I’ve interviewed for and been interviewed by companies large and small. We all know software engineer job interviews suck. But it’s hard on the other side of the table too.
One of the better places I worked for had a lightweight process of one phone screen and a four hour on-site. The company also prepared offers before the on-site interview round.
When you finished interviewing, you got a same-day yes or no answer, and if it was yes, you had the offer in your inbox within an hour.
What interview practices have you found effective?
… And by what metric?
Started with an at home exercise that was rooted in the actual work the company does rather than code kata type problems. The exercise was critically reviewed on organization, testing, and documentation in addition to solving the actual problem. It also included a debugging component.
The hiring manager was extremely personable. So much so that he’s the entire reason I took that job over other offers.
The interviews were broken into small groups, each focused on particular skills. After starting I found out that they actually had a training series to teach people interview skills before they actually ran interviews.
One interview was a coding based and was a consistent series of problems that were real world and built on each other that demonstrate coding skills. One was a design interview that was explicitly meant to highlight high level thinking. One was a culture fit interview broken down into a series is conversational questions.
The recruiter was provided with enough info to give the expectations in how they wanted answers structured as well.