[adamredwoods]

Interviewing is a separate domain from programming, and everyone should brush up, be prepared, before interviewing.

I usually have a project or two that I can speak-to in depth, to give examples of decisions made, challenges handled.

[wpietri]

I agree this is true, but I think that's in contradiction to the notion that one can just ask some breezy "totally humane questions" and then make optimal hiring decisions. The more separate the domain, and the more preparation helps, the more you're testing for something pretty different than the work.

[atoav]

You don't make "optimal" hiring decisions by just talking to someone. I would say whether your hiring decision was optimal can only be judged in hindsight. Hiring is getting a limited pool of people and filtering down to find the ones that fit the role most.

In the end all you could actually do is guesstimating who would do best at the job. And sometimes the answer is: "none of the ones who showed up".

If you are a good engineer or programmer yourself you can tell a lot about a person by talking to them for an hour. You can learn what is important to them in the craft, how they deal with criticism, what they aspire to, what kind of problems they tend to work on, if they are more autodidactic or more influenced by other's opinions and so on. This is all knowledge directly inpacting the question whether they are the right person for the job.

And who the right person is depends on the job, so there might not be "right" answers to the questions. For a very niche database job you might actually want someone who is very accurate, very in the detail and very focused. For other jobs maybe some entirely different traits are better.

Of course the problem here is that the people you hire could just be very good actors or liars who cannot do the things they say, so a little technical testing might also be needed.

[Arch-TK]

I think the issue is that, and I'm paraphrasing something which someone else said but which I think reflects what I've seen, nobody (at least in larger companies) wants to be responsible for a bad hiring decision.

While yes, you can get someone who has a good track record of being a good judge of character to make hiring decisions. If that decision goes wrong and the blame game starts then you inevitably ask this person to explain their hiring decision. This person will then reply: well it was my opinion that X, Y and Z.

In the alternative case where you just get someone to follow a rigid process you can answer: Well he scored well on this exercise and the opinion of the team was in his favour and the work history ticked the right boxes. This effectively dilutes the responsibility. You can no longer blame one person for the bad hire.

Lastly there's also the diversity aspect. With companies increasingly being scrutinized for their hiring practices, "it was my opinion" just gets translated to "this person's internal biases guided the hiring process and as such it was not fair."

I agree this is all making hiring much harder than it needs to be. And certainly you can still find companies where the hiring decisions are made on highly experienced and well honed gut instinct (its the only kind of interview I have been a part of) but it also makes sense how in our increasingly overcomplicated world we are developing increasingly overcomplicated hiring processes.

My recommendation is if you want a sensible hiring process (with maybe a telephone screen followed up by one normal interview) you should stick to smaller and less corporate companies.

[wpietri]

Unfortunately, "gut instinct" is just another phrase for "unconscious bias". Sometimes those biases are helpful, some less so. And some can result in hiring results that are unfair enough to invite lawsuits.

I know plenty of smaller, less corporate companies that still use careful hiring processes with thoughtful rubrics. They do that not because of risk avoidance; they are generally still ok firing people who don't work out. They do it because they want to run a fair process while maximizing ROI.