For employers/How to hire better

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

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 »

People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance. Here’s the data.

interviewing.io is a platform where people can practice technical interviewing anonymously, and if things go well, get jobs at top companies in the process. 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. At the end of 2015, we published a post about how people are terrible at gauging their own interview performance. At the time, we just had a few hundred interviews to draw on, so as you can imagine, we were quite eager to rerun the numbers with the advent of more data. After drawing on roughly one thousand interviews, we were surprised to find that

People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance. Here’s the data. Read more »

A founder’s guide to making your first recruiting hire

Recently, a number of founder friends have asked me about how to approach their first recruiting hire, and I’ve found myself repeating the same stuff over and over again. Below are some of my most salient thoughts on the subject. Note that I’ll be talking a lot about engineering hiring because that’s what I know, but I expect a lot of this applies to other fields as well, especially ones where the demand for labor outstrips supply. Don’t get caught up by flashy employment history; hustle trumps brands At first glance, hiring someone who’s done recruiting for highly successful tech giants seems like a no-brainer. Google and Facebook are good at hiring great engineers, right?

A founder’s guide to making your first recruiting hire Read more »

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

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 »

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