Over the years there have been changes in the way interview processes are handled, which I believe are causing interviews to evolve into something unnecessarily complicated.

This observation, generally called "the broken process of job interviews", I wouldn’t personally call it broken as companies are still hiring, but! I won’t ignore there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Although every company develops its own custom interview process, there are common patterns in how the whole process is split. For that particular reason, I will divide this article into two different parts, one referring to the non-technical interviews and the other focusing on the technical parts we might encounter.

There's no particular audience for this article, as an interviewer or an interviewee I hope you can get something out of this.

Whether you end up getting hired or not, to me, communication across the interview series is the most important factor that will make a process potentially good or bad.

From a starting point, job descriptions tend to be a copy-paste from each other, which makes it hard to understand what are they actually looking for in terms of profiling.

Once you get immersed in the interviews, in most cases, expectations, focus, and takeaways from every particular interview are rarely shared.

And in case the result ends in a rejection, communication, sometimes, gets forgotten.

One of the most common examples of the last point is emails. I am talking about those template emails saying they decided to go further with other candidates, with no feedback whatsoever. Or even canceling your application from scratch without mentioning the reasons why they have decided to withdraw your application in the first place.

Not to mention the number of times I get ghosted after I ask for feedback.

Companies are in the right of doing this, but for me, this is already part of the culture, so if I spot some of those behaviors I won't probably apply again nor recommend this opening to another friend.

Having big companies setting the bar high in terms of complexity and how difficult it is to pass their interview process, has side effects on other companies which follow the same approach and decide to take this as a metric of success.

Far from being the reason for their success, one of the main reasons why they are complex is due to the filter they are forced to make based on the number of applications they have. In the long run, this will give more false negatives, but companies who are getting tons of requests are eligible to take that risk.

The first takeaway of the article, avoid copying other companies’ processes! The big names are the ones dictating the way to do these processes in a way that fits their needs. But that doesn't mean this process will be useful for all companies.

I understand that in places that receive tons of applications with higher salaries in the market, there's a bigger filter that needs to be done. Meaning that if the salary you will end up getting is a life game-changer, I will expect it to be more challenging than others.

But why do others follow the same thing? As for my understanding, it is just because is trending.

Related to this, how many times have you got questions during the interview process but once you started to go deep into the company code, those good and amazing good practices were not even close to the reality

The one I like the most in this regard is TDD, which is also something I tend to see on job postings as well. I got asked to follow TDD and BDD practices during code challenges, just to find 0% code test coverage on the company code after I manage to get the job.

This reflects a lack of customization and profiling in the process, rather than imitate and go for something standard, you can take this opportunity to look for a candidate that would fit YOUR daily tasks and team culture.

Inclusion plays a more important role in this equation than people regularly think.

The lack of empathy when companies ask you to invest time in applications or code challenges, without offering anything in return, always surprises me.

I have been told that I should invest more hours in the assignment, just because I have described some solutions with comments, or because my test coverage wasn’t 100%, among others. Is incredible how generous people are with the time of others, isn't it?

Furthermore, considering free time investment, what if I have kids? what if I am doing several interviews in parallel because I am in a rush of getting a new job? what if I have side jobs? Does it mean that I am not eligible for applying for these openings? That’s hard.

So, please make sure those requests are optimized, or consider offering a paycheck among other types of benefits if those tasks are time-consuming.

About this particular subject there's a book and also a newsletter that I would like to recommend, that it doesn't only apply to recruitment:

In this link, you can subscribe to weekly recommendations and check out the book, which has helped me to understand better the importance and complexity of this subject.

One simple starting point is to make your interviews inclusively friendly, by including minorities as part of the process, so that people reflect more, and get a sense of the environment. It will also help out to filter those profiles that show some flags during those sessions.

I can understand that for companies, especially the ones offering visa sponsorship, where there is a huge investment/risk at stake, before submitting an offer they would like to be as convinced as possible.

Companies aren't doing us a favor when hiring us, we are just going to be paid for our work, it should be a bidirectional negotiation.

