6. Remote Hiring and Interviewing
Listen here:
Episode 6 on Anchor.Fm
Episode Description / Notes:
Are you currently trying to figure out how to hire remotely for a new work-from-home position? Maybe you're already experienced at remote hiring, but you feel you're missing an edge? Or maybe you're company is totally new to the Video interview scene and need some tips to get started?
I'm here to help!
This episode focuses on great Hiring tips for remote positions, and how you can excel at:
- Figuring out if this candidates are right for the role, using some new techniques
- Impressing the candidate so they know this position and company are worth making the move!
Episode Script:
Welcome to this episode of SpeakingSoftware. I'm your host Philip, and together we're going take another look at the soft side of Software Development.
Today's topic is about Interview Tips – but for Recruiters and Hiring Managers!
We’re over the other side of the interview desk today, helping you succeed at Remote hiring.
Lets get right into it!
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Remote Hiring is harder than people think! Don’t get me wrong - being an interview candidate is traditionally seen as the tougher position – and for good reason. You should know that it can be pretty rough on the other side of the fence too! Hiring the wrong candidate can be at best a performance drag on your team and at worst a very expensive mistake. Developer on-boarding is always a risk and nobody wants to be responsible for hiring a lemon!
REMOTE hiring, is even riskier - Even if you’re well versed in in-person hiring and interviewing. A lot of cues you may be used to reading don’t exist in a video call, and techniques like white-boarding, etc... do not translate well into the virtual space. Its an entirely different kettle of fish! CoronaVirus / Covid19 has put pressure on companies who were typically non-remote before to get up to speed about the remote space and I know that for some companies and people it has not been an easy transition.
Don’t worry though, I’ve got you covered! Having worked in the industry for over 10 years, with the last 5 years of that being 100% remote – I know what it takes to hire the perfect candidate remotely. I’ve been on both sides of the interview. I’ve seen and lived first hand what can make or break a remote resource hire.
Remote hiring requires a shift in view. A new perspective, if you will. This is the modern age, and success in the modern age requires a modern mindset. Gone are the days where interview candidates were required to submit to draconian interview processes. 10 years ago I remember walking into an interview, for the interviewer to simply say “Impress me.” That’s just not going to fly now.
The onus isn’t just on the interviewee to impress you – you now also have to impress them. This isn’t hiring 16 year-olds for your local McDonald's – Software Developers know their worth. The have the most desired skill set in the world. They’ll walk if they think you’re going to bullshit or lowball them. Personally, as a candidate I have stopped and left interviews because the company misrepresented what they were, or gave a poor impression. I know I’m not the only one…
As an Interviewer or Hiring manager in the Virtual Interview space, you have 2 tasks
Convince them that the company/role is a good fit for them.
Ascertain if the candidate are a good fit for this role.
Lets break them down into manageable bytes!
PART 1:
CONVINCE THEM THIS IS THE ROLE FOR THEM
Going to scare your pants off with something now: Everything you do and say has magnified meaning in the remote/virtual interview space. Your actions are now worth triple in terms of their ability to given an impression candidates. You are just as ‘on trial’ as they are. You need to work harder to show that the company is a great place to work for.
How do you win at Impressing Candidates?
PREPARE
Prepare for the Interview – just like a candidate you intend to hire would do. What do we mean by that?
Do a Prep session
(and involve any other interviewers) beforehand, PER CANDIDATE Decide who is the ‘main’ driver of the interview.
If no one is driving, then there will be lots of awkward pauses, interruptions and peoples talking over each other and tripping up. Do NOT depend on the candidate to drive the whole interview It reflects very poorly on a company when interviewers can’t interview.
Review the Candidates CV/Resume together with ALL of the other interviewers
Discuss what you like and don’t like
Have a consensus on points to task/talk about
Don’t read the CV in the Interview!
Instant Fail If I join a Video Call and an interviewer seems like or even admits they’re reading my CV for the first time, I will politely excuse myself and end the call. I’m not the only person to do this.
