Interviews are the necessary evil that both job seekers and employers have to put up with.  In theory, they give both sides a chance to feel each other out and decide if it would be mutually beneficial for them to work with each other.

In practice, things don’t always work out that way.

The problem is that, for some odd reason, interviews seem to have become bizarre, ritualistic versions of what they’re really supposed to be.  It is, I think, due to four main things – standards imposed by HR departments, papers published by “experts” who say what interviews should be, interviewers not knowing very much about the position they are trying to fill, and the HR people trying to choose people for a position that they absolutely do not understand.

Having said that, thinking of past interview experiences, I have a few suggestions for interviewers:


1) If you call someone in for an interview, be serious about your interest in them and the position they applied for.

It seems like common sense.  If you call someone in for an interview, do so because you are genuinely interested in them as a candidate for the position.  Don’t call them in order to satisfy your bosses that the position can’t be filled.  You’re wasting everyone’s time.

The second part of the statement: “be serious about the position they applied for” means this – if they apply for a developer position, don’t call them in for a customer service position.  It’s an even bigger waste of the candidate’s time because at least in the first case they get to hone their interview skills.

I had the unpleasant experience of being called in under false pretenses.  All I can say is that I’m glad it was a very short drive.  Had it been more than 30 minutes to get to the interview, I would have been extremely unhappy, especially since it had been explicitly stated that I was only interested in software development positions.

This also holds true for the candidate – if you are called in on a serious interview, don’t treat it as a throw away.  Relax and be yourself, but take it seriously.


2) Don’t waste the candidate’s time.

Interviewers see it as an extreme sign of disrespect if a candidate shows up late without very good reason (death, dismemberment, car trouble, etc).  Guess what?  Candidates feel the same way about interviewers.

If you don’t think our time is valuable, what does that say about the image your company puts forward?

Don’t keep the candidate waiting for even slightly excessive amounts of time.  It shows disrespect and makes us not want to work for you.  Your task during the time you scheduled to interview us is to interview us; not to make us sit around while you wander off and do other things.  This includes making them wait an hour between sections of an interview because the people involved “got sidetracked” (yes, I experienced this).

I also have to say that if the person conducting the interview stops in the middle of speaking to me in order to answer the phone, I may just go postal.  This happened once before and it was all that I could do to leave politely.  You called me in so that you could take up my time in order to see if we wanted to do business with each other, and I can tell you that I've fired suppliers for doing things like that.  Treat me like a prospective customer, not like the coffee boy.


3) Don’t jerk the candidate around

Interviews are serious things.  They are there in order to decide whether both parties are interested in working with each other.  Doing things which show a lack of respect for the other party makes that party not want to do business with you.

These things include, but are not limited to, wasting the candidate’s time, calling them in for interviews which have absolutely nothing to do with the position they applied for, calling serious candidates in on a day when you were only planning on interviewing co-op students, and generally not showing them respect in various other ways. 

They are your peers and potential co-workers.  Treat them as such.


4) Enough of the fake stress tests and silly questions already

Stress tests are silly to begin with.  You are there to interview a candidate; not to interrogate a prisoner.  If you treat your candidates like suspects in a crime, don’t expect to get good talent.

Stress tests include not only being grilled verbally, but also being yanked from one place to another in the middle of a task that has been assigned to you.  A case in point being one all day interview that I went on (no, I will not tell you who the company is).

There were several components to this interview – a tour of the corporate campus, lunch, HR interview, interview with the managing developer, and a programming test.  Most normal people would assume that these would be discrete parts of the interview.  This was not the case.

For starters, I had to wait around for half an hour to start the tour.  After the tour, we (more on that in a moment) were taken into a meeting room where we heard a short speech from one of the directors.  Lunch was then brought into the room along with the programming tests.  While we were taking the tests and eating lunch, several sets of developers came in to speak and answer questions.  To top it off, in the middle of all of this, we were taken away at random for the HR interview, the computer skills test (why they had this, I have no idea), and the interview with the managing developer, being brought back to the room to continue work on the test and lunch between the aforementioned interviews.

What’s wrong with this, you might ask (I’m hoping you don’t have to ask, but just in case)?  First off, it was *extremely* unorganized and showed that they didn’t take what they were doing seriously.  Second, they never allowed you to work on any one thing for an adequate period of time and the time you did have to work on the programming test was constantly interrupted by the developers telling you how great the place was.  Finally, remember that “we” part?  It turns out that I was the only serious candidate they had there for a full time position.  All of the rest of their candidates there for the day were there for co-op positions.  They scheduled me for that day knowing this.

Interviews are stressful enough without all of this baloney.

The silly questions don’t belong in an interview either.  What’s a silly question?  A silly question is one which has no real bearing on the relationship between you and your candidate should they get the job.

Silly questions include, but are no means limited to the following:


a) Where do you see yourself in five years?

Reason: This depends largely on circumstance.  Plans should not be set in stone past “learning and improving.”  Besides, this always makes me want to ask the interviewer if they actually keep people for five years at their company (a more appropriate question would be where the company sees itself in five years.  Watch the reaction you get to that).  Personally, I’m always tempted to say “despot king of the world” but somehow I manage to refrain.


b) If you were a (tree, flower, etc) what kind would you be?

Reason: Do I really need to comment on this one?  And yes, this has been a real interview question.


c) Why do you want to work for us?

Reason: I know this seems like a perfectly legitimate question, but it’s been rehearsed so much that it will tell you absolutely nothing about the person in question 99% of the time.  A better question would be what the candidate finds interesting about the work that your company does (watch 70% of the candidates go blank because they have no idea what your company does.  Note – if you use this question, make sure that it is easy to find out what your company does.).

Really all of the things discussed above boil down to one common theme – respect.  You expect it and so do we.  We are, after all, there to decide if it would be a mutually beneficial union between employee and employer.

It should also be said that the mutual respect doesn’t end when the interview does.  It continues every day that we work together.  We realize that everyone has bad days and we accept the good with the bad, but the average trend should be toward the good end of the spectrum.

We’re willing to hold up our end of the bargain if you are.  After all, we’re in this together.