The advice about interviewing being exhausting is spot-on. Recruiting, interviewing, and hiring candidates is a very different type of work than most of us engineering types enjoy. Until you’ve developed a thick skin, it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate.
The best compromise I’ve found is to have a dedicated person or team perform high-quality first pass filtering of candidates so that the engineers don’t waste their interviewing energy on interviewing any and every candidate. It’s an iterative process that requires constant fine-tuning. It also tends to have a higher false negative rate, so you’ll have to increase the number of candidates entering the funnel.
It’s also important to give interviewers an out to bail early on candidates who are obviously unqualified early in the process. Multi-stage interviews are good here, but you can’t drag the process out for too long. Avoid scheduling more than a 30-60 minute interview before you have a good idea that the candidate is on the right track. Don’t be afraid to politely dismiss a candidate halfway through an interview if they’re obviously not going to work out.
The second topic is more difficult:
> Am I complicit in a racist, sexist system?
If you’re not familiar with all the permutations of this line of thinking, it goes much deeper than you might expect. The pop culture definition of various -ists and -isms varies greatly from person to person. The fear of accidentally crossing into territory that might classify ones self as the “bad” person is a growing fear for people who grew up in the age of Twitter shaming and hyperbolic news stories about evil corporations. The pressure to avoid feeling like one is on the wrong side of history can lead people to make choices in a self-protective fashion rather than doing what’s best for the team or company. I don’t have a great answer to this, but it’s important to keep the dialogues open rather than forcing everyone to determine their own narratives internally. Those unspoken narratives can have an outsized influence on decisions if you don’t get ahead of it as a company.
> it can also be emotionally draining to reject candidate after candidate.
How so? I mean I can certainly see why interviewing is not for everyone, but this really never crossed my mind. It's not like you know the candidate. Also you want to keep a good standard in your company, don't you? So why would this ever matter to you.
Doing the right thing doesn't always make it easy. I've rejected candidates that I thought were awesome people, just not at the right level of expertise for the role. I really appreciate the enthusiasm that people just entering the industry have, but at some point you can't overcome the lack of experience with enthusiasm. Likewise when you do Zoom interviews with people who don't have awesome jobs currently, and think about what they could do with their lives if they made the kind of money the job pays.
It's emotionally draining because there might be a dozen reasons you want to hire someone, and you have to mentally debate whether any of those reasons can outweigh their faults enough to let you say yes. But they can't, so you have to smash that person's hopes and say no.
It's also emotionally draining to try to confront unconscious bias. You have to tediously step through each link of your decision to say no and make sure that it's consistent with how you treat other people. It's important to do, but it does take some mental effort.
And at a certain point, when you've rejected 5, 7, 10 candidates for the role, it starts to feel hopeless. Are we ever going to find someone to fill the role? And yet you can't let that hopelessness bleed into the interview, so you have to take 5 minutes before the interview to get into "pep mode" so you don't let the interviewee realize how bleak you feel about their prospects of passing, and then to make sure you don't your hopelessness seep into how you review the candidate.
It really is emotionally draining. Especially if you're doing it once or twice a week, because there isn't enough time to forget about your last experience.
I imagine this differs from person to person, and that some people would find rejecting people (especially person after person) to be draining.
You're trying to hire because you want to find someone to help you and you're hoping this next person will be the one to be that help. The person looking for a job obviously wants to find a job that will work well for them, and especially during this pandemic it's entirely possible that the stakes are higher for them than normal (do they currently have a job? Are they moving out of fear of their job going away? etc).
I think that it's entirely possible that someone would find it stressful to reject a stream of applicants - repeatedly telling a series of people, to their faces, knowing that they're people and not just faceless applicants, that it's not going to work out might very well be stressful to some people.
I think that's just the key reason why interviewing isn't for everyone. It's hard for me to emotionally step back from a candidate without zoning out entirely and delivering a bad interview experience.
The best compromise I’ve found is to have a dedicated person or team perform high-quality first pass filtering of candidates so that the engineers don’t waste their interviewing energy on interviewing any and every candidate. It’s an iterative process that requires constant fine-tuning. It also tends to have a higher false negative rate, so you’ll have to increase the number of candidates entering the funnel.
It’s also important to give interviewers an out to bail early on candidates who are obviously unqualified early in the process. Multi-stage interviews are good here, but you can’t drag the process out for too long. Avoid scheduling more than a 30-60 minute interview before you have a good idea that the candidate is on the right track. Don’t be afraid to politely dismiss a candidate halfway through an interview if they’re obviously not going to work out.
The second topic is more difficult:
> Am I complicit in a racist, sexist system?
If you’re not familiar with all the permutations of this line of thinking, it goes much deeper than you might expect. The pop culture definition of various -ists and -isms varies greatly from person to person. The fear of accidentally crossing into territory that might classify ones self as the “bad” person is a growing fear for people who grew up in the age of Twitter shaming and hyperbolic news stories about evil corporations. The pressure to avoid feeling like one is on the wrong side of history can lead people to make choices in a self-protective fashion rather than doing what’s best for the team or company. I don’t have a great answer to this, but it’s important to keep the dialogues open rather than forcing everyone to determine their own narratives internally. Those unspoken narratives can have an outsized influence on decisions if you don’t get ahead of it as a company.