Aline Lerner

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring.

By / February 25, 2021

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 »

3 exercises to craft the kind of employer brand that actually makes engineers want to work for you

By / January 14, 2021

If I’m honest, I’ve wanted to write something about employer brand for a long time. One of the things that really gets my goat is when companies build employer brand by over-indexing on banalities (“look we have a ping pong table!”, “look we’re a startup so you’ll have a huge impact”, etc.) instead of focusing on the narratives that make them special. Hiring engineers is really hard. It’s hard for tech giants, and it’s hard for small companies… but it’s especially hard for small companies people haven’t quite heard of, and they can use all the help they can get because talking about impact and ping pong tables just doesn’t cut it anymore. At interviewing.io, …

3 exercises to craft the kind of employer brand that actually makes engineers want to work for you Read more »

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should.

By / January 14, 2021

Whether you’re a recruiter yourself or an engineer who’s involved in hiring, you’ve probably heard of the following two recruiting-related metrics: time to hire and cost per hire. Indeed, these are THE two metrics that any self-respecting recruiting team will track. Time to hire is important because it lets you plan — if a given role has historically taken 3 months to fill, you’re going to act differently when you need to fill it again than if it takes 2 weeks. And, traditionally, cost per hire has been a planning tool as well — if you’re setting recruiting budgets for next year and have a headcount in mind, seeing what recruiting spent last year is …

You probably don’t factor in engineering time when calculating cost per hire. Here’s why you really should. Read more »

There is a real connection between technical interview performance and salary. Here’s the data.

By / January 20, 2021

At the end of the day, money is a huge driver for the decisions we make about what jobs to go after. In the past, we’ve written about how to negotiate your salary, and there are a lot of labor statistics and reports out there looking at salaries in the tech industry as a whole. But as with many things in eng hiring, there’s very little concrete data on whether technical interview performance plays a role in compensation offers. So we set out to gather the data and asked our users who had gone on to successfully get jobs after using our platform to share their salary info. With our unique dataset of real coding …

There is a real connection between technical interview performance and salary. Here’s the data. Read more »

Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women… and other findings from thousands of technical interviews

By / February 19, 2021

The modern technical interview is a rite of passage for software engineers and (hopefully!) the precursor to a great job. But it’s also a huge source of stress and endless questions for new candidates. Just searching “how do I prepare for a technical interview” turns up millions of Medium posts, coding bootcamp blogs, Quora discussions, and entire books. Despite all this conversation, people struggle to know how they’re even doing in interviews. In a previous post, we found that a surprisingly large number of interviewing.io’s users consistently underestimate their performance, making them more likely to drop out of the process and ultimately harder to hire. Now, and with considerably more data (over 10k interviews led …

Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women… and other findings from thousands of technical interviews Read more »

Exactly what to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number… and other negotiation word-for-words

By / August 22, 2021

There are a lot of resources out there that talk about salary negotiation but many tend to skew a bit theoretical. In my experience, one of the hardest things about negotiating your salary is knowing what to say in tough, ambiguous situations with a power balance that’s not in your favor. What’s OK? What’s rude? What are the social norms? And so on. Before I started interviewing.io, I’ve worked as a software engineer, an in-house recruiter, and an agency recruiter, so I’ve literally been on all sides of the negotiating table. For the last few years, I’ve been guest-lecturing MIT’s 6.UAT, a class about technical communication for computer science majors. Every semester, negotiation is one …

Exactly what to say when recruiters ask you to name the first number… and other negotiation word-for-words Read more »

What do the best interviewers have in common? We looked at thousands of real interviews to find out.

By / March 16, 2021

At interviewing.io, we’ve analyzed and written at some depth about what makes for a good interview from the perspective of an interviewee. However, despite the inherent power imbalance, interviewing is a two-way street. I wrote a while ago about how, in this market, recruiting isn’t about vetting as much as it is about selling, and not engaging candidates in the course of talking to them for an hour is a woefully missed opportunity. But, just like solving interview questions is a learned skill that takes time and practice, so, too, is the other side of the table. Being a good interviewer takes time and effort and a fundamental willingness to get out of autopilot and …

What do the best interviewers have in common? We looked at thousands of real interviews to find out. Read more »

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