On the number of interviews

Posted on 2024-08-20

Preface

Today I want to write about interviews, or, the number of interviews you can face. Every person in the profession has had good and bad interviews, both on the giving and receiving end. And since it's not a strictly defined process, everyone formed their opinions. I'm here today to talk about mine.

Whom to talk to

Thinking about it for five minutes, let me give you a list of facts that resulted in the amount of interviews I had on the receiving end in my career:

• The "HR Filters"
• Get to know the team
• Trustable info about you from employees
• The amount of confidence your CV gives the reader
• Team & Company size
• Trust in engineering leadership
• The role you're applying for
• Bullshit HR filter leadership came up with

The "HR Filters"

At one company I was hiring at we had internal HR people doing the first interview round with applicants just to filter out assholes, obvious liars and/or non straightforward background topics like requiring paperwork to work in $country or requiring sponsorship. Since not every hiring manager can be educated on the legal mumbojumbo involved, what the company will and will not do paperwork wise etc this might even make sense to let them handle that first round if the hiring manager is not exclusively hiring but needs to get actual work done on a product or is a team lead.

Get to know the team

Yeah well CTO interviews are nice and all but when I apply at an engineering role then it's kinda more important to me what the team is like - because these are the people I spend my most time with. I have denied offers because some people gave me the ick in those meetings and still am happy I did so.

Trustable info about you from employees

Assuming I'm a Product engineering leader at a startup who requires someone highly specialized in $tech - My CTO knows a guy. When the CTO recommends them I can skip entire sections from the interview playbook.

The amount of confidence your CV gives the reader

Assuming:

• Everything at your CV screams distributed systems engineer
• You're on youtube at a local "Papers we love" meeting
• You write on a personal blog about your experiences
• I find issues on github where you commented on database connectivity edge cases

If not one but ALL of the above are true, then I can, as a hiring manager, just like above throw away another section I would've needed to ask in order to understand your level of expertise in the topic.

Team & Company size

When I just bootstrapped an angel investment and look for another person to launch a platform with then I want to know very well whom I'm writing contracts with. When I'm a publicly traded company, who has a massive amount of internal HR filter people on site, they might have a time-optimized schedule you'll go through. Or vice versa. It's complicated.

Trust in engineering leadership

I remember when I did my first rounds of interviews with candidates and there were bunch of people I wanted to onboard, my VP wanted to talk to these candidates before I hired them. He then roasted me on said decisions and that was a good thing because if I effed that thing up this was bad PR for the company. At another company the CTO wanted to talk to everyone period (trust but verify).

The role you're applying for

When you are in engineering leadership or are applying for such a role, it makes sense to talk to the CTO to know what expectations they bring to the table. When I was in engineering management I actually wanted to talk to the CTOs to know what I'm getting into.

Bullshit HR filter leadership came up with

Let's just say there's a famous linux distribution company that has their candidates fill out weird sheets of 50 questions and then later requires them to quickly click on one of three results of math equations. The funniest bullshit I've ever seen. Now please turn away from the machine you're reading this from and think about what that'll tell them about the candidate.

Red flags

Here is a incomplete list of red flags I've seen that resulted in me saying nope-bye to companies:

• When they've asked me questions not only completely irrelevant for that role but are also immensely open ended (the open ended part might be material for it's own article)
• When a resting bitchfaced interviewer rarely answered my questions and only rattled off the list of challenges (some people are really not made to interview others, but seeing this as a personal flaw of oneself requires reflection)
• When the answer to multiple completely non business related questions is "I'm not allowed to talk about that" (shows highly restrictive flow of information)
• When the person is being late to the interview and doesn't apologise but seems to do this on purpose (shows low respect for people's time)
• When on every quesion around company culture the interviewer rolls their eyes to the top of their head and starts fishing for words (good sign for a restrictive environment or the interviewer is not being sincere)
• When a hiring manager would not only schedule calls with teams but also seems to not permit talking to individual contributors without them or HR people present (shows a low trust environment)

These are implementation details

Some people (that can be very loud on social media) say they only give a company N amount of hours divided by M amount of separate interviews, and skip continuing the process if they overshoot. And I get it: there are many other companies to talk to, you might still be employed and only have limited amount of hours to spend on this per day, you might have family to take care of etc. But let me give you a counter-argument: In every interview they pull their pants down and you get to see if it's all as rosy as the social media and/or marketing machinery would make you believe. If I skipped, say, the "get to know the team" round where I would've encountered toxic people with whom I would've spent way more time with than with the hiring manager who grilled me on the behavorial and/or coding challenge - I miss info when at the end of the day I want to know if I want to sign with a company.

One of my (please steal this idea) first questions in an interview is about the process and the number of interviews because it shows me not only the process they created but also how they think about the candidates for a certain role. One aspect of a highly agile environment where errors are being run into quickly and pivoting quickly is part of culture might be that they have a very limited amount of hours spent per candidate, because of the probation period. And I cannot stress this enough: the probation period (or the US equivalent: hire & fire) is also a valuable tool for the applicant. Meaning: If you get hired with a certain perception of an employer that turned out to be completely false then the possibility of exiting it quickly and without much legal hassle can be valuable.

So please understand that the amount of hours spent in these interviews are sometimes really what the company enforces but they are also a tool for you to undestand what you're getting yourself into. Every minute they show their face in calls or even on site is another minute where you can grill them for what you really value in an employer. Another idea for you to steal is to ask the questions back: When I have a leader in front of me that grills me on the behavorial with the STAR Method, I throw in the occasional "What behavior made you really loose your shit this year and how did the team mate react?", or, my personal favorite: "you're saying nonsense in a meeting with your higher ups, how do you want me to stop you making a clown of yourself?".

The last stage: acceptance

I accept the number of interview rounds given to me (up to a certain point where afterwards it gets riddiculous) because I want to know if my time at this future employer is wasted. I accept it because every single interview round I can learn how they function, what makes the team work and what doesn't. Part of accepting this is also: Making sure you have an understanding what the worst case scenario is: You get hired and see it doesn't work out. Which in this case means either you're still in your probation period (and kicked out, or again the US equivalent) and interviewing immediately or you're on a PIP ("performance improvement plan" doesn't really cut it, "paid interview period" is a better description - because a pip always means they want to get rid of you).

And as always: before you update your LinkedIn or your CV make sure how the change can be perceived. When you've just exited a toxic work relationship with a company after a short period of time and start a new one, think about how it looks on your vitae when you quickly jumped two employers. Because the third potential employer might not give you the time and chance to explain what happened. Sometimes keeping the old LinkedIn employment intact until the probation period at the new company is over makes sense.