"The candidate was not technically strong," said the feedback email from the technical manager. This candidate was the twenty-fifth in a long line of candidates for a senior engineer who the manager had rejected. The recruiter instinctively knew there was a problem with the interview process or panel but did not dare to discuss it with the respected manager. So, the recruiter escalated to me - the manager's manager.

Systemic Issues

I discovered issues that I now believe are systemic ones plaguing many interviewers across organizations, irrespective of their organizational culture. These issues are hard to discover because they emanate from the best technical talent thrust into taking interviews based on their technical skills rather than interviewing abilities. Moreover, given the reputation of the interviewers, the recruiters and managers are afraid to push back or raise suspicion.

Interviews as Hurdles

Most interviewers consider interviews as a filtering mechanism. They take pride in their "hard interview" process. This mindset bears a bias that the market is flooded with low-medium quality candidates who must be weeded out to find the strong ones. This assumption may be valid for some industries, but certainly far from the current realities of the Technology industry. Interviews are intentionally made stressful in different ways.

• The interviewer creates an environment of fear during the interview.
• Interviews are conducted in small, plain rooms resembling interrogation rooms.
• Multiple interviewers swarm a candidate like a gang initiation.
• Candidates don't have access to the same tools they would usually have, while interviewers expect the same level of rigor.

Favorite Questions Anti-Pattern

"How do you write a class constructor in Ruby?" The interviewer lamented that the candidate couldn't write it, so in ten minutes, he knew this was not the right candidate. When interviewers have favorite questions or share questions with the recruiter to weed candidates at the first conversation, this is a sign that the interview process has a mindset problem.

No System of Record

When feedback is captured in emails, chats, or verbally, the recruiter needs to go through their mailbox to find out how many candidates have been interviewed for a position. As a result, it's almost impossible to objectively identify if there is any expectations mismatch between the hiring manager and the recruiter or take any corrective measures.

No Delegation

A lack of delegation of hiring decisions indicates a cult of personality problem. If the hiring manager insists on making all hiring decisions at every level and discipline, that's a red flag.

Rethinking Interviews

An interview is a part of hiring. The purpose of hiring is to build a team with the same values and complementary skills. So, it would be best not to approach interviews as a way to weed out candidates but as a funnel, like a sales process. Interviews are a process to find out the best fit for the Team. It's a selection process, not a set of elimination rounds.

Keep Hiring for a Team

When someone leaves a Team, their backfill does not need to be a like-for-like in all cases. Attrition is an opportunity to rethink the complementary skills and experience of the Team. For example, if the Team needs help with software maintainability, consider compromising on the skills for deep knowledge of refactoring code and databases. If the prior picked up unrelated skills during their tenure, try upskilling an existing Team member than setting out to find someone one-of-a-kind(an OOAK).

Start with Values

Instead of giving recruiters skill-based questions to filter the candidate, ask for candidates who pass the minimum qualifications and appear as good cultural fits to the recruiter. Sharing filter questions de-skills recruiters. It takes away from them their capacity to adapt and discover. Instead, form a hypothesis about each candidate and use the interview process to confirm or disprove a hypothesis. Then, in a recruitment retrospective, share any learning with the recruiters that might help them at the start of the process.

Address Systemic Issues

The following are the building blocks of a functional hiring system.

• The hiring process is the first window to the organization's culture, so it needs to be authentic. If the work can get highly stressful just because of the level's nature or seniority, putting the candidates through some stress is acceptable. But otherwise, there is no need to make it stressful.

• Set up delegation as per functional or line reporting structure. The most experienced or senior folks get to share the feedback, but ultimately the hiring manager makes the call.

• Establish a system of record for interviews. Management needs to be able to see the current snapshot and the trend. Some valuable metrics are interviews by an interviewer, the pass rate at each interview stage, estimated offer dates, and joining dates. The records aim to improve the pass rate at each interview round to create a feedback loop that reduces the expectation gap between stages and accelerates the hiring success rate over time.

• Develop a hiring rubric across the Team so that everyone has the same expectations of a level and skills. For example, if a Team has a test-driven-development (TDD) culture, the Team needs to decide if they want to hire only TDD followers or if they will invest time in teaching someone. The interviewers must follow this rubric to provide candidate feedback.

• Establish a regular retrospective to analyze the system and continuously improve each step of the process.