Deep data dives

We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. Here’s what happened.

By / December 12, 2022

interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs based on their interview performance rather than their resumes. Since we started, we’ve amassed data from thousands of technical interviews, and in this blog, we routinely share some of the surprising stuff we’ve learned. In this post, I’ll talk about what happened when we built real-time voice masking to investigate the magnitude of bias against women in technical interviews. In short, we made men sound like women and women sound like men and looked at how that affected their interview performance. We also looked at what happened when women did poorly in interviews, how drastically that differed from …

We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. Here’s what happened. Read more »

Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary. Here’s the data.

By / February 19, 2021

Note: Though I wrote most of the words in this post, there are a few people outside of interviewing.io whose work made it possible. Ian Johnson, creator of d3 Building Blocks, created the graph entitled Standard Dev vs. Mean of Interviewee Performance (the one with the icons) as well as all the interactive visualizations that go with it. Dave Holtz did all the stats work for computing the probability of people failing individual interviews. You can see more about his work on his blog. interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously and, in the process, find jobs. In the past few months, we’ve amassed data from hundreds of interviews, and when …

Technical interview performance is kind of arbitrary. Here’s the data. Read more »

Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance. And that makes them harder to hire.

By / January 12, 2021

interviewing.io is an anonymous technical interviewing platform. We started it because resumes suck and because we believe that anyone, regardless of how they look on paper, should have the opportunity to prove their mettle. In the past few months, we’ve amassed over 600 technical interviews along with their associated data and metadata. Interview questions tend to fall into the category of what you’d encounter at a phone screen for a back-end software engineering role at a top company, and interviewers typically come from a mix of larger companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as engineering-focused startups like Asana, Mattermark, KeepSafe, and more. Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll be sharing some …

Engineers can’t gauge their own interview performance. And that makes them harder to hire. Read more »

Resumes suck. Here’s the data.

By / January 14, 2021

Note: This post is syndicated from Aline Lerner’s personal blog. Aline is the CEO and co-founder of interviewing.io, and results like these are what inspired her to start this company. About a year ago, after looking at the resumes of engineers we had interviewed at TrialPay in 2012, I learned that the strongest signal for whether someone would get an offer was the number of typos and grammatical errors on their resume. On the other hand, where people went to school, their GPA, and highest degree earned didn’t matter at all. These results were pretty unexpected, ran counter to how resumes were normally filtered, and left me scratching my head about how good people are …

Resumes suck. Here’s the data. Read more »

Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data

By / January 14, 2021

Note: This post is syndicated from Aline Lerner’s personal blog. Aline is the CEO and co-founder of interviewing.io, and results like these are what inspired her to start this company. I ran technical recruiting at TrialPay for a year before going off to start my own agency. Because I used to be an engineer, one part of my job was conducting first-round technical interviews, and between January 2012 and January 2013, I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position. TrialPay was awesome and gave me a lot of freedom, so I was able to use my intuition about whom to interview. As a result, candidates ranged from self-taught college dropouts or associate’s degree …

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