I recently interviewed with a few major software companies in the Seattle area and I really do think the interview process is broken.
All interviews started off with a phone screen, then if that went well, I moved on to an in depth on site interview.
I think where the process breaks is the phone screens. This is where the companies were the most risk averse, when this is really where they should be willing to take the biggest risk.
I did a phone screen with two different divisions of a different company. One wanted to fly me out, the other decided they were looking for someone with "better coding skills" which is weird, since they didn't have me write any code during the interview. I didn't really feel like either interview with the company went that much better/worse than the other, but it resulted in drastically different outcomes. I flew out for the first division and was offered, and took, the job.
When one division of your company hires someone that another division thought wasn't qualified, I think you probably need to rework some parts of your hiring process.
My solution? Invest a little more time in your phone screens. Don't do just one, unless the person is a COMPLETE moron. Try a few people and get different perspectives. It's not fair for the candidate to lose out on the opportunity because they got a bad interviewer and it's no good for the company to lose out on the candidate just because the interviewer had an off day.
The process of interview indeed, requires a very good amount of skill and sagacity on the part of the interviewer. Selecting the right person has been a daunting challenge for any company, be it giants like Google, Microsoft or budding startups.
The process becomes all the more tricky when it comes to freshers because they may have the talent required for the job, but nothing to show that backs it up.
I think it comes down to fasle negatives vs false positives. A company is in a far better situation if they don't hire a good candidate than if they hired a bad one. So asking algorithm questions and brain teasers, while not a perfect science, is not a bad way to screen fro general intelligence, which hopefully the company can mold into an efficient employee.
Maybe it is broken. But the fact remains that it introduces the human element in the whole process which a written/automated test can not FULLY replace. It has to be some kind of combination of both or something entirely different.
All interviews started off with a phone screen, then if that went well, I moved on to an in depth on site interview.
I think where the process breaks is the phone screens. This is where the companies were the most risk averse, when this is really where they should be willing to take the biggest risk.
I did a phone screen with two different divisions of a different company. One wanted to fly me out, the other decided they were looking for someone with "better coding skills" which is weird, since they didn't have me write any code during the interview. I didn't really feel like either interview with the company went that much better/worse than the other, but it resulted in drastically different outcomes. I flew out for the first division and was offered, and took, the job.
When one division of your company hires someone that another division thought wasn't qualified, I think you probably need to rework some parts of your hiring process.
My solution? Invest a little more time in your phone screens. Don't do just one, unless the person is a COMPLETE moron. Try a few people and get different perspectives. It's not fair for the candidate to lose out on the opportunity because they got a bad interviewer and it's no good for the company to lose out on the candidate just because the interviewer had an off day.