Hi everyone,
Have you ever had or conducted an interview without whiteboarding, home assignments, binary-tree-rotations, write-a-website-in-two-hours, design-twitter-on-paper exercises?
Was there an interview where you only talked about the candidate's (or yours) previous experience, their projects, their role, how they solved problems?
I'd love to hear if you had such experience!
As an interviewer, did you feel it is better or worse than more traditional ones?
Was such an interview approach successful for you? More or less stressful for your candidates? Was there enough info about the candidate's skills? Were hired folks more or less successful?
As a candidate, did you present yourself better or worse? Did you feel more at ease? Did you prefer this approach or other ones?
I'll be happy if you could share your experience!
Thanks in advance!
Latest comments (34)
I personally believe that looking into previous projects/work/company can definitely say a lot about the candidate. But what if that candidate is changing profiles/technology/stack.
For example, I changed my profile from a support guy to a developer. Hence judging my knowledge for the position I applied cannot be tested using my previous job experience.
I had such an interview where I was being questioned continuously about my previous job. Like, not a single question about the current job I applied for or the technology related to that. If I am switching profiles because I wasn't satisfied, then making the entire interview about my previous job doesn't make any sense.
I gave a recent interview where the process took more than an hour of questioning about the technology I was switching into, a project to be made and submitted within a week, and then another discussion about my goals with the CTO.
In my opinion, this is the right criteria to judge someone applying for a job. Check if the candidate 'IS' currently a right fit for you guys. His past may or may not help you decide that all the time.
As a candidate, I'll be happy if you ask me technical questions, or questions about how I managed to learn something daily, or improved my knowledge, or put in an effort to improve myself.
Thank you for explaining your point of view.
In this approach, you presume that the candidate already knows a lot about the new technology stack, do I understand it correctly? How would you consider currently employed ones who are not 100% familiar with the new stack yet?
Also I see a lot of people making a distinction between more senior and more junior roles. Do you think this approach is (or should be) applicable for everyone, or would you make a distinction?
I've sort of had this happen.
A friend of mine referred me for a QA position at his employer. While there was a coding assignment prior to heading to the interview, the interviews themselves dealt more with, "How would you approach testing ____?" The only whiteboarding I encountered involved drawing some diagrams.
I ended up not getting the job. A few months later, a friend who referred me told me about a Devops opening they had. I spoke with the hiring manager and tech lead about generic tech topics, past experience, etc. I had an offer in hand later that day. After I started, I ran into the QA folks and all of them said, "We really wanted to work with you, but we thought Devops might be better for you."
These days, I won't do coding challenges (automated or take-home) without first talking with a hiring manager, and I actively screen out companies who do them by looking them up on They Whiteboarded Me (they.whiteboarded.me) or Hiring Without Whiteboards (github.com/poteto/hiring-without-w...).
(Full Disclosure: I run they.whiteboarded.me)
Talking about previous projects: I like it! You get to show off a bit and also show what you learned and what your existing flaws are. It also gives the interviewer a good idea where you're at when they ask you how long something took. (Which for me, is longer than the average dev but i think the important part is figuring it out without giving up)
My current job I got through a series of background/how-do-you-deal-with-people interviews. I kept bracing for a code test but it didn't happen?
Take home tests: I've done the debug-this-problem thing.
I've also had conversational rapidfire q&a interviews just to quiz me on fundamentals, and those are a lot easier than being put on the spot, coding without internet. However after a handful of failures at the coding-sans-internet tests I felt like I had to get my rigour up, which was a good motivator.
I was hired by a tech company that did this in the interview. They already had my CV and so they asked me "well, tell us about you, your projects" I told them about my open source projects, speeches and such and it was mostly like an informal chat with some nice people interested in tech. Surprisingly I was given the job the exact moment we ended talking. I think it's amazing to feel comfortable in an interview and that way I was able to show better my experience and abilities, just because I felt relieved.
Interesting! Can you share more? Both about testing (is it an internship or a probation period?) and about the thesis.
