Hiring from the Other Side

Here's some insights about what the hiring process can look like from within a company. Useful if you're applying and you're wondering what happens inside companies when you do. The title is a play on Adele's "Hello (from the other side)".

I’ve interviewed for just about 3 jobs in my life, and I’ve interviewed about 300-500 people that applied to teams that I was leading. Quite a lot! You could say my hiring experience is a bit lop-sided towards interviewing rather than being interviewed.

Most people probably have this the other way round, they will have applied more than they have been interviewed by others. If this is you, you might be frustrated with the process or be disheartened by rejections or bad interviewing experiences. The process might feel like a complete black box. After doing X rounds of interviews over many weeks, you might get a bland rejection notice from a recruiter saying “we have someone else who is a better fit” or “the team had doubts about Y”. We are not great at giving useful feedback as an industry. My friend Oliver wrote a great post about how he wants to do better, and it spells out what I've always tried to live up to.

To shed a bit of light on what typically happens in companies, here are three small stories from my own experience, and some insights at the end. Mind you that my insights are quite limited, as I’m in the software industry which has a lot of hype cycles and is not like others.

Glossary

But first, let's see how we talk about hiring.

• Hiring Manager - The person with the ultimate hiring decision and budget. Might not be in the team, and might not lead the process if there is a recruiter, but is still accountable for it.
  
  
• Candidate - anyone that applies or is in "the process".
  
  
• The Process - all the steps that candidates need to go through to get hired. You're "in the process" from the moment you apply / we reach out, until the moment you get rejected or hired.
  
  
• Referral - if someone in the company refers someone, it's a big plus, as someone vouches for their skills and actually wants to work with them again. These candidates sometimes get a quicker process, and the employees that referred them get a nice bonus (I've seen 250 to 10,000 euros depending on "The Market", see below)
  
  
• Internal Recruiter - Only companies that are going to hire consistently over longer periods have internal recruiters. These find and select the candidates to go into the process, but don't know much about the technical side of the job. Often they are the main contact person for candidates. Think of this person as the personal assistant of the hiring process. They do a lot of leg work but have little official say. Of course they have a lot of actual power, because if they do not recognize that a certain CV is actually a great fit, nobody but them will ever see it. 
  
  
• External Recruiter - sometimes we use External Recruiters if it's hard to find people. Their company gets a bonus if they place a candidate, dependent on how high the salary is, so they will often do their best, and are more specialized so have a lot of contacts already. Internal recruiters often start from scratch. They typically ask about 20-25% of the yearly salary which they get the moment the contract with the candidate is signed. So, don't trust everything they say because the incentives are not aligned. We want low salary that is fair towards the rest of the team, they want as high as possible with the least amount of effort from their side. You want a good job with a nice team for good pay. There are good external recruiters out there, but there are typically games being played that you are not aware of.
  
  
• Interview Committee - everyone involved in the hiring process. Some companies put a founder as the final step in every interview process. If they say no, then they overrule the hiring manager. After every round there is a decision to stop or continue, and in the last round, to make an offer or not.
  
  
• The Team - Hopefully the team members who you'll work with are also in the interviews, but they might not be. Sometimes the team has little say in if you're hired or not. In some extreme cases in larger companies, the Interview Committee will just assign you to a team after you are hired.
  
  
• Round - every time you have a longer call or meeting with a specific interview goal, it's called a Round. There are typically 2 to 4 rounds before you get an offer. During my interview rounds with a silicon valley company, there were 5 rounds remotely and then 2 full days of interviews on-site. That was pretty extreme. Some companies are a bit more organic, and no one really knows in advance how many rounds there are going to be. Sometimes there are 3 good candidates at the final round, and they have specific doubts. Then the company might do another call about this.
  
  
• Take-home assignment - some roles require you to do a homework assignment as one of the later rounds. This shows A) that you're motivated, and B) that you're skilled. It also gives you something concrete to talk about in an interview.
  
  
• The Market - this is how we talk about how easy it is to find candidates. Is the market "on our side" it means that there are lots of candidates and we can be picky and for example demand that people work from the office. If the market is "not good" it means candidates will be more expensive and we have to entice them. Typically we skip on "take-home assignments" if the market is bad, as candidates might say that they have no time for this.
  
  
• Pipeline - what we call the amount of candidates that are applying / in the process. A good pipeline just means we have plenty of candidates.
  
  
• Applicant Tracking System (ATS) - the system that lists each candidate and is used to communicate with them etc. For you it might just look like an email, but it all ends up in a system so everyone can see what you communicated with whom. This is also where interviewers make notes, give evaluation scores and drag you from column "Screening call" to "Interview 1". For hiring managers, if they write a simple note "please reject", this will result in the recruiter writing a rejection email to the candidate, hopefully with useful feedback, but often they use a standard "canned response" or make something up. (Sorry).
  
  
• Evaluation - if you have lots of candidates, you want to evaluate them systematically and fairly. So many companies end up creating a "score card", where they'll put a number like 1-5 on certain aspects (cultural fit, a couple of hard skills, etc). It's often very subjective, but gives a good basis to talk about differences. 

Scenario 1 - scale-up

At Mendix around 2015, we were growing fast and had recently closed a series B investment (25 million or so). I was a humble Product Manager for the cloud team which was then about 6-8 people. It was clear we needed more people and with the new cash, there was also an expansion plan to hire X more engineers this year. The strategy of the company was basically to hire as many excellent engineers as we could, but we did set the bar quite high: we would only hire very good ones. This meant that we could not hire them faster than we could spend our money, so in practice “money wasn’t an issue”.

For my team we would have an internal recruiter (so someone working exclusively for the company) who would try to find good candidates. Cloud Engineers were in pretty high demand, so we did not have many good candidates that applied, that means our recruiter had to try to find all of them. The recruiter was internal.

People inside of our team didn’t get to see the profiles until they were given to us by the recruiter and the Hiring Manager. I often doubted how many qualified people they rejected because they didn't like the layout of the CV. You have to realize that we would be working with this person in the room 40 hours a week, the Hiring Manager would have way less interaction with them, but he was going to be the official people manager. This meant that in practice, the Hiring Managers just wanted senior enough people in the team to decide if we wanted to hire this candidate or not.

We would do 3 rounds of interviews.

• Screening call of about 20-30 minutes, with the recruiter or Hiring Manager to see if the person was nice and professional enough and