I have written about hiring before and I felt there was more I could say about it. I do not have a huge amount of experience of searching for jobs elsewhere but here in Israel I feel the whole process is lacking. I am originally from the UK and though I spent most of my time since high school studying at university I did apply for some jobs. One experience jumps to mind. I had a phone interview with a big consulting firm. At the time I was not so confident with my programming ability. I was young and naive and I guess what ever I said came off as, "I don't like programming, I don't want to do it." I was told later by HR from this company that I did not progress because I said that I did not like programming. (things have changed considerably for me). There was no attitude of 'lets interview him some more and see how it goes.' Later interviews, here in Israel, with other big companies have resulted in my not progressing for good reason, failing to pass whatever puzzles, tests and problems that were set out for me (Google, Bloomberg, and Brevin Howard), and being offered a job by Intel because I did pass these tests. These are big companies, with HR that has been developed over many years. They are efficient and are able to take on the best candidates.
So why here do we have this attitude of wasting interviewers' and candidates' time by interviewing them when they are inappropriate. Additionally at my previous company, for all the positives that they gained from taking a chance and hiring me, there were many people who were hired who were let go in 3 months or less because they were just unsuitable for the job. The turn over of employees in my time there was ridiculous. I suggested that they paid more to new candidates in order to attract better people, they didn't believe me and stated that there just isn't anyone out there. This I find hard to believe.
Testing is the way forward. As I stated in my last post on this topic it should be not just one question but a number designed to demonstrate many different abilities and not to prejudice a decision by the candidate failing at one thing. There are certain things that I want to know from a candidate that I should implement for the next interview process. I work with linux and the commandline a lot. I use Cygwin on my windows machines to interface with my linux boxes and more importantly to gain the power of bash to manipulate files in windows. Where am I going with this. If a candidate claims knowledge of linux I have an easy question to test something basic. Given the directory C:\src\ (or whatever) find all the java files in that directory and its sub directories that have classes that implement a certain interface. Lets say the action listener interface. I could even sit them at my keyboard and get them to do it. If the candidate has no understanding of linux this would be impossible. If they do but are unfamiliar with the syntax of grep or find for example I would be happy for them to spend 5 mins reading the man pages. I would expect an answer like:
grep -Ri ActionListener * | grep -v svn | grep implements
I would expect to see them remove the svn directories from the result and refine the use of ActionListener to only when it is implemented in the class and not used as an anonymous class.
This is an ideal list of things a candidate should know. Its use is explained in a link near the bottom. A good score would certainly make a an ideal sounding candidate. But these things especially the in depth knowledge of computer science things like sorting and search algorithms do not always translate well into the best employees. Discussed in a further article about the hiring process, it seems different approaches can be taken and are valid.
Another thing that I would like to see is their participation in something like StackOverflow, Experts exchange or some other forum of this type. Alternatively involvement in an open source project.
Regular expressions are such a useful tool. Everyone should know about them and how to use them. Again its easy to set up a simple test to discover the number of words of a certain type in a give text file. I am reminded of this wonderful xkcd cartoon.
Finally here is another article on some positive traits to look out for in a new candidate.
Happy hiring!
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