Not another interviews’ article: Aftermath
[Previous Chapter — The Questions]
Well, we really thought on how to do an interview, and did it. We’re finished right?
Interviewer Point of View
If you are also focusing on culture, don’t forget:
- Why do you want to come to this company?
- What would you like to do here?
- If we wanted to hire you, when would you be available?
(Avoid not managing the person’s expectations and explain this is a standard question to avoid people’s high hopes for nothing).
And let’s wrap up the interview with the last 3 questions:
- Tell me something you learn the last week.
- Talk me about some blogs, articles, news.. That you follow and have read recently about Android.
- Do you wish to ask me anything? (Company related mainly, but extra points if someone asks why I’m so beautiful of course!)
And it’s a wrap!
Don’t forget to shake hands and wish the best of luck to that person.
Explain that you will give your feedback soon but the process will not be up to you from now, but you’ll do your part to make the final feedback be given soon.
For God’s sake, don’t just say things, really care for the person and ask the people in charge of it to really give that person feedback ASAP.
If the interviewee is clearly not a match and is asking some feedback, try to ask “How do you think it went?”. Some of the people will understand easily that it really didn’t went that well. Those who don’t, you can choose according to the person attitude if you are giving some feedback (“I don’t think it went very well..”) right away or not.
When the person leaves the room your job is not finished. You should send your feedback (or talk with co-interviewers and send it) right after, or at least in the next day or so.
Also, try to have a good and fast feedback policy, and avoid having the company not replying to someone even if it’s just to say no. If you want that person but there is current no position available, be honest and explain to the person that she’s on a shortlist. Lack of feedback makes it look that you really don’t care about the person.
A good feedback also means that without being too blunt, you should say the reason the person failed in broad strokes:
“Technically you aren’t still at the point we would like” or “Culturally we don’t think you are a fit”
Don’t really go into details, but being honest is always the way to go.
An important thing which is not very common is maintaining a company’s private log about the people interviewed and the interviewer's feedback. It will allow several things:
- If in the future the person applies again after failing, you can focus right on what the person failed
- It will also allow you to recall some people for interview that were on the borderline sometime later.
- And really important, something that almost no company does… something that will allow you to calibrate your interviewers. After 6 months or 1 year evaluate the success of the hire and make some statistics about which interviewers have better evaluation skills. Then you can either pair those who are not so good at it with those who are really good, or ask the ones not so good to avoid doing interviews at all (you can read a nice guide of how to do this on this book)
You have now finished the interview. Try to check in the near future if you got your evaluation right (according to what I said above) to know your current capability and try to understand what you can improve at.
If you did all that that we talked about before, GREAT JOB!
You managed to not just be an engineer but also a nice person!
Interviewee Point of View
In the final part of the interview if you had done your homework and studied the company you probably have some questions. You now have the opportunity to ask them. That will make them notice you are really interested and well, you can as I did and ask what’s the Facebook Messenger architecture and learn some nice things.
You can also ask when you will receive positive or negative feedback and if it’s a positive what will happen next.
If you try to ask some feedback right away be prepared to receive both positive or negative feedback. Remember that if it’s feedback it’s not up to discussion, it’s the other person opinion. You can accept it (or not) but under no circumstance have a backlash moment.
You can find here some other very good closing questions.
A good example:
Shake the hand of the interviewer(s) and it’s a wrap!
UPDATE:
After this got a whole lot more readers than I expected, I’m currently adding more content. I’ll also leave here some interesting links:
☞ Pedro Vicente can be reached via Medium response or on Twitter. Feel free to send some comments.
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