But lately, I have completed and started processes with up to 6 phases or sessions, including 3 only discussing technical-related subjects. Why are tech companies so obsessed with measuring and testing technical skills? Especially for senior positions, where tech-related subjects only imply a partial amount of our work, the rest is dealing with other problems where soft skills have a bigger impact.

I find it odd, that the senior and experience I get, the more complex it is to get a job. Crazy!

Side note, in case you are curious to know what defines seniority to me, you can find it here.

Slow feedback circles, make it easy for interviewees to get tired, and long sessions are an overflow of information.

Having these sessions can potentially lead to a lack of tracking of the process, difficulty in syncing the process with the people included, and difficulty finding the right and motivated people to do it.

Hire people not roles! Find what type of profiles meets your expectation without looking in-depth at technical implications, as that is the easiest part to learn in the long term. Soft skills are harder to change or adapt.

At a company I used to work for, the most important part of the interview process was in a bar or coffee place, depending on the candidate's preferences. A session where we spend some time chatting informally about work and life. It really worked both for us to check if there was a match, and for the interviewee to get a sense of what it was like to socialize with us.

Train the interviewer is important, and avoid forcing people to take interviews just because they have the knowledge. During a few interviews I did in the past, I had the feeling I did well but the interviewer didn't feel like doing the interview so I was just the victim that person uses to complain about him taking more interviews.

Moreover, make sure candidates take interviews from the company side, and represent the profiles you are looking for.

Measure the knowledge (aka seniority) is tough. Just the fact that an hour interview is going to define the salary you will get makes people feel nervous, which is one of the reasons why I normally panic before taking any time-framed technical interview.

I believe the interview should be bidirectional instead, where we as interviewers also take a primary role, for which I recommend this article.

Be careful with the people you put to interview, first impressions are really important, and not all devs, no matter how senior they are, are ready to make interviews and assess a person, or even less able to provide objective and not biased feedback about it. This is definitely a skill outside of regular work that needs to be developed.

I'm not the first person to say that live coding interviews are far from reality and that the only thing it does is put a person in the spotlight, while the others are looking at you while coding and suffering because of the pressure.

No matter how hard you try, if there is one person being evaluated and the interviewers/s know the problem, its context, and its possible solutions, it's definitely not a pair programming session.

We can call it a collaborative session, where devs will help you to proceed if you get stuck.

These sessions are supposed to evaluate your communication skills, but I hardly ever do I feel comfortable.

Although I am not a big fan of this particular type of interview, I must say they were cases where the result was successful as the interviewers were able to build and create a safe environment and the assignment was rather simple, as the main focus was on communication and in how to move things forward on iterations.

I am referring to things like Hackerrank type of exercises, that I would only consider as an option if it's a mandatory skill for the job opening.

As a frontend developer, it’s unbelievable the number of interviews I have failed because of those exercises, that I have never done on a job in 10 years. Or maybe I did, there was time for research and analysis.

So, please try to mirror problems that are likely to appear in the real job.

I am not ranting against performance, as a front-end developer, I invest time in practices on how to improve it, but only when necessary.

In real-life scenarios, I work on problems when they actually become one, or I have metrics that can potentially become one. The need to over-engineering everything just to prepare for every single case scenario is a flaw for the business, that could easily scale to something difficult to maintain.

Although is good because there no much pressure other than solving that on the spot (which is hardly a situation you will experience at work), it implies that you take extra free time to work on its solution, and not everyone is willing to do that.

In these cases what worked for me was to set an expected time to spend on it, otherwise is hard to measure if more people can spend more time on interviews than others, and the final evaluation won't be fair.

Scope the investment of time, evaluate comments, and don't be picky when looking for the details. Remember that usually, people don't have much time to work on this considering the context switch and iterations.

I prefer the take-home type of assessment, where you can also see the prioritization of the features and time management. And never ask for everything to be finished.

As in most processes, feedback should be mandatory. There was one time, that I spent a week developing a technical assessment from which I had good feedback first, but at the moment I was having the next round the interviewers started to ask questions without having an idea of my solutions. For me that was a lack of respect, I spent a week of my free time doing something they even didn't dare to check.