On the flip-side - I would also be pretty disappointed if a coworker did this during an interview.
Think about questions you’ll ask and decide in what order you’ll ask them.
This ensures you don’t try to ask the same questions! The amount of times I’ve heard an interviewer say “Oh I was going to ask that!” when another interviewer asks a questions is astonishing!
You can also organize questions into phases/categories so it’s easier:
Phase 1: Previous Experience Q’s Tell us about your time at Company X?
Phase 2: Skill/Ability Q’s How familiar are you with Git /Agile Unit-testing? Tell us about your experience with Tool/Library/Framework X
Phase 3: Definition Q’s Can you define what LINQ is and why would you use it?
Asking questions from these categories in random order is a great way to disorient your candidate and confuse them – and also show that the interviewers are not working together or on the same page.
Put your questions in a slidedeck/powerpoint and present them during the call.
This can help candidates who can’t hear your correctly, and also help to keep the conversation focused.
Candidates can often miss sentences or details over calls, and this makes sure they have a full understanding of the question.
Don’t just talk at them for an hour!
Preparation also means being aware of you and your coworkers work-from-home situation and being cognizant that it IS a stand-in for the companies office presence/working situation.
Wear something appropriate. You don’t need to put on a full suit for a work-from-home interview, but don’t be the interviewer wearing an over-sized baggy t-shirt. Look as presentable as you’d wish you look when you accidentally bump into your boss at the grocery store on the weekend.
Clean your flipping room!
It kills me that I have to say this, but if you’re interviewing from, say your spare bedroom, or your kitchen – make sure the background is clean and clear from clutter. Its not a good look when your background is wardrobe with one of the doors half hanging, or there’s groceries waiting to be unpacked on the counter, or when there’s stacks of boxes, papers, laundry, etc...
When looking at a messy room on camera, it’s a distraction and a very poor representation of the company (even though its your home)
Be somewhere you won’t be interrupted.
It can be hard when working from home, people have partners, kids, roommates and there can be distractions, but DO your best to minimize them happening! Be aware of Window/Fan/Pet/TV/Shower... noises.
I had a call where 1 interviewer out of 3 that I was being interviewed by (at the same time) had to mute their mic every 5 minutes as they were doing the call in a bedroom that faced a train line. For the 30-60 seconds the train passed, we literally just had to sit their looking at each other on the call without speaking, as he couldn’t hear anything. These kinds of interruptions really threw off the conversation flow as I had to wait to answer them or hear the rest of a question.
Use tools you know, don’t use tools you don’t know.
If you’re not familiar with Go-to-Meeting or Zoom, but you do know Skype or Google hangout, use those. Don’t try a tool just to see if/how it works. Someone’s interview is not the time to experiment. If you don’t look like you know what you’re doing as an interviewer – candidates will not want to work with you.
Great Example: I had an interview a while back where they wanted to use Google Drawing for a collaborative drawing/whiteboard experience. Nobody had google accounts though, so they were given random names like Anonymous Llama, Anonymous Bison, etc... Neither I nor they knew what their names were in the tool so we had to ask “Who is writing/drawing?” every few minutes to know who exactly was asking what. It was everyone’s first time using the program, so no-one knew what to expect or what they could do, so we wasted time looking for tools or things we could do. “Why am I drawing lines, where is the free-draw tool??”. This did not make a very good impression on me, and I ultimately declined to pursue their open positions.
Following those tips will get you 90% of the way there to your candidate wanting to sign on!
PART 2:
Ascertaining if the candidate is suitable for the role at hand.
This can be very hard to do when you’re working from home. If you’re going to remotely interview a candidate, getting a feel for them and their skills can be really hard. My advice is this: It’s not an in person interview, so don’t treat it like it. Come to terms with that, and embrace it. The future is remote work. Learn to love it!
So thinking about this more in depth – the stuff that you may do at the moment isn’t going to work. A really great example of this would be:
White-boarding doesn’t really work on a Screen-share / remote interview situation.
