I'm a "well-calibrated interviewer" at Facebook for my role (Production Engineer), and some things from the post sound fairly similar.
I consistently do two-ish phone interviews or on-site interviews a week. I'd say 2 hours is a little on the high side for average time per candidate (probably around 1.5 hours), but it does happen. I am sometimes called in to do tiebreaker interviews (before or even after on-site interviews), or requested for particular candidates. I occasionally help other groups (capacity engineering, software engineering, operations engineering) with their interviews on top of my usual load. I've flown overseas for people who can't easily get US visitor visas. I'm in the top 5 interviewers by quantity for the role (which isn't too hard, admittedly), and in the top few percent of the company (I even got some ice cream as thanks!).
In addition to interviews, I also spend an hour a week in a recruiting meeting trying to improve our recruiting process (including giving feedback to our interviewers on how to improve their interviewing and feedback). And I've done non-interview recruiting at universities (manning booths at career fairs, mentoring at hackathons) and conferences (at Velocity, SCALE, Surge, PyCon just in the last year).
My feeling about spending 4-6 hours a week on interviewing and recruiting activities is that it is some of the most valuable work I can be doing. Avoiding a false positive - ensuring we maintain a consistent high bar - is going to save people in my group (and others in the company) potentially hundreds of hours. Making a great hire is going to add thousands of hours of productivity to my group and the company.
And we're a small enough group (and even a small enough company for the non-PE hires I've helped with) that I can easily keep track of the people I've helped hire and it is supremely fulfilling.
That's very cool. I think what grinds on most people is the people up stream tend to send lots of low quality leads down the pipe and it burns people out.
> In addition to interviews, I also spend an hour a week in a recruiting meeting trying to improve our recruiting process ...
Exactly.. If it's broke "let's all work to improve it". Not "oh no here comes the recruiter again with some horrible candidate".
I don't know about the team you work with but the recruiting team I'm working with is full of bright excited and passionate people who want to learn. They don't code.. SO WHAT.. They know people well, and they're willing to learn. That's all I ask.. from anyone... I can teach you anything.. I can't teach you to have a good attitude and I've yet to find a way to increase people's IQ.. :)
I might not be able to teach you as a recruiter to code, or "be smarter" but I can help you "work smarter" and help avoid burning people out further down the pipe.
> My feeling about spending 4-6 hours a week on interviewing and recruiting activities is that it is some of the most valuable work I can be doing.
4-6 hours and once in a while you get to add 2,000 hours of new capacity to the team! :-)
If you think about the ROI interviewing and getting the right people on the team can be amazing. Much better then those hours spent refactoring 20 lines of code...
Yeah, I really enjoy working with our recruiting team - they display the same interest in being better at what they do and willingness to put in the effort necessary to improve as the engineers I work with, and that earns them my respect.
Taking some time to understand what people do, the challenges they face, the work they head off without you seeing any of it, and that they're as interested in getting things done, and getting better at what they do, as you are is well worth the investment.
Increasing people's IQ is pretty straightforward. Just have them do a couple of IQ tests, and tell them what the right answers were afterwards. This can get you as much as 10 points of IQ.
Somewhat tangential question- when you have people who conduct interviews so regularly, have companies ever tried measuring the performance of said interviewers via the ratings of the people they brought on board?
I am not personally aware of anything like that happening frequently, although I do know that Facebook has previously invested (amongst other things) in evaluating the use of certain types of questions before, with some interesting results.
It sounds like it could be a fairly unreliable indicator. I'm not sure what the interview-to-hire rate is, but there are only a pretty small number of people that are offered positions - and even then sometimes you don't win against a competing offer, or a sudden realisation that they want to stay geographically where they are. So even for the top few percent of interviewers who interview ~100 a year, you might only have 2-6 hires, which isn't really a large enough population to evaluate.
In an interview, the best you can do is try probe talents, skills, and knowledge, but you'll also get a point-in-time view into their current attitudes and beliefs, as well as the possibility for swagger and misdirection (even self-misdirection).
We do look carefully at situations where one or sometimes two people get strongly negative or positive signals while the remainder get strongly in the other direction, in case there is a problem. Most times it has turned out to be valid concerns, and it also helps us give feedback to interviewers on how to write better feedback, how strongly to weight certain traits ("not knowing the name of a particular useful function/method under pressure is reasonable, so let them just use it even if they got the name wrong"), or how to evaluate a particular type of candidate (newly graduated candidates, for example).
At least in our environment the "next step" are loops with multiple people. The goal is to help get more people a chance to see the candidate before they join etc.
It might be interesting to track the number of screens -vs- cut-offs on-site.. :)
Also I am measuring the number of screens that fail as a quality indicator for the recruiting team.
Think of it as a pipeline from the first contact all the way through new-hire and 1yr review. How are we doing at each step and what can we do to improve each step for everyone involved including the candidate.
I consistently do two-ish phone interviews or on-site interviews a week. I'd say 2 hours is a little on the high side for average time per candidate (probably around 1.5 hours), but it does happen. I am sometimes called in to do tiebreaker interviews (before or even after on-site interviews), or requested for particular candidates. I occasionally help other groups (capacity engineering, software engineering, operations engineering) with their interviews on top of my usual load. I've flown overseas for people who can't easily get US visitor visas. I'm in the top 5 interviewers by quantity for the role (which isn't too hard, admittedly), and in the top few percent of the company (I even got some ice cream as thanks!).
In addition to interviews, I also spend an hour a week in a recruiting meeting trying to improve our recruiting process (including giving feedback to our interviewers on how to improve their interviewing and feedback). And I've done non-interview recruiting at universities (manning booths at career fairs, mentoring at hackathons) and conferences (at Velocity, SCALE, Surge, PyCon just in the last year).
My feeling about spending 4-6 hours a week on interviewing and recruiting activities is that it is some of the most valuable work I can be doing. Avoiding a false positive - ensuring we maintain a consistent high bar - is going to save people in my group (and others in the company) potentially hundreds of hours. Making a great hire is going to add thousands of hours of productivity to my group and the company.
And we're a small enough group (and even a small enough company for the non-PE hires I've helped with) that I can easily keep track of the people I've helped hire and it is supremely fulfilling.