I am in the IT field, and they seem like a waste of time to me. The skills to do well in an interview have nothing to do with succeeding at the job. I once had an interview for a company that maintained point of sale systems. They didn’t even ask about my technical background!
The point of the interview is not to find out whether or not you can do the job; that was supposed to be handled when you were talking to the headhunter (“Do you think this is a good fit for your skill set?” “Yes”). The interview is to see whether or not they want you to work for them and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your technical skill or the job requirement.
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This is more opinion than factual, so off to IMHO it goes.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
Interviews seem to be the final step in OCR/keyword analysis/algorithmic scoring of resumes, matched against job listings so specific that anyone who shows up with a high match is automatically hired, because there aren’t two of them.
I guess they’re to make sure you learned how to bathe and wear pants while spending five years with a niche wireframe tool and two applications only used by six companies nationwide.
Interviews are far more useful than resumes. How many headhunters or HR people are qualified to check whether you can do the job?
When I interview people I probe the parts of their resumes that make them good matches. Sometimes it is clear that a candidate did something but was only a follower or peripherally involved or didn’t understand what they were doing very well. On the other hand, some candidates show they really get it.
People can put any buzz words they like on a resume, but you need to figure out whether they have that skill to the level you need.
There is also energy level. If a candidate can’t be animated during an interview, how lazy are they going to be working?
Finally, if you are interviewing really good people they are likely to get other offers. An interview is a good way of selling your job to them.
Now I interview highly skilled people. An interview might not be important if all you are looking for is someone who is reasonably sanitary and doesn’t nod off during the interview.
Company culture is an extremely important part of the success of a company. Having personnel whose philosophical orientation is aligned with that culture is a part of that. The interview process is the best way to determine if people will be a good fit for your organization.
Interviews are important for gauging personality. You don’t want an engineer who has outstanding qualifications but is a disrespectful jerk.
Today, I sat in on an interview for a candidate who seemed perfect on paper. Within a few minutes it became clear that, uh, he may have had jobs for so many years, but he didn’t actually know a whole lot about those jobs, his presentation was nearly incoherent, and his personality was not at all suited for the position (we need a confident and competent leader, not…this guy).
Conversely, one of the candidates last week had like a 3-sentence cover letter and had only worked at one institution in her life, but her interview was really impressive and it’s clear she knows the job inside and out.
In both of these cases, we needed the interview to reveal this to us.
many people have never been trained on how to do an interview and it shows. So in those cases it can be a waste of time.
In 2015, companies are more concerned about fitting in and being a team player than the skills. If they ask you, “How did you handle a disagreement with a supervisor.” and your reply is, “He was a bean-counter so I told him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. You can’t run 15.125V through a duotronic Heisenfram resonator.” no one will care if you are technically correct.
For programming skills, interviews (esp. with coding tests) are pretty much required for anything not very entry-level. Someone who puts “10 years of Java experience” on their resume could be a very talented Java developer, or someone who spent ten years writing Fortran in Java. There really is no practical way to distinguish the two without plopping the candidate down and getting some code written.
not sure why but 20 years ago nobody asked me to write code in an interview. And they still don’t today but I know it’s common now. I guess my area (stat programming) is just not into that type of testing.
You conduct an interview for the same reason you would be unlikely to hire a contractor for an important job at your home sight unseen.
A successful employee is also a successful part of the organizational culture. This is true on any level, from the janitor to the guy on the line to the VP of Finance. If your organizational culture is very laid back and the candidate is very rigid and by the book, he or she won’t succeed in your culture. And of course the opposite it equally true.
And yes, this gets even more important as you go up the ladder of responsibility. The higher level the job, the more time, effort, and especially money is being spent to bring that individual in the door. If they show up on their first day and are miserable in your environment, all that time, effort and money is straight out the door, along with that new employee.
Your technical bona fides should have been established prior to the interview with the hiring manager. He shouldn’t have to be giving you coding tests, for example. If you have an F2F early on with HR only, it’s possible that hasn’t been done, although that is getting less and less likely as we become more dependent on recruiters, or in my company’s case, our talent attraction department.
We do our job in tandom, the TA department and me in HR. They do the checking, I go with my gut on who will fit best out of the most qualified candidates.
So yes, to get back around to your question, an interview, even for a STEM/TECH hire such as you (OP) would be. Let’s face it, a goodly share of technical folks are not great ‘people persons’, which is fine if you’ll be working alone or with minimal interaction with others. But if I’m looking for a tech person who can be groomed five years on in his career to become a manager, I’ll want someone with the ability and desire to supervise others. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to force a good square peg technical type into a round hole managerial position, simply because they’ve been good at their job.
Okay, I’m putting you on a desert island with a doctor, a farmer, a builder, a meteorologist and a stand-up comedian. You will be there for three year or until you are rescued, whichever comes first.
Are you sure it’d be a huge waste of time to meet these people before you go?
I think it depends greatly on the company doing the interviewing. Some highly professional companies have a professional recruitment process & hiring process that produces good hires.
Other fouled up companies or departments are all-but throwing darts at boards. Clueless untrained interviewers looking to fill slots whose requirements they don’t understand with lazy people who they plan to underpay and who they hope won’t notice the organizational dysfunction until they’re too entrenched to bother leaving.
