Moving Beyond The Tyranny of Interviews
Interviewless Hiring is a revolutionary new approach to sourcing and vetting talent, and it’s going to change the way hiring happens. But it’s kind of a shocking term when you first encounter it, and your initial reaction when hearing it is probably to think, “What? No interviews? That’s crazy!”
That’s an understandable reaction. Most companies still consider interviews to be a reliable assessment mechanism for making hiring decisions. So eliminating them seems … crazy.
But there’s another way to think about this.
The chronology of a career launch
Consider the chronology of a career launch. That moment when you get offered the dream job — that’s the end of the journey. All the work you put in before that is what makes that moment possible. But what if you don’t get the job offer? Does that mean everything that came before was … for naught? Sadly, the answer is pretty much yes. No matter how much hard work you put in to get yourself to the interview stage, if the interview doesn’t go well, you’re out of luck.
Ultimately, this is a failure of process that does a disservice to both candidate and company.
Making room for data by eliminating interviews
So what happens if you eliminate interviews? What takes their place?
We live in a world in which actions can produce data, and data can be leveraged to produce actionable insights. So what if all that great work you put in preparing for your career produced data? And what if that data could be leveraged to produce actionable insights about you as a job candidate?
That’s exactly what’s now possible, and we’re already seeing it happen at Udacity.
The Flipkart Use Case
Peeyush Ranjan, the Chief Technical Officer at Flipkart, recently wrote an article entitled “Interviewless Hiring: Lowering Risk and Raising the Bar.” In that article, he describes the process:
“What’s important to understand is that Udacity students learn by doing, so as they progress, they build up a portfolio of work. They also establish an ongoing record of their performance and behavior. They take tests, watch videos, and ask questions. They engage with mentors and coaches, and in forums and Slack communities. They post to GitHub, participate in hackathons, enter competitions, and publish apps. All of this activity produces data, which becomes part of the unique metadata contained in Udacity candidate profiles.”
Flipkart has already hired Udacity graduates using Interviewless Hiring, and they’ve proven to be great hires. As Peeyush writes in his article, he’s not surprised:
“Interviewless Hiring, the way we’ve developed it with Udacity, is actually much less risky. The data can tell us what we need to know far more reliably than an in-person interview can. An interview is a once-in-a-lifetime interaction, fraught with too many irrelevant factors that can bias the experience one way or the other. Our approach with Udacity provides a long-term, holistic image of a candidate’s skills and behaviors. The proof is in the results. We hired candidates based on their Udacity profiles, and they’re excelling.”
What’s good for the candidate is good for the company (and vice versa!)
Interviewless Hiring is admittedly still in the early stages. But given the success pioneering companies like Flipkart are seeing, there’s no doubt more organizations will be following suit in the very near future.
Just as you deserve to have the full measure of your talents, skills, and experience assessed when applying to a company for a job, so too does that company deserve the chance to learn the full measure of your talents, skills, and experience. Ultimately, Interviewless Hiring is a process that benefits both candidate and company.
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This post was written by Christopher Watkins, Senior Writer, Udacity
