| Hey. Author here. Thanks for the feedback. I completely agree that culture fit and giving candidates a chance to learn about the company/position are hugely important to any interview. I could write entire posts about each of those. I guess I should have been clearer in my description that I was writing strictly about the technical portion of an interview. That said, my experience has been that it's much more difficult to effectively evaluate a candidate's technical ability based on take-home tests or the like. A phone screen would probably work well too, but since that requires a fair amount of my time, I usually prefer to just meet in person. Hiring is such an important part of any company, and even more so at a super early-stage startup like the one I work at. So I always try to err on the side of false positives instead of false negatives. I'd rather invite more candidates to interview and maybe have some of them end up being under-qualified than to miss out on a great candidate because I'm making too many assumptions before meeting them. That said, this stuff isn't an exact science, and I'm certainly not claiming to have discovered the One True Way™. I just wrote about my experience, and the things I tend to look for. EDIT It's also worth mentioning that here in Boston, there's a huge shortage of intermediate/senior JS devs. So most of the time, I'm really looking for a junior level person who seems likely to progress quickly. In a market where I was able to get more senior level people in the door, I think my strategy would probably shift pretty significantly. |