Drawing with a mouse is hard, Not everyone has a touchscreen, Collaboration tools lag on updating all clients, etc…
Everyone will spend more time fighting with the tools than actually solving a problem.Hypothetical / Thought Experiment Questions also don’t work.
Following on from white-boarding It can be impossible to get people ‘on the same page as you’ or into the right headspace when doing these over video calls or even just normal phone calls. People miss out on phrases, or key terms, or they feel that can’t jot it down/draw it out while on video, etc... or as mentioned before - if they’re using a white-boarding tool it can be frustrating and distracting to do so.
So, the tools you usually reach for are useless here. Like a hammer made of spaghetti, using them is going to result in a mess.
Don’t lament what you can’t do via remote. Instead, I’d challenge you to embrace what you CAN do.
What can you do? Show and tell! Folks, The secret to assessing a candidates skill and cultural fit via remote interview is very simple. SCREEN-SHARING is the winning strategy every single time. Show the candidate your questions, via PowerPoint or slide-deck maybe even the Company Website, or the Job Description and walk though points on it. Show them some code, or GitHub projects, or related stuff.
Let them show you their code, their setup, their portfolio, their projects, their GitHub or Bitbucket, etc...
Give them a chance to show-off! You’ll be surprised by how much you can learn about someone when they are presenting their own work. You’ll get a good chance to know how they take constructive criticism, if they get defensive, how open they are to change, and how they conduct themselves. Having been a remote interviewer myself MANY times, I’ve had candidates who have performed poorly on the tech or hypothetical questions that were asked, but then when showing their own work they were able to cover advanced, in-depth topics with ease and certainty. If I hadn’t of given them the chance to showcase their own work and skills, then we would have lost out on an AMAZING hire.
When they’re doing their show and tell - Let the candidate use the tools they know. Let them share their screen and use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Code, or whatever the cool kids are using these days. DO NOT HESITATE to make them presenter of the call. Don’t be afraid to jump back and forth between you and they sharing. Its all good! I’ve had interviewers tell me as a interviewee, and as a peer interviewer (on the same meetings) that they “weren’t comfortable” making someone else the presenter. If you can’t trust them to be presenter on a video call, why are you even interviewing them???
As mentioned before, letting them use their own tools helps them feel like they’re on home-territory, and there is a massive difference in confidence and success levels when using your own tools! Better yet, get them to do a live coding exercise with your collaboration. Notice I said collaboration instead of supervision. You’re not there to babysit them.
Prepare a task (like you would for a normal, in person interview) and the key difference here is to send it to them a few days before the interview. Give them time to prepare. They can then live code the solution in front of you using the tools they know (which presumably are the tools and frameworks that you’re looking for, hence interviewing them!). You’ll get an insight into their thought process, how they prepared (including what they didn’t prepare, etc...). Again, can they take criticism, can they pick up on hints, are they too stubborn to collaborate, or do they directly depend on external direction?
This is much more efficient to assess a candidate then say a take-home test or algorithm/data structure trivia questions. The feedback is instant, and much stronger here! It also much closely mirrors the real-life development scenario. You shouldn’t be testing candidates to write code on paper, or on a computer in a tool they don't know or with no internet. Those days are done!
So there you go. You’re now better able to
Convince a candidate that your company and this role is the right fit for themselves while simultaneously doing no.
Which is ascertaining if they are the right fit for the position.
You’re no longer fighting with your hands tied behind your back, and you’ll never have to apologize to your boss for the expensive mistake of hiring a lemon. Win win!
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No matter which side of the interviewing desk you’re going to be on, I offer Interview and Mentorship Services. If you’re a candidate, then these calls will help test and train you for the Social, Cultural fit and general Soft skill questions, and you’ll definitely come out feeling more prepared for your next round of interviews.
If you’re company who’s recruiting developers and wants to revamp their hiring process for the modern age, then I am your guy. Reach out to me via email at speakingsoftwareshow@gmail.com or via DM on twitter or instagram. I’d love to discuss your situation and how we can get you into a place of confidence and success.
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We’ve been Speaking Software. Catch you next time!