Hiring
Hire someone smarter than you
Don’t hire assholes
Show up on time because being late throws off the candidate’s confidence, shortens the subsequent interviews, and shows a general lack of respect.
- Ask if candidate needs a drink, snack, or restroom break (if applicable)
- Be open-minded, friendly, humble
- If the candidate is taking too long on a single question, gently switch topics. Here’s a good example of this: “To be mindful of time, why don’t we move on to a different topic? We can revisit this if you would like at the end.”
- Remember, the goal is to find out what a candidate knows, not what they don’t know. If you spend too much time where they’re stuck, you’re losing time to find out other things they might be great at.
- Be aware of time, let the candidate open up with the best side
- Avoid saying things like “I was actually looking for this answer…” - it doesn’t help the candidate to know that they failed
- It’s important to remember that candidates are evaluating you as much as you are them.
Intro (5 min)
- Introduce yourself. What you do.
- Explain purpose of the meeting. To evaluate technical skills and your level and give feedback and recommendation to the rest of the interviewers
- Meeting agenda & structure
- Mention about your note-taking behavior
- Two-way format, not an interrogation. Free to questions
- Tell if you don't know
- Tell how much time you have and what you want to get out of the conversation to set the candidate’s expectations
Check homework (if applicable) (20 min)
Purpose is to confirm authorship, clarify details, have a basis go deeper into each area based on existing work
• How did you like the assignment?
â—¦ Did you learn anything new?
• How did you solve home assignment?
• Use evaluation criterias as factual / objective basis
• What would you change if you had more time?
â—¦ High load problem (queues / async is expected)
â–Ş Can you draw the architecture (diagram)?
â—¦ Memory limitation problem (streams / text processing is expected)
General thinking process evaluation
Thinking process questions
| Topic / what we check | Q |
|---|---|
| Willpower | • Why do you want to work for us? - What’s the most difficult challenge that you’ve overcome? - Tell me about your greatest failure. - What’s your proudest accomplishment? • What gives your life meaning? ◦ What keeps you up at night? • What takes up too much of your time? ◦ How do you manage your work-life balance? • Do you do sport programming, contests, hackatons? |
| Communication | • What is the most annoying question that people ask you? • Pretend I’m not a tech person. ◦ Can you explain TCP/IP in simple terms? ◦ Can you explain what is wrong with website if you saw in logs: Error: 1118 SQLSTATE: 42000 (ER_TOO_BIG_ROWSIZE)Message: Row size too large. The maximum row size for the used table type, not counting BLOBs, is %ld. You have to change some columns to TEXT or BLOBs |
| Growth | • Why did you decide to do the work you are doing now? - Tell me about a time you accidently released imperfect code. How did you find out about it, and what steps did you take to rectify the situation? • How do you keep your technology skills current? • What is project are you proud of? ◦ What was your role? ▪ What technical challenges did you face? • What are your favorite and least favorite technology products, and why? |
| Creativity | - How would you organize your dream project today? - Do you do sport programming, contests, hackatons? - How do you balance speed and quality? - How do you develop a product without a tangible marketing requirements document or user interface specification? |
| Leadership | - What was the last presentation you gave? - Do you have pet projects? - What have you done to build a positive reputation in the tech community for you and the company that you currently work for? - Do you own open source repos? |
| Management | - What’s the difference between managing individual contributors and managing managers? How do you think engineering teams should be organized? How do you allocate engineers to different projects? How do you onboard engineers to new projects? How do you manage priorities across engineering teams? - What is your role in recruiting for the teams you manage? How do you know if someone will add to the culture of your teams? What balance of senior and junior engineers do you need on a team to ensure its success? How many direct reports should a manager have at any given time? How do you manage your team’s performance? How do you determine when someone needs to be promoted? Tell me about a time one of your direct reports wasn't meeting their goals. What steps did you take? What do you do when someone quits? How do you ensure knowledge transfer before someone quits? What core values do you think every engineering team should hold? Describe your best hire. How did you recruit them? Describe your worst hire. What went wrong? |
| Critical thinking | • How did you like this interview? What can we improve in tech interview? |
Candidate’s questions
Evaluate curiousity, question topics as past pain-areas
Impress & Sell (5 min)
- What are you looking forward to in the coming months if you’re hired?
- Explain what cool is being done internally & why person should join
- Highlight the reasons you like working at your company
- Try to tie how their skills and interests would add to the company
- What is done currently in the team
- Thank the candidate for their time
Related:
Evaluating Candidates
- Give a concise summary of your recommendation
- Make recommendations on the
- Problem Solving: Was this person able to solve the question asked?
- Design Process: How does this person design their work processes?
- Correctness: Did the candidate reach the most efficient and effective solutions?
- Domain Expertise: What is the candidate’s general knowledge of the domain?
- Communication: What is the candidate’s communication style?
- Role: Can this person fulfill the business objectives of this role, as related to the job description?
- Team: Is this someone you’d hire to replace yourself or a member of your team?
- Manager: If we hire this person to manage you, would you want to work for that person?
Quantitative Scoring: The 5 point scale.
The points on the scale, as shown on the bottom of Greenhouse scorecards, have the following meaning:
Strong Yes: We should hire this person, and I'm prepared to argue why.
Yes: We should hire this person, but I could be convinced otherwise.
No: We should not hire this person, but I could be convinced otherwise.
Strong No
: We should not hire this person, and I'm prepared to argue why.