A thought on technical interviews as a service
Can we have less interviews but keep the quality?
tl;dr
The technical interview process has not fundamentally changed for over a decade.
Half the interview are technical and are similar across companies.
A technical interview as a service can save everyone’s time.
Are you interviewing for entry software development at a Silicon Valley startup? Let me recommend you this book, Cracking the Coding Interview. Despite being published in 2008, the content is still as relevant today.
After a decade in the industry, I find that the technical interview process has remained the same. Sure there are new tools to make the process easier, like Lever and CoderPad. Even the phone interviews moved off cell networks to the internet over Zoom. The underlying aspects—how to conduct phone interviews, evaluate coding challenges, etc.—fundamentally have remained the same across companies.
How to run a technical Interview
If you have not been through the process before, here are a 5-steps you can expect if you were to go through the process.
Globally Inefficient
I recently wrapped up my interviews for a managerial software development position. Overall as a candidate, the process was surprisingly inefficient. Per company, each required 5-8 interviews. Of course, having sat on this side of the table, I think this is reasonable as I would rather get more data points than entertain a bad hire. However, I was talking to 4 companies. Half a dozen interviews here and half a dozen there, the number of interviews quickly added up to almost 20 over 6 months.
Ironically, half of those interviews sought to answer the same question: am I technical enough to do the job? To get to that answer, every company threw coding challenges, whiteboard interview questions, and technical design discussions at me.
And here I was interviewing for a managerial position. If this were an entry or mid-level software engineering position, definitely more than half of the interviews would have been just technical questions.
Rethinking the Interview Process
This got me thinking. Because every company needs to answer this question but is individually probing candidates, can we refactor the process so a third party can answer this question for all the hiring companies—a technical interview as a service?
Technical interviews as a service can start from the initial reach out and cover all the technical assessments companies usually give to candidates. This service can be the one-stop shop for phone interviews, take-home coding challenges, and “onsite” technical interviews. The output can be a list of prospective candidates with a qualitative skills assessment and a quantitative interview performance score.
The hiring companies can then browse the list to cherry-pick promising candidates for further interviews. This way, the companies can skip technical interviews and jump directly to the behavioral/cultural interviews and focus on selling the candidate for the position.
Thoughts on Possible Benefits
For a company
Reduces half the human hours needed to hire a candidate by halving the number of interviews.
Drives up the interview funnel conversion rate. The service will prefilter out poor performers so companies will interview fewer bad candidates.
Reduces ramp-up time when posting new a job description. As the service should be continuously interviewing candidates. When a company is ready to hire, it can immediately tap into the list of actively looking candidates that match the job description.
For a candidate
Halves the interview load when interviewing with multiple companies. For example, candidates can solve one take-home coding challenge overall instead of one per company.
Access to more companies. Immediately after completing the service’s interview process, it can match the candidate to a list of relevant and hiring companies.
Ideas on implementation
The technical interview process needs to be standardized to make the service work. Today many companies are already using a reasonably similar interview rubric. For example, many use the 4-point system where a 1 is a strong no-hire, and a 4 is a strong hire. Paired this score with the questions asked, we can statistically extract a difficulty factor for each question at scale. So we can quantitatively score a candidate’s performance per question and performance overall against all other candidates. Answers interviewers get from these questions also serve as another data point. Qualitative data about the technologies the candidates know or have used and problems they have worked on can help a candidate stand out.
Together, a hiring manager can have a holistic view of the candidate without doing their company doing the technical interviews. For example, the hiring manager can choose candidates with a strong score, which should correlate with their technical prowess. The hiring manager can also choose to focus on demonstrated expertise or experiences necessary for the role.
Conclusion
As an interviewee for a software development position, interviewing many companies is taxing. The overall process can be more efficient, especially for entry-level and mid-level positions. As a thought experiment, a technical interview as a service can help companies outsource their technical interviews freeing up time for their personnel while also shortening the overall interviewing time. Furthermore, reducing the number of redundant interviews candidates have to take across companies. There are some companies like LeetCode tackling some of these steps. I would love to see a full end-to-end interview as a service company pop up in the near future.