For my most recent interview, I was required to give a 60 minute presentation on my work experience, previous projects, public contributions, etc. To the entire team I was interviewing for, and was followed up by question and answer. It was definitely the most unique interview I have been through, but I feel it was one of the best. I have a feeling that the interviewing team spent a bit of time researching topics and technology on my resume because I was asked very specific questions regarding individual technologies that I would not expect a normal interviewer to know, much less be able to judge the correctness of my answer. Almost as if they were asking my opinion on how to handle a specific task they were working on. All in all I really preferred the interview over answering quiz questions.
Very interesting. 60 minutes sounds rough though.
Which position were you applying for?
The interview was for a senior-ish software engineering position focused on high performance computing / scientific software. The presentation wasn't as bad as I expected, but the Q/A session was much more specific and informed than any other interview I had been on.
This approach is very prone to a hiring mistake. You can end up with theoretical generalist who only can
architectbut in fact never wrote more anything more thanFizz-Buzz. Even a 5 minute coding assignment is enough to evaluate the candidate.Hi Alex,
Is it your personal experience that you (or your co) hired a talkative person unable to code? Would be very interesting if you shared a bit more about your case, please.
I'm not really comfortable to share the details :) I would not use talkative word, I would say that you can hire with this approach a person who just read the day before interview an article on medium about CQRS/microservices/ML/
you named it hereand has zero in depth understanding or practical skills. Moreover the candidate could say in the fist day of on boarding - Pfff I don't use {place your mainstream programming language here }, let rewrite it in Node! (Hypothetical situation )I believe that most companies today interview to look for a book worm that knows all the vocabulary and memorization. When I interview people I look for critical thinking skills. I look to how they solve problems. I am not expecting them to build me some multi-dimensional array or know all these JS terms.
So you may ask, well how do you know what they put on their resume is true? Well that is why you call the company they worked for to talk to them. I honestly think this is never done anymore. Also lots of tech companies will hire temp to hire positions.
Hi John,
I understand the importance of the references, but I imagine it would be hard to do if the person is still working and doesn't want to let the current company know they're interviewing. How do you handle this?
Also can you explain more how you investigate their problem solving approach? I'd like to know more.
I would hope the person has more than there most recent job on their resume. You could contact those people first as this would not impact their current role.
As far as problem solving skills, I like to show the person a problem and without code I want them to talk me through some ideas on how they would solve that problem. Have them explain what they would do to identify where the problem is and what steps they take to solve it
Before freelancing I worked for a few companies.
I've always been hired due to interviews and referrals without coding challenges. Not because I'm a genius, just because they didn't do any. It was extensive chats about technology, past projects, stuff on the resume and so on. Questions like Dian Fay's hints to.
I think I was hired at my first full time job because there weren't many (somewhat) skilled Python programmers at the time in the city more than anything else. I started working in a company specialised in financial software that used C++ and Python in 2007...
The only time I was interviewed with a whiteboard coding challenge (after passing extensive phone interviews) I froze half way, my brain went blank and I failed spectacularly. They didn't hire me.
Naturally as a candidate, not having to do technical tests makes the recruitment process a lot less hassle.
I am pretty happy with my current role, but often get contacted via LinkedIn about job opportunities and nothing turns me off more than lengthy, multi-interview, technical test laden recruitment processes.
To answer one of your questions, yes I have been hired at a company (2 actually) without having to do any tests, by just talking about past experience, strengths and weaknesses, and what the goals and plan is if I joined the new company.
For one I did provide links to some github projects I created so they could get an idea of my coding style.
Fortunately for those companies, finding a person who was a good fit for the team and was eager to learn were more important than knowing the latest JS (or whatever) framework. I enjoyed working at these places as they were very good with providing training and other opportunities for career development.
Somewhat worryingly, last year most companies I interviewed with had a lot of testing. Including some that wanted tests completed before they were willing to talk. Also rather than general tests of web development, which is the area of IT I am in, many were for a particular JS framework (some I have not used before so failed those tests rather badly).
If I must be tested, as a candidate I prefer a small programming task I can do at home. I am usually slightly nervous in interviews, and have lots of questions about the company and processes, so don't think I do so well with verbal or written tests during the interview itself.