Those were the drawbacks I have noticed in the interviews I have done in the last few years, both as interviewer and interviewee.

Unfortunately, there's no only solution we can follow. We need to adapt the process to our business and provide different alternatives to the candidates so that we will improve engagement and inclusion.

Since I can remember I have been someone who is afraid to say that I am good at something. Not because I am modest, not because I am humble, it just doesn't come up.

That ability or weakness, has taught me different things across the variety of places that I have lived and worked at.

With time I have learned that sharing my vulnerabilities proves that I am aware of my weak points, or areas that I know I need and would like to improve.

And from another perspective, exposing and opening those black boxes, generally help managers and colleagues to share feedback with me.

Being that outspoken hasn't always worked the way I wanted, there were times when people took that weakness to their advantage to make me feel the hierarchy that was between us. In other words, making me feel inferior.

That's why, in different opportunities, I had to hold on and get back my confidence and self-esteem again because I was feeling undervalued. 

I start with the baseline that we all have good intentions, and if I begin observing these behaviors I would probably ask for feedback, and share feelings with my personal manager. As we humans are subjective, those actions could also happen because of a misunderstanding.

Keeping an open communication is essential to staying aligned with reality. Surrounding myself with good people that I trust, with the same core values, and the ones I want to learn from ends up being my best tool to return to being calm and boost my motivation back up again.

Despite we most of the time blame it on people, toxicity isn't always because of the people, but maybe the environment which is triggering those survival and defensive mechanisms.

Talking about work environments, I have also been told once that I was too talkative or expressive, and work is a place where feelings and emotions need to be put aside, otherwise is a lack of professionalism. As old-fashioned as this might sound, these things are still happening.
 (There's a book to help me go over this particular topic, “No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work”).

These situations are quite easy to spot, and because of this, I have developed a skill to read people the moment I start working with them.

The road to this point wasn't easy, it took me some time to understand, that I wasn't doing something wrong, and I just needed to find a place with a working culture that fit my profile. This is now the main factor from which I decide whether to take or not a new opportunity, putting things such as technology and money aside.

Another side effect is that whenever I share any of the previously mentioned feelings or emotions ( or anything linked to mental health), people feel sorry for me. And that, I believe, is one of the reasons why we hide or prevent sharing experiences like this one.

I think it is devastating to get special treatment just because I feel different about something. It actually has the opposite effect on me, and I will probably fade out of my presence there.

The same goes for any type of inclusion, people are not looking for special treatment or fake recognition, in the end, minorities want equality, without feeling judged.

On top of that, but now more under control, I have suffered a lot because of my insecurities and anxiety. So that I will never forget managers and co-workers who took my openness to help me out or land a hand without expecting any type of recognition in return.

You can always learn how to be good technically but those things, in my experience are way harder.

I'm not writing this to feel better than the others, to show off something nor is it something that makes me proud. But just the fact that I am able to share it, makes me feel relieved that I have learned how to live with this, despite the ups and downs.

Taking care of yourself without feeling selfish for not getting involved is for sure one of the biggest challenges I have faced.

As a side note, related to mental health, and to close this part I would like to state that we need to stop normalizing working 24/7 or burnout at work. Companies nowadays offering well-being programs are already a warning. 

To whoever has or had similar feelings what has worked for me is, to try to control the environment. I don’t believe those who say that nobody can change the world working 40hs a week. Live your life, not the goal of others.

The taboo of ignoring the psychological aspect was there since day one, hiding everything under the carpet. Is this happening more nowadays or people are now feeling more comfortable and supported while sharing these things?

It's nice to see kids from younger generations referring to this subject without feeling judged. People from my generation are still in general a bit introverted about sharing emotions, which can also have some cultural and personality implications as well.

I do share my personal views, and how I deal with these things. But it was part of an internal introspection that probably the experience of living abroad accelerated, and took me some time to get the courage to open up this box and start learning and sharing.

From one side it helped me to be more conscious about stress in general, not only for me but with friends, family, and colleagues. And, how this was manifesting in physical manners, in my case insomnia, anxiety plus some eating disorders.

The change in paradigms and frameworks has also contributed to helping me feel better.

