Hiring is hard. I have interviewed hundreds of people throughout my career, and I could not dare to open a thread in Twitter to explain how to do it. I have not even remotely crafted a method nor a recipe. Every person is different, every conversation is different. The more people I interview, the more I stray from devising a system. But, conversely, the more I do it, the more I grow a finer sense for flags. Thing is, those flags do change with different cultures, from company to company.
Most of the time, my plans for interviews do not survive contact with reality, just like most plans. After the first exchange of words, the conversation dynamics takes me to a different place compared to what I had initially planned, which I enjoy anyway because it makes the interviewing process less boring: if it was just a mechanistic sequence of steps a. an algorithm could do it, and b. I would hire no soul ever because who likes to be interviewed by an algorithm, anyway? A candidate being good at building rapport is the ultimate skill.
On top of all the challenges mentioned above about interviewing, I must remind the reader that I am talking about technical candidates here, so the complexities involved grow fast as the process evolves. Although eventually, down the line, a tech person takes over as hiring manager, still non-technical recruiters are carrying the heavy load screening candidates who are supposed to fit usually cryptic job descriptions. If the tech and non-tech parts of a hiring process are not extremely well integrated together, the endeavor consumes more energy than the results it produces.
If hiring is tough, hiring domain specialists is tougher. When I see a company having tens if not hundreds of tech positions open simultaneously, I cannot help but feeling sorry for those having to coordinate such a titanic task. If any coordination exists at all.
As much as we engineers like to make fun of recruiters—they are indeed a piece of work, but who isn’t?—with their clichés such as the classic and grammatically defective “I hope your well”, the more formal alternative “I hope my email finds you well” and their steep fees (if external), the task for a recruiter is nothing short than colossal. Not only they need to:
Gauge total stranger’s “soft” skills—i.e., scanning for the asshole-factor
Filter signal from noise: CVs tend to be decorated with variable amounts of filler
Do deep semantic parsing: two candidates with exact same backgrounds might write their resumés in extremely different ways
Understand all of a sudden what attitude control, embedded software, micro services, monoliths, the difference between front and back end, devops, full stack, microprocessors, microcontrollers, FPGAs and whatnot. And, oh, the acronyms: CAD, EDA, PLM, ERP, BOM, EGSE, AOCS, FDIR, OBC, TTL, CCSDS, NRE, SDLP, API, ICMP, LEO, MEO, GEO, CPU, ADC, MCU, UART, FMECA, IOT, JTAG or GPIO.
With all this at play, one thing remains non-negotiable: clarity for the candidate1. Things must be clear, honest, concise and smooth. Recruiters and hiring managers cannot afford to sound like they do not know what they’re doing or talking about. People in the pipeline might be considering big changes for them and their relatives. Stakes are sky-high.
Hiring might be tough, but it’s the window you open for people you do not fully know to come to your organization, make themselves at home and help you be better at whatever you do. Hiring is a serious thing, so recruiters and hiring managers hunting for talent must dance together better than artistic swimmers.
And last but not least, I do hope this article finds you well.
Needless to say, this also means schedule-clarity. Being clear with the hiring schedule and not making the candidate go through an endless sequence of excruciating interviews including assignments about esoteric topics that they will never ever do in their day job, only to, once hired, implement archaic methods in poorly-documented projects.