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Hiring and Interviews

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Brian L edited this page Jul 9, 2013 · 25 revisions

Hiring is very important to small companies. Companies can fail, or succeed, as a result of hiring the wrong person at the wrong time.

As such, we've come up with these guidelines for conducting hiring and doing interviews.

Hiring

[More details required]

Who we're looking for

Good fit for the team

  • Good communication skills
    • Able to talk about technical concepts
    • Not afraid to ask questions
    • Not afraid to admit not knowing something
    • "Good enough" command of the English language
    • Can hold a general conversation
  • Pleasant to work with, and is good and collaborative work
  • Pleasant to hang out with after work (we're a very small team, it's good to have people on friendly terms with each other not just from 9 to 5)
  • Likes rock climbing ;)

Good fit for the role

  • Role specific criteria.
  • For a generalist developer, great performance on the "aptitude" and "design" questions, intermixed with other stuff as differentiators?

Interviews

  • Try to keep the interview to a set amount of time. An hour is a good guideline.
    • 10 minutes for introductions
    • 40 minutes for coding
    • 10 minutes for questions and answers
  • Pick a coding question that flexes a lot of computer science muscles. A good question might involve a few of the following:
    • Recursion
    • Object-Oriented Programming
    • Queues
    • Data Structures
  • Its good to pick a problem that has multiple solutions; it gives the interviewee more opportunity to be creative.
    • Make sure that you understand some of the solutions!
  • Make sure to do an interview with at least two interviewers
  • Pull the plug if the candidate is bombing the interview. You can always say something like 'This isn't going as I expected'
  • If a candidate is no-go, be sure to cite a real reason as to why they aren't a good fit. E.g. "we're looking for folks that understand a language, not framework" or "a solid understanding of these data structures is really important to us"

Questions

See Interview Questions.

Self Feedback

  • more specifics on the design question, but not too much to prevent candidate from asking useful questions themselves
  • how do we track performance?
  • possibly more time? Need more interviews with various people to decide that

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