When you start writing a job description, the first question you should ask yourself is, Am I trying to attract the right people, or am I trying to keep the wrong people out? Then, once you answer it, write for that audience deliberately, because it’s really hard to write for both…
I’ve been hiring engineers in some capacity for the past decade. Five years ago I founded interviewing.io, a technical recruiting marketplace that provides engineers with anonymous mock interviews and then fast-tracks top performers—regardless of who they are or how they look on paper—at top companies. We’ve hosted close to 100K technical interviews on our platform and have helped thousands of engineers find jobs. For the last year or so, we’ve also been running a Fellowship program specifically for engineers from underrepresented backgrounds. That’s all to say that even though I have developed some strong opinions about “diversity hiring” initiatives, my opinions are based not on anecdotes but on cold, hard data. And the data points …
The 3 things that diversity hiring initiatives get wrong Read more »
I’ve been hiring engineers in some capacity for the past decade, and five years ago I founded interviewing.io, a technical recruiting marketplace that provides engineers with anonymous mock interviews and then fast-tracks top performers—regardless of who they are or how they look on paper—at top companies. We’ve hosted close to 100K technical interviews on our platform and have helped thousands of engineers find jobs. Since last year, we’ve also been running a Fellowship program specifically for engineers from underrepresented backgrounds. All that is to say that even though I have strong opinions about “diversity hiring” initiatives, I’ve acquired them the honest way, through laboratory experience.
I started interviewing.io because I was frustrated with how inefficient and unfair hiring was and how much emphasis employers placed on resumes. But the problem is bigger than resumes. We’ve come to learn that interview practice matters just as much. The resume gets you in the door, and your interview performance is what gets you the offer. But, even though technical interviews are hard and scary for everyone — many of our users are senior engineers from FAANG who are terrified of getting back out there and code up the kinds of problems they don’t usually see at work while someone breathes down their neck — interview prep isn’t equitably distributed. This inequity never really …
Announcing the interviewing.io Technical Interview Practice Fellowship Read more »
I started interviewing.io 5 years ago. After working as both an engineer and a recruiter, my frustration with how inefficient and unfair hiring had reached a boiling point. What made me especially angry was that despite mounting evidence that resumes are poor predictors of aptitude, employers were obsessed with where people had gone to school and worked previously. In my mind, any great engineer, regardless of how they look on paper, should have the opportunity to get their foot in the door wherever they choose. So, we set out to build a better system. On interviewing.io, software engineers can book anonymous mock interviews with senior engineers from companies like Facebook, Google, and others, and if …
interviewing.io is finally out of beta. Anonymous technical interview practice for all! Read more »
One of the things that sucks most about technical interviews is that they’re a black box—candidates (usually) get told whether they made it to the next round, but they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did. Lack of feedback, or feedback that doesn’t come right away, isn’t just frustrating to candidates. It’s bad for business. We did a whole study on this. It turns out that candidates chronically underrate and overrate their technical interview performance, like so: Where this finding starts to get actionable is that there’s a statistically significant relationship between whether people think they did well in an interview and whether they’d want to work with you. In other words, …
If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires). The pipeline problem argument goes something like this: “There aren’t enough qualified women out there, so it’s not our fault if we don’t hire them.” Many people don’t like this reductive line of thinking because it ignores the growing body of research that points to unwelcoming environments that drive underrepresented talent out of tech: STEM in early education being unfriendly to children from underrepresented backgrounds, lack of a level playing field and unequal access to quality STEM education (see this study on …
We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring. Read more »
