Interview Them Where They Are

As engineers, we've spent years mastering the art of conducting technical interviews—or have we? Despite being on both sides of the table dozens of times, how often have we come away feeling that the interview didn't work as well as it could have? How many of our interviews have been just plain bad? How much time do we spend designing and improving our own interview processes, and what signals should we be looking for when it comes to making those improvements? In this talk, we'll examine the technical interview in depth, developing a framework for interviewing candidates "where they are" by focusing on answering two major questions: how can we ensure our interview process identifies the people and skillsets we need to grow our teams, and how can we interview candidates in an inclusive way that maximizes their ability to demonstrate their competencies? By the end, we'll have built out a rich new set of tools you can immediately apply to the hiring process in your own organization.

Transcript

3. $ ps aux | grep wat | awk '{print $2}'
4. $ ps aux | grep wat | awk '{print $2}'
5. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML
6. Asynchronous JSON and... Xmascript?
7. Asynchronous JSON and... cript?
8. "This isn't hard"
9. (We didn't get to the hard part)
11. %
13. &!='
15. Interviewing is broken. How do we fix it?
16. Interview Them RailsConf 2019 Minneapolis, MN, USA Where They Are
17. > DoubleAgent.find 49 => #<DoubleAgent:0x00007fc201f70150 id: 49, name: "Eric Weinstein", employer: "Test Double", email: "eric@testdouble.com", github: "ericqweinstein", twitter: "ericqweinstein", website: "https://ericweinste.in">
19. Find the people we need to grow our teams
20. Optimize for demonstrating competencies
23. "We're looking for someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science (or equivalent), one to three years of experience, and knows JavaScript + React and Go. Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes."
24. ❌
25. We're looking for someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science (or equivalent) One to three years of experience Knows JavaScript + React and Go Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
26. We're looking for someone with a bachelor's degree in computer science (or equivalent) One to three years of experience Knows JavaScript + React and Go Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
27. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years One to three years of experience Knows JavaScript + React and Go Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
28. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years One to three years of experience Knows JavaScript + React and Go Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
29. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years Comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services Knows JavaScript + React and Go Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
30. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years Comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services Knows JavaScript + React and Go Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
31. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years Comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services Prefer knowing either JS + React or Go, but for more experienced candidates, not a hard requirement Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
32. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years Comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services Prefer knowing either JS + React or Go, but for more experienced candidates, not a hard requirement Bonus points for experience with PostgreSQL, microservices, and Kubernetes
33. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years Comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services Prefer knowing either JS + React or Go, but for more experienced candidates, not a hard requirement Describe our stack: JS/React + Go, PG, microservices + Kubernetes
34. No degree requirement, no "equivalent experience" or years Comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services Prefer knowing either JS + React or Go, but for more experienced candidates, not a hard requirement Describe our stack: JS/React + Go, PG, microservices + Kubernetes
35. "We're looking for someone comfortable building features and looking to grow to own entire services. We prefer that candidates know either JavaScript and React or Go, but this is not a hard requirement. Our team uses JS/React, Go, and PostgreSQL, organized into microservices orchestrated by Kubernetes."
36. ✅
37. Know who and what you're looking for before you interview
38. This includes how you measure success
39. %,-. /012
40. %,-. /012
43. "They have to be short enough that they can be explained and solved reasonably quickly, yet complex enough that not everyone can solve them. Therefore, it's unlikely that you'll be asked any real-world problems." — Programming Interviews Exposed
44. "They have to be short enough that they can be explained and solved reasonably quickly, yet complex enough that not everyone can solve them. Therefore, it's unlikely that you'll be asked any real-world problems." — Programming Interviews Exposed
46. Meet Ada 4
47. Strengths
48. Strengths
49. Strengths f(x)
51. Made-to-measure interviews
52. Meet Ben 6
53. Strengths 7
54. Strengths </> </> ✨
55. Strengths ⚖
56. :
57. Look for strengths rather than prod for weaknesses
58. Meet Charlie ;
59. Strengths
60. Strengths
61. Strengths
62. Doesn't this introduce bias?
63. Uniform != Unbiased
64. Know who and what you're looking for before you interview
65. Try made-to-measure interviews
66. Look for strengths rather than prod for weaknesses
67. An interview fails the interviewee when that interview does not anticipate candidates like them
70. Credits De Bruijn sequence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence Milton Bradley/Hasbro's "Operation": https://target.scene7.com/is/image/Target/GUEST_b0a7dc62- d987-4dae-84f6-4fabd53046a1 Cover slide image: https://firebrandtalent.com/wp-content/uploads/BEnglish191018.png Quicksort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicksort Stack Overflow image: https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.316142692.7951/ap, 550x550,12x12,1,transparent,t.png "T. Hanks": https://www.redbubble.com/people/defendingdrealm/works/31688245-thanks-tom-hanks