Uncategorized
Posted by Aline Lerner on February 6th,
In addition to making candidates you want today more likely to join your team, feedback is crucial for the candidates you might want down the road. Technical interview results are highly non-deterministic. According to our data, only about 40% of candidates perform consistently from interview to interview. Why does this matter? If interview results are erratic, it means that the same candidate you reject this time might be someone you want to hire in 6 months. It’s in your interest to forge a good relationship with them now and be cognizant of and humble about the flaws in your hiring process.
I thought this tweet captured my sentiments particularly well.
The sad truth is that hiring practices have not caught up with market realities. Many of the hiring practices we take for granted today originated in a world where there was a surplus of candidates and a shortage of jobs. This extends to everything from painfully long take-home assignments to poorly written job descriptions. And post-interview feedback is no exception. As Gayle Laakmann McDowell, author of Cracking the Coding Interview , explains on Quora : “Companies are not trying to create the most perfect process for you. They are trying to hire — ideally efficiently, cheaper, and effectively. This is about their goals, not yours. Maybe when it’s easy they’ll help you too, but really this whole process is about them … Companies do not believe it helps them to give candidates feedback. Frankly, all they see is downside. ” Look, I’m guilty of this, too. Here’s a rejection email I wrote when I was head of technical recruiting at TrialPay. This email makes me want to go back in time and punch myself in the face and then wish myself the best in my future endeavors to not get punched in the face.
These types of form letter rejections (which I guess In this hiring climate, companies should move toward practices that give candidates a better interview experience. Is fear of litigation and discomfort legit enough to keep companies from giving feedback? Does optimizing for fear and a few bad actors in lieu of candidate experience make sense in the midst of a severe engineering shortage? Let’s break it down. Does the fear of getting sued even make sense? While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company constructive feedback (ie not “durrrr we did not hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation.
Hey , guess what? IT’S ZERO! THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER. 1
As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get. But in this market, creating poor candidate experience to hedge against something that is highly unlikely seems… irrational at best and destructive at worst. What about candidates getting defensive? At some point, I stopped writing trite rejection emails like the one above, but I was still beholden to my employer’s rules about written feedback. (2) As an experiment, I tried giving candidates verbal feedback over the phone. For context, I had a unique, hybrid role at TrialPay. Though my title was Head of Technical Recruiting, which meant I was accountable for normal recruiter stuff like branding and sourcing and interview process logistics, my role had one unique component. Because I had previously been a software engineer, to take the heat off the long-suffering eng team, I was often the first line of defense for technical interviews and conducted something like of them that year. After doing a lot of interviews day in and day out, I became less shy about ending them early when it was clear that a candidate wasn ‘ t qualified (eg they couldn’t get through the brute force solution to the problem, let alone optimize). Did ending interviews early cause candidates to fly off the handle or feel particularly awkward, as many people suspect?
In My experience, cutting things off and saying nothing about why is a lot more awkward and leads to more defensiveness than letting candidates know what the deal is. Some candidates will get defensive (at which point you can politely end the call), but if you offer constructive feedback – let them know what went wrong, make some recommendations about books to read, point them to problem repositories like Leetcode 3 , etc. — most will be grateful. My personal experience with giving feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. I used to love mailing books to candidates, and I formed lasting relationships with many. Some became early interviewing.io users a few years later. Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next. So if giving feedback isn’t actually risky and has real upsides, how does one do it? When I started interviewing.io, it was the culmination of what I had started experimenting with at TrialPay. It was clear to me that feedback is a Good Thing and that candidates liked it… which in this market means it’s also good for companies. But, we still had to grapple with prospective customers’ (pretty irrational) fears about the market being flooded with defensive candidates with a lawyer on speed dial.
For context, interviewing.io is a hiring marketplace. Before talking to companies, engineers can practice technical interviewing anonymously, and if things go well, unlock our jobs portal, where they can bypass the usual top-of-funnel cruft (applying online, talking to recruiters or “talent managers,” finding friends who can refer them) and book real technical interviews with companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Coinbase, Twitch, and many others… often as early as the next day.
The cool thing is that both practice and real interviews with companies take place within the interviewing.io ecosystem, and wrt feedback, you’ll see why this matters in a moment. Before we started working with employers, we spent some time building out our practice platform and getting the mechanics right. For practice interviews, our post-interview feedback forms looked like this:
The feedback form that an interviewer fills out
After each practice interview, interviewers fill out the form above. Candidates fill out a similar form rating their interviewer. When both parties fill out their forms, they can see each other’s responses. When we started letting employers hire on our platform, we just recycled this post-interview feedback format, told them they should leave feedback to help us calibrate and because it’s good for candidate experience, and fervently hoped that they wouldn’t have an issue with it.
To our surprise and delight, employers were eminently willing to leave feedback. On our platform, candidates were able to see whether they passed or not and exactly how they did, just a few minutes after the interview was over, stopping the rising tide of post-interview anxiety and self-flagellation in its tracks, and, as we’ve said, increasing the likelihood that a great candidate will accept an offer.
Be clear that It’s a no-go. Ambiguity is psychologically difficult in a stressful situation. For instance: Thank you for interviewing with us. Unfortunately, you did not pass the interview. After you make it clear that it’s a no-go, tell them something nice. Find something about their performance — an answer they gave, or the way they thought through a problem, or how they asked the right questions — and share it with them. They’ll be more receptive to the rest of your feedback once they know that you’re on their side. For instance: despite the fact that it did not work out this time, you did {x, y, z } really well, and I think that you can do much better in the future. Here are some suggestions for what you can work on. When you give suggestions, be specific and constructive. Don’t tell them that they royally screwed the whole operation and need to rethink their line of work. Instead, focus on specific things they can work on. Or, to put it another way, “Hey, familiarize yourself with big O notation. It’s not as scary as it sounds bc it comes up a lot in these kinds of interviews. ” (4 ) doesn’t say “you’re dumb and your work experience is dumb and you should feel bad” or “you seem like an asshole.” It says you should familiarize yourself with big o notation.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings