Batch interviewing
Problem
Interviewing can be expensive for a number of reasons.
For interviewees:
- Traditional hiring pipelines are at risk of institutional bias, which decreases efficiency when sourcing candidates from diverse backgrounds.
- Accumulating experience interviewing, a key factor for success, is hard when each company has a different process.
For interviewers:
- Focus work is fundamentally different than interpersonal work and requires blocks of uninterrupted time. Graham and Davies mention multi-hour blocks, which is consistent with my experience. For this reason, scheduling interviews at arbitrary times is extra costly for developers.
- Because interviewing requires standard problems, it differs from day to day work, so we need to warm up in advance.
For recruiters:
- Scheduling several people at arbitary times is also costly (unless interviews have top priority, in which case this cost is pushed onto the interviewer).
- Motivating everyone on an interview panel to submit feedback quickly is hard, which delays hiring decisions.
(Thx, Megha, for feedback regarding problem/solution presentation!)
Solution
Schedule interviews in blocks, eg 5 back-to-back interviews in a day.
Perform a quick evaluation after each interview, eg 45 minutes of interview, 10 minutes of eval, 5 minutes to transition.
Huddle at the end of the day, ask each interviewer to vote, stack rank candidates, and make hiring decisions.
Benefits
Enable interviewees to efficiently gain experience, and administrators and recruiters to efficiently schedule, by adding interview blocks to a standard process.
Eliminate a source of institutional bias in the hiring pipeline by moving interviews to the candidate.
Amortize warm-up cost and increase evaluation accuracy by asking the same question repeatedly.
Discussion
Batch interviewing, aka on-campus interviewing, is common at some schools, notably Waterloo, which in my experience consistently produces high-performing candidates. (Students also gain an uncommon amount of practical experience through their co-op program.)
Uber runs a day of batch interviews at CSUMB in the spring for summer internships.
My experience with batch interviewsing came from a two-day interview batch in Japan.
All these examples involve travel, which may have an impact on the value, ie would batch interviews provide the same cost/benefit when used at a business' location?
One of the primary concerns I've heard expressed is the cost of finding a time that works for candidates, ie traditional scheduling seems optimized for meeting candidates when they're ready. I'm curious to experiment with publishing a interview block, eg we hire on Fridays, to test this.
Ashwin Raghav shared his experience (thx!):
- I have participated (as an interviewer and as an interviewee) in batch interviews in India. Very common practice in engineering schools.
- I did not go to an elite school, which meant that everyone wanted to participate in any company's recruitment drive.
- This was often tiring for the interviewers because of the sheer number of interviews and for the interviewees because giving them accurate time slots to take interviews was not easy - meaning they waited for their turn.
- A lot of the candidates are friends among themselves. They share their interview experience once they exit the interview. This forced us to keep changing questions as interviewers to keep up the difficulty level.
- I always remember these being very intense emotional experiences compared to industry hire interviews because of the scale of participation. It helped if interviewers were "nice" / "not assholes"
- Always helps to have a college alumni in the team. I would have never known about sharing interview questions if I did not go back to interview as an alumni.