The OP seems to have a lot of experience with the latter. Most posters here seem to be part of companies like the former.
I’ve seen both. The difference is almost beyond comprehension to somebody who’s only lived one or the other.
A good FORTRAN programmer can write a FORTRAN program in any language.
At my job, hiring is done by committee. Frequently, it’s the hiring manager, a team lead (or someone who functions in that capacity), and a senior member of the team with overlapping job duties.
Hell yeah interviews are important! If we don’t know a person from Adam, the interview is the best way to get to know them. How they answer the questions is important, but so are their reactions to them. Do they have self-confidence? Or are they gonna be the type of person who cries at their desk on the first day because they don’t think they can hack it? Do they have a sense of humor? Or are they so intense that interacting with them is going to be a chore? Do they have an engaging way of speaking? Or are we going to be bored out of our minds whenever they speak up at staff meetings?
A resume/application can’t answer these questions.
Interviewing is largely a horrible way to evaluate candidates and most companies do it extremely poorly. We just don’t have a better method than physically meeting someone.
What I think is the biggest waste of time is the stupid resume game.
There should be just one place you upload your resume. Resumes should contain 3rd party verification, so if I write an honest resume, I’m not competing against liars. Instead of it being this hugely time wasting game where you search job boards, etc, and then spam companies online - each of whom often has their own resume submission system - it should be the other way around. Every single resume from every single job seeker in the entire country should be in one place, and then companies can just search from there. Much time saved on both ends.
Companies will know not to wait for someone better to come along if they can actually just see the overall field. Job searches for individuals will just take a few hours to setup, and not pointless time wasted after that. Governments and unemployment agencies and conservatives won’t be able to point the finger at people who there really are not jobs for.
The H1B game wouldn’t be full of companies trying to cheat the system - the Feds who regulate H1Bs would see the thousands of American born tech workers trying to find jobs by the open resumes in the system. Companies could not justify hiring H1Bs unless they can actually prove to the Feds there really are no candidates.
I have been on both sides of the interviewing table many times and I don’t consider myself to be an especially strong interviewee but apparently I am better than the others for at least some positions. That is really all that matters.
I agree that interviewing generally sucks for both sides and I try to make it as casual as possible when I am the one doing the interviewing because that is the way that I want to be treated. In others words, just have a focused conversation based around the materials like a resume that is already present and let it go where it goes. You would be surprised how much people will tell you in a very short time as long as you keep it friendly and bidirectional. Most people don’t like being put on the spot or talking for minutes at a time in a formal speech format so don’t make them do it unless that is also something that will be an essential part of their job.
It is true that many people claim to have skills that they clearly have not mastered but that is just as easy to tell through some casual questions as it is with a formal test. I don’t like formal tests as interviewing tools in general. Even competent people have worked in greatly varied environments and may not know something that you think is the most common thing in the world even though they could learn it the first day.
At a previous job, we had a written technical skills test but I was the one that graded it even for other interviewers. It was just very basic database and SQL concepts that usually had more than one right answer. I didn’t give a number score because it was just pass/fail based on my overall impressions and the difference between the two groups was immediately obvious to me at least. Some people that claimed to be experts on various database concepts couldn’t form a simple SELECT statement or even describe what one could be used for in common terms. I could also see that most of those that failed couldn’t write well at all either so they were wished well and sent on their way.
OTOH, I have been to some interviews of my own that I would describe as genuinely abusive. One was a subsidiary of a major bank (fuck’em, who am I protecting?; it was Capitol One.) It started off with a surprise call saying that they saw my resume and were interested and wanted to know if I could do an interview. I was thrilled except I didn’t know that they meant right that minute. They put me on the phone with an extremely serious hard-ass that started asking basic questions. I did well enough on those so they switched me over to a verbal technical interview. I passed that too.
I won’t bore you with the details because there were several stages beyond that before I was invited to a half-day onsite interview with their option to make it a full day and then multiple days if I passed those. I prepared for what I thought standard interviews would be and then went but it turns out that they have an especially intense interviewing process and it is whatever the opposite of fun is.
They do or at least did behavioral interviews which sounds fairly mild but it isn’t especially if you aren’t an expert bullshitter. Behavioral interviews are extremely strict. You go into a room and the interviewer is allowed to introduce themselves but not say much more than that. They have one sheet of paper with a question about a specific situation that they have expected you to have encountered before. They read it and you have to speak for exactly 5 minutes on the topic on your own with no other feedback while the interviewer takes cryptic notes then you are ushered away and go to a new room with another interviewer.
Some topics will be simple like 'How have you handled yourself when you have had personality conflicts with another coworker?". However, it is quite possible that they will give you one that you have no experience with especially if you are young. They may ask you, “How did you handle it when you found out that someone in your organization was engaging in unethical or criminal business activity?” If you don’t have any good examples for the question at hand, you can either babble about whatever pops into your head or just sit there until the clock expires. Keep in mind that the rules are that theoretical examples are not allowed. You can only speak to specific behavior that you have conducted in the past.
Screw Capitol One and every company they own. I still refuse to use them as a bank in any capacity after that experience. I got cut after the first day of interviews which was fine by me at that point because I was already burned out of that hostile environment just through my short time of dealing with them.