Session: Hiring is Broken: Towards Effective and Equitable Technical Interviews
Why do you study for 20+ years in school but get a job for coding quicksort on a whiteboard?
In this talk, we present research related to the technical interview process, including how developers perceive technical interviews, issues that occur in hiring pipelines, and impact of interview formats on stress levels and problem-solving ability. Finally, we describe several alternative interview approaches and preliminary successes they have achieved, including private interviews and Focus Time—a feature implemented in CoderPad that aims to reduce anxiety during online technical interviews.
To understand developer perceptions about technical interviews, we conducted a qualitative study of 46,115 comments in online developer forums. To understand where candidates become disengaged in the hiring pipeline—and what companies can do to prevent it—we conducted a qualitative study on over 10,000 reviews on 19 companies from Glassdoor, a website where candidates can leave reviews about their hiring process experiences. Finally, to understand technical interviews induce stress that significantly hinders performance, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 48 Computer Science students, comparing them in private and public whiteboard settings.
While technical interviews should allow for an unbiased and inclusive assessment of problem-solving ability, the results of our research has found that than assessing problem-solving ability, technical interviews may simply be a procedure for identifying candidates who best handle and migrate stress solely caused by being examined by an interviewer (performance anxiety). Furthermore, we identified several poor practices which prematurely sabotage the hiring process—for example, not adequately communicating hiring criteria, conducting interviews with inexperienced interviewers, and ghosting candidates. Finally, developers report several additional concerns and negative perceptions about interviews, including their lack of real-world relevance, bias towards younger developers, demanding time commitment, and requiring them to learn arbitrary, implicit, and obscure norms.
Presenters:
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