Interviews: How Not To Hire Good People
Back in August 2006 I went to a job interview. I haven’t been to all that many interviews in my ten years of working but I can say without a doubt that this was the worst interview ever; both from my perspective and from the employers perspective. Simply put, this was a classic case of ‘how not to conduct an interview’ in the technology sphere. To protect the innocent, I won’t name names (other than myself) and I’ll simply refer to the potential employer as ‘The Corporation’.
In hind sight, I should have never applied for the job. The Corporation’s website used to apply for jobs is terrible. The careers section is one of those out of the box solutions that everyone inside the corporation thinks is cool, mostly because after paying for the product they didn’t really have to customize it. But, those same people already have a job, so they never had to use the careers section, so they wouldn’t know any differently. And job prospects certainly aren’t going to criticize the careers section because the person doing the interview might have been the one who implemented it. And should the interviewee get hired, well then they no longer care how crappy the careers section is because, well, they have a job. Back to the site though. Remember when the first web content started coming out back in the mid-1990s and most sites wouldn’t let you cache anything that you submitted through a form? You know, you’d get that crap message about the cache had expired, even though you had ‘just’ hit the page? Well, I haven’t seen many instances of that anymore, and in fact the only instance I can think of off hand is when signing in to my online banking. So that I can accept. But in the case of The Corporation, any time you did a search for a job posting, checked out a job and then tried to click the back button, you’d receive the ‘expired cache’ error. If they were posting jobs every few minutes I could maybe understand, but in this case it is highly unlikely that a new job would be posted during my 5 minute job searching session. That expired cache problem drove me nuts. And when combined with the fact that some of the links to log into the career section didn’t work or redirected to the wrong spot should have been enough to push me away. But I thought that given my experience and smarts, I would be a good fit and moreover, I was excited about the position as it sounded like just what I was looking for.
My next clues about the job should have been picked up during the interaction while scheduling an interview. If, at anytime, the person scheduling the interview jokes around or is anything but professional, you should probably figure out and excuse and call it even. In my case, all emails to me from the Corporation contained not one but several smilies (emoticons), for no real reason whatsoever. At this point, even Ali was skeptical and suggested calling it off. But, I still felt that this job would be a good match for my skill set and offer some new experiences; so I scheduled a time.
On the day of the interview, I wore a suit without a tie. The emails I received from the Corporation specifically about the interview (how to get there, parking , etc) mentioned that they would be in business casual clothes but that I could wear a suit to impress them (followed by several smilies). Again, I looked past the smilies and the lame reference to making an impression by wearing a suit, and decided that this was still the job for me. In my defence, I almost always wear a suit for interviews so that part had no effect on me. I arrived at the Corporation’s offices, several floors up and phoned the contact person from a phone in the lobby. The person came to the door, introduced themselves and led me to the location of the interview - their office; their small office I might add. At this point, everything was starting to add up I was getting a bad vibe. From this point on down, I couldn’t wait to get out. But, still I persevered.
At this point another person also joined us in the small office and the three of us sat at a small table to conduct the interview. Or more accurately, the three of us carried out the Corporation’s interview ‘script’. Interviewer number one directed act one, which most people would call the HR question section and interviewer number two directed act two, which would be likely referred to as the technical part of the interview. Bot of these acts were read verbatim from pre-printed ‘scripts’ and at no time did we sway from the script. Seriously. So imagine yourself sitting in front of two people whom will likely be your boss(es) and having them with their heads down reading questions from a piece of letter-sized paper, then scribing down as you respond. Nice. Oh, and if you don’t follow the script and answer in a way that they are expecting then you are specifically told that you need to follow the script. Seriously. Even though their script is in front of them and your script? Oh, the director didn’t print one out so you have to improvise. But your script better match the director’s script or you won’t do well.
After act one, it’s on to act two. You’d think you’d have a little more leeway here in terms of the script but no, this is simply a knowledge act. You either know the answer or you don’t. Because smart people know acronyms and project code names. Ya, smart people don’t ever need to explain how they built a scalable, server farm that provided load balancing and redundancy or how they designed some enterprise system to tackle some problem more efficiently. Nope. Never mind that this job entails enterprise technologies and design. No need for that information, because the smart people just need to know what EJB and JSP and WKRP stand for. And they should also know that Oak was the codename for first version of the Java programming language. Seriously. Oh and they should also have in depth knowledge of the specific technologies being used by the Corporation today, because that what’s in use today and the Corporation doesn’t think about tomorrow thus there is no need to choose people that will be smart enough to adapt to the next great technology chosen by the Corporation.
After answering ‘no’, ‘not sure’, ‘no idea’, for most of technical questions, I asked a few questions about life at the Corporation and left. And my interviewers told me that sometimes they forget to let people know one way or the other whether or not they got the job so if I hadn’t heard form them by a certain day, to email or call them. To date, I have yet to hear anything. Not that I mind, since right after that I accepted a great job at Critical Mass.
I was initially going to summarize how to conduct a good interview, but I think Joel has covered that subject more than enough. Instead, I provide this example of how not to recruit good people. Of course, to accept that premise, you will have to accept that I am a good person - I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
And for the record, I do in fact know what EJB, JSP and WKRP stand for; those were not questions asked by the Corporation.
Wed, 01 Nov 2006 01:08 Posted in General
