[karaterobot]

The ones that come to mind:

* If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself.

* If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems. For some people, this is going to be an enticement, but based on my experience, what I hear is "we're going to work you like a dog and pay you in equity, and at the end neither your work nor your equity will matter because we're definitely going to go out of business". I recognize this is a bias, but it's happened to me a couple times, and I'm in my 40s now and just not having it anymore. Plus, the problems are never that exciting, they're usually "how to sell a SaaS product that is basically a CRUD app, in a crowded marketplace with lots of competitors".

* If the interview is composed of like 10 rounds of 30 minute interviews, each with different groups in the company, that to me is an indicator that Conway's Law is at the helm of that organization: lots of groups that want input into everything, nobody empowered to make a decision on their own. Plus, it's just not a very good format. Give me a smaller number of hour long sessions where we can actually get into it, rather than racing through pro forma questions.

[giantg2]

"looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems."

This and other grandiose language is an immediate red flag. I fully expect the people writing these to be the equivalent of used car salesmen.

[avgDev]

Once you start the job, so we need you to change the color of the button in our legacy winforms app.

[giantg2]

Yeah, and when theyee willing to sell it that way with deception, they're willing to do that with other things. To me that sounds like a political yes-man environment.

[bazil376]

Outsourcing any part of the interview process for a small company is definitely one for me. Any hire is going to be absolutely critical and you’re going to let someone else make this decision?

[achompas]

My experience this is common for specialty knowledge the founders might not possess. They know enough to know they cannot assess, say, AI/ML or infrastructure, and seek interview support from an advisor.

[JohnFen]

Damn! I never encountered that, but if I did, I'd be probably bail immediately.

I guess in this day and age, I need to add "using a chatbot as a stand-in for a real person".

[kelnos]

> If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company.

I'm torn on this. Having dedicated recruiting staff isn't cheap, and I'm not sure a small company could justify this unless they're constantly hiring. But I've gotten soooo much low-effort, generic recruiting spam from third-party recruiters that, were I running a company, I'd only resort to those sorts of recruiters if I had no choice.

[karaterobot]

Oh, I wasn't even thinking about recruiting staff, I was specifically thinking about outsourcing technical screening to a third-party company.

I'm specifically thinking of the time I was asked to do a karat technical screen when applying for a position with a small company, and it was a big red flag for me. This is a service that does a remote, screen-share-based technical screening. My view is, you're only going to get a worse outcome with this approach compared to doing the screening yourself: either you're spending a lot of time going through the recording afterward, in which case you might as well have just done it yourself in the first place, or else you are just looking at the feedback by the third party company and deciding based on what they tell you. Since the third-party screener doesn't know you business, product, culture, or tech stack, that seems like a terrible idea.

People will often acknowledge that hiring (or not hiring) is the riskiest thing a company can do, and yet take stupid shortcuts to save a little time on it. That's the mentality of companies I want to avoid.

[pcloadletter_]

While it's not fair, what I've settled on is this: if they can't spend for in-house recruiting, they probably can't afford me. This is based on ~20 years of this consistently happening. Again, not fair, but I have limited time to do job searching and empirically 3rd party recruiters have always hit a dead end.

[qwerty456127]

1-2 hour long interview?

[karaterobot]

No, I meant one or two interviews of an hour each. I've since edited my comment to gaslight you. Err, I mean to clarify the language.

[ghaff]

I honestly think 30 minutes is a pretty good length as an average. Get much longer than that and it's really easy to get into filling in conversation holes. I've even interviewed people where 10 minutes in it's pretty obviously not going to work out and now where are you?

Maybe it's modern attention spans but I generally push back on analyst briefings/presentations/etc. that get much beyond the 30 minute mark.

[karaterobot]

I recently interviewed people for a couple positions where I work. We had to ask questions that got at a bunch of different skills, and at the end we were supposed to score their responses in a spreadsheet.

It quickly became obvious to me that there was a flaw in the method: If the candidate didn't get a chance to answer all the questions, their score would be really low. This is through no fault of their own: they don't know they're on question 4 of 12, and there's only 15 minutes left in the interview. They think they're just answering the question thoroughly and thoughtfully. So, it left me in the position of having to do a "lightning round" style assault at the end of the interview, to make sure they at least got a chance to answer everything, and not be torpedoed by the scoring system.

The solution to this is likely one of:

* ask everyone different questions, or different numbers of questions

* ask fewer questions to everyone, and potentially not cover some areas.

* timebox each response, and cut them off to say "time's up, let's move on".

* ignore questions they didn't answer, which means deciding on a candidate you know less about.

* increase the length of the interview.

I think I'd be happy asking everyone a different set of questions, but companies are apparently scared about the bias that could introduce (at any rate, we were instructed not to do that). Of the remaining options, the best one seems to be to increase the length of the meeting.

[woleium]

or, you know, just explain there are 12 questions at the start, and each one gets a couple of minutes only

[djleroy]

I’ve found standardized questions to be useless. I’ve found the best people by reading their cvs carefully. Then reading whatever published work they have. Then asking them to talk about that. If that goes well then I describe the work the team is doing and ask them their thoughts. If I really need validation I have a data problem I send them and ask them to send it back. (I don’t ask people to code in front of me - that’s ridiculous and tells me nothing) The standard problem Id ask was to figure out how to calculate something I describe only conceptually, and then give them a data set to do it on. Most mediocre so called data scientists will throw a bunch of Python libraries at the data and not even think about what was asked. This, sadly, is the state of my profession after 10 years of “boot camps “ and incursions from other disciplines.