In the old times, when the most common way of working was the waterfall model, having the need to prevent and prepare yourself for every possible scenario was stressful as hell. And if any situation alternated the plan - that took ages to define - the effects were catastrophic.

Then agile came into the picture fighting the flaws of trying to prepare for every situation and just build and react faster. And the results speak for themselves that in unpredictable situations this is a better way of working.

While searching if I was the only one feeling this way I found this well-written article about the same subject https://matthewstrom.com/writing/agile-anxiety.

That level of transparency to understand that we can't predict the future helps us to be more relaxed, we have time to re-think, fail, learn, and understand that the worst-case scenario is not that bad, generally speaking. I can imagine that in some specific domains those variants that I exposed have a different impact.

Definitely, agile doesn't mean let's do whatever, and eventually, we will find our way. There are things like roadmaps, strategy definitions, and missions, that help us define a detailed short-term plan and vague long-term plan for the unpredictable future. This means that if something comes into the picture that we didn't foresee we will be able to react faster, without feeling that we spend much time preparing for something that never happened.

Believe me, having that as a premise for me was a game-changer.

Along the way, and learning the hard way I have managed to not blame myself for not being able to predict, but that urge is not something that I can give away that easily, even more, when we tend to congratulate people for predicting it, making me feel under-performing if something that I didn't see ends up affecting us.

Having a mix of planning and aligning with the business, and being practical when making changes even if the data that we have is not enough, helped me to fight that anxiety back.

Since social networks became part of our daily basis, the working environment has been affected by some behaviors from that world.

Those concepts and behaviors are far away from being something new, but people, myself included, tend to show a reality that is not happening.

The show-off revelation, in different types of companies that I have worked for or others that I research about (culture-wise), seems to be a repetitive pattern. A phenomenon that can also be seen in the evolution of Linkedin. Nothing against the tool itself but the usage we got into.

Moments when decorating every situation we are in at work, putting ourselves on top of everything, rather than showing the reality or the learnings we have accomplished. Because not showing success all the time or focusing on improvements could be seen as signs of weakness or pessimism.

When did intentions, or fake results become more important than the actual outcome?

This situation together with gatekeepers contributes to me feeling bummer because I am the one not knowing the future, but in reality, we are all pretending to be comfortable with something we probably aren't. And this lack of transparency and alignment will slowly evolve into something toxic.

Ever since I started to work in this field, I have seen a transformation in the way companies shape their teams.

Of course, the nature of the business is the one dictating the form and the need of the teams towards a common goal. And we can iterate this into many different levels so let's move from macro to micro.

To close the scope, I will only focus on product companies. Companies that offer and develop a product to different customers, whether they are BTC (business to customer) or BTB (business to business).

The first factor that I would like to analyze is the size of the company, in the sense of when a role becomes a need over something the rest of the team can absorb.

It can also be considered as the timing where a company is in terms of its maturation and growth.

In startups, as the main goal is to validate if the product or hypothesis the company is building has a future or not, the common pattern is for people to wear multiple hats, as long as the team is productive enough.

In the beginning, this approach can look disorganized or a bit chaotic, but this is only because the focus is on delivery and nothing else. This for sure has side effects like growing the technical debt, lack of process, overlapping of responsibilities, etc.

In this particular environment, you might not specialize in a particular role, but you will learn about many other areas across the development cycle.

So, again, generally speaking, it's more common to see full-stack developers in startups, and the role of QA,  just to name an example, is embedded in the team as a shared responsibility.

None of those embedded roles will be fully proficient, but as I said before, the focus is on delivering as fast as possible. So in case, we fail, we can re-adapt faster.

As the company starts growing, either by getting new customers, investments, or acquisitions, among other possibilities, the need for particular roles becomes crucial to the success of the company.

And here is when the situation starts to become a puzzle.

There is a video from Steve Jobs, that sums up what I feel most companies suffer when growing in size.

Steve Jobs Content vs Process

The video is about the difference between process and content, process as the set of actions and rituals that took us to where we are today, and content as the output we have produced.

