[tracerbulletx]

The actual best way is to only have a small set of senior engineers who also are very good at talking about programming, and are good with people and interviewing specifically and have a history of trust and good judgment do all of the interviews where they have a lengthy conversation about past experience, technical topics, and maybe code a little together if they think they need to and just give them total authority to make the call. It might not be that scalable but it would work the best.

[gemstones]

This has empirically resulted in bad hiring, at multiple companies I’ve worked at. The best predictor of senior performance on the job has been the take home test or coding challenge. We frequently have seniors who suggest that the technical discussion would be enough for senior roles. We always have to let them down a bit when we tell them that the discussion is less predictive than they’ve built it up to be in their mind.

[blowski]

How do you know which candidates are worth your senior engineers spending all that time with?

[tracerbulletx]

I'm not sure. I think that's a problem to figure out. What I want to advocate for is mostly that talent scouting should be taken seriously not farmed out by scheduling random employees who aren't good at it and then collating the partial opinions of 10 people who don't really have enough time with the person to have a total view.

[blowski]

I agree in theory.

But engineers with good tech skills and good people are already likely to be the most valuable and time-constrained resources in the business. So taking 2 of them out to have a 2 hour interview with, say, 100 candidates is 400 hours. Even assuming they’d be willing to do that, that’s about 2 months worth of development from your best engineers.

This is why companies have processes like screening with a non-tech person and tech tests. It filters that 100 down to, say, 5 which is more feasible to put in front of those top engineers.

It hurts not to be selected for that 5, to be told you’re not good enough. Companies should do a better job at that. If they can’t give feedback because of the lawyers, they should warn you of that in advance, to set your expectations. They should be responsive and transparent through the whole process. What they can’t do - seemingly to the chagrin of many engineers here - is offer you a highly-paid job merely because you think you deserve it. I can see people on this post that likely have appalling people skills based on their comment, arguing that, since they didn’t get an offer, the company’s process was wrong. Perhaps those commenters need to look in a mirror to find the problem.

Recruiters might miss some top talent, but that’s the price they pay. All other solutions also have costs.