I’m trying to keep things much more like your first job experience than what seems like the average experience nowadays. although it’s not really in my control anymore, and I’m not even sure if I would be included in future interviews or if my manager would handle it entirely.
but anyways when it was my responsibility before I had a manager, as somebody who was most often on the other side of it and who more identifies as an average worker than as management, I tried to be respectful of the applicants.
The way I ran interviews was simple - tell me your experience, tell me how you approach problems, and come on site to walk around the shop and talk about the machines or parts that we have on the floor. generally I think I know halfway through the phone interview if I’m going to hire this person or not, but we still do the in-person one to confirm it. and prior to that we had one short HR screening call. so a total of three steps in the interview process, roughly 5, 30-60, and 30-60 minutes each (the better the applicant was, the longer the interview would go, because it was less about figuring out if they would be hired and more about just chatting about things that we were both interested in related to the work). I’m not the best at reading people, but if anything ran over 30 minutes I would always stop and explicitly say “hey we’ve covered everything that we came here to do, so there is no need to continue talking unless you want to, the interview itself is over”. The thing is, by that point, people have already shown whether or not they have a good approach to problems and are able to effectively talk about how things work.
so the obvious next question is “did we hire anybody who did not want to continue talking after the 30 minutes was up and I asked them this question?” — and the answer to that is yes, we did. and one of them is one of our best employees.
I can also say, from my experience on this side of the hiring process (even though I’m not external facing)… holy shit we get so many shitty applicants, or applicants that look good on paper but are completely shit in the first interview. One of the examples I always bring up is the guy who “did the calculations”. whenever I asked him what exactly they did to determine that something was the appropriate solution for something, his response was that “we did the calculations”. not him specifically, but “we”. I think that interview was like 14 minutes long because I hadn’t dealt with that before and I was really trying to give him a chance to give actual answers to things. and then soon after that, we got a guy who said even less, and the interview literally ended before 4 minutes was up.
I’m trying to keep things much more like your first job experience than what seems like the average experience nowadays. although it’s not really in my control anymore, and I’m not even sure if I would be included in future interviews or if my manager would handle it entirely.
but anyways when it was my responsibility before I had a manager, as somebody who was most often on the other side of it and who more identifies as an average worker than as management, I tried to be respectful of the applicants.
The way I ran interviews was simple - tell me your experience, tell me how you approach problems, and come on site to walk around the shop and talk about the machines or parts that we have on the floor. generally I think I know halfway through the phone interview if I’m going to hire this person or not, but we still do the in-person one to confirm it. and prior to that we had one short HR screening call. so a total of three steps in the interview process, roughly 5, 30-60, and 30-60 minutes each (the better the applicant was, the longer the interview would go, because it was less about figuring out if they would be hired and more about just chatting about things that we were both interested in related to the work). I’m not the best at reading people, but if anything ran over 30 minutes I would always stop and explicitly say “hey we’ve covered everything that we came here to do, so there is no need to continue talking unless you want to, the interview itself is over”. The thing is, by that point, people have already shown whether or not they have a good approach to problems and are able to effectively talk about how things work.
so the obvious next question is “did we hire anybody who did not want to continue talking after the 30 minutes was up and I asked them this question?” — and the answer to that is yes, we did. and one of them is one of our best employees.
I can also say, from my experience on this side of the hiring process (even though I’m not external facing)… holy shit we get so many shitty applicants, or applicants that look good on paper but are completely shit in the first interview. One of the examples I always bring up is the guy who “did the calculations”. whenever I asked him what exactly they did to determine that something was the appropriate solution for something, his response was that “we did the calculations”. not him specifically, but “we”. I think that interview was like 14 minutes long because I hadn’t dealt with that before and I was really trying to give him a chance to give actual answers to things. and then soon after that, we got a guy who said even less, and the interview literally ended before 4 minutes was up.