"You know what it is? People get confused. Companies get confused. When they start getting bigger they want to replicate their original success. And they start to think that somehow there is some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to institutionalize the process across the company"

It’s not easy anyway, but the less we focus on standardizing or institutionalizing the process, the closer we will get to our final goal.

As the company goes from a start-up to a scale-up, defining a structure becomes a necessary evil. Scaling teams is difficult from every aspect we can think of.

Hypergrowth, sometimes used as an argument to convince people to join a company, is in my experience something that I,  as an employer, will try to avoid.

I am not a fan because this usually ends up with a lot of people entering at once, with no proper onboarding and focus; with a lot of new managers having to take on new roles and promotions due to the new vacancies being opened, a consequence of this growth.

Keeping the culture of what has made a company successful as a startup or scale-up is difficult, and doubling the size in months makes it even harder.

As a newcomer, getting used to a way of working takes time.

As the company continues growing there's a need to start dividing and conquering different aspects of the product, in order to reduce the scope and define bounded contexts.

Having that in place, teams can feel more empowered to deliver impact, by getting a better understanding of its specific context.

Splitting responsibilities and defining what's generally known as domains (mainly due to the book written by Eric Evans called “Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software”) has become one of the most common patterns to promote what's called subject matter experts.

Whether you call it domains, areas, verticals, chapters, or even products, keeping the structure in sync slowly becomes an issue.

But, how does this affect delivery? The more people and teams we have, the more difficult the communication will be. There is a lot of try and error in this regard, as there is no framework that solves all the issues. So understanding the context and the tools is key.

The benefit of going in this direction is that we develop expertise in a particular subject, which in the end will help to develop more accurate and well-thought features and initiatives. Mainly because we are reducing the focus on the things we have to take care of, in other words scoping the knowledge, and responsibilities.

Similarly, we can think of the analogy when we try to split a monolith into microservices, sorry for the technical reference, but one of the drawbacks is how to balance autonomy and not create silos.

As a side note, I think when people say that every team has a startup feel, would potentially lead to misunderstanding as there is a lot of alignment that needs to be kept in order to fight for a common goal.

Once we have done the split, things start to get more complicated, and this is when for me the aim for autonomy can have a side effect on creating silos.

Teams will start looking down their own priorities and roadmaps. An aspect that has a magnificent benefit, but if we take alignment and general guidelines for granted this can end up in chaos.

Empowering the teams, and making them believe their impact matters is good, but it doesn't come for free. Having roles to keep those teams synchronized to reduce dependencies, to coordinate common problems with a holistic view of the product, ends up being something mandatory.

No matter how we based the split of the teams, business, or infrastructure, the necessity of standardizing and building the foundations (so we can align and speak the same language) will always be there.

One example of what foundations mean to me can be decided on the agile methodology, or the tracking and communication tools, we will use in every team.

At a certain level, delegating decisions and providing freedom to teams is good, but it all has to be aligned in a way in terms of direction towards the future. Clear communication and easy-to-understand guidelines can be a good starting point. The misinterpretation of these factors is a huge risk in big organizations.

Be cautious when making new steps, and move pieces incrementally and organically, rather than going for revolutionary changes, which are naturally hard to digest. Otherwise, you will spend most of the time organizing the structure of your system to shape it towards pre-defined domains.

Having a business purpose in sync and connected, usually helps to have control and guidelines for the teams. On one hand, they will have the autonomy to take their own decisions based on these key results, and on the other hand, they will avoid falling into silos as there is a common goal in every person's mindset.

Generally, it’s not a matter of only having the process but the people with higher overviews, taking care of cross teams initiatives that can spot where things are misleading, or when we see teams that are supposed to support each other running in different directions.

When things don't flow as expected, we might probably need to go over a re-organization of the team, towards a better setup that will make us work in an organized and meaningful way.

Re-orgs sometimes seen as a bad pattern, are a natural process that companies go for when changing directions or dealing with changes. Obviously, the overuse of this process will make people get tired.

Closing up this is just my view based on how things are seen from my perspective, my experience in the different places I have worked, the responsibilities I have had along with my career, and how these types of processes could affect motivation.

MANUOBREGOZO

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