Mishandling Interviews
Welcome back! Let's continue our dive into some issues that we see trending in the hiring process at companies as changes continue to disrupt the industry. We began our journey identifying the issue of companies failing to recognize talent that exists beyond FAANG engineers. In this post, we will look at another common issue: mishandling interviews.
This is one of my pet peeves for interviews, as it tends to be an area that affects me personally. Many modern companies tend to have poorly structured interviews. That's not a singular or unique opinion. Go follow any of the major anonymous feedback forums, you'll see how people really feel when they aren't worried about being penalized for voicing their opinions on the interviews they are experiencing.
So let's step back. 'Mishandling Interviews' is a pretty bold statement, but what does it mean? Simply speaking, it means that companies are not investing the proper energy to define their needs, or plan their interviews in a fashion that aligns with the role that they need to find a matching candidate for. Now, obviously I can't speak to all sides of the industry, but I can speak about it as it pertains to the engineering side.
We have so many areas of expertise in engineering, and yet we see the same type of interview strategies for all roles. As I mentioned previously, I blame this directly on FAANG. Companies focus on hiring only these engineers, and many times they do not have the diversity of multiple positions or styles of interviews. They have only ever worked for/at their FAANG roles, so they have only seen that one type of interview. To be clear -- I am not saying these engineers are bad engineers or anything of the sort. What I am suggesting is that they can lack exposure and experience. That is not really unique to just these engineers, though. We can see it in many engineers that are promoted without proper mentorship or training. This is a failure of companies, not of the engineers.
In the next entry, we will begin exploring how we can transform our interview process so that it helps us find the candidates that will best fit our needs. Stay tuned!
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