants for days when they’ve never actually shipped anything valuable and their colleagues would run from them before ever work with them again.

Its like five people trying to describe directions to a restaurant in a city they’ve never been in, and they all speak different languages, and have never met, and then all of them are surprised when the directions fail.

Good luck, Sahat. And thanks for the rant. It’s well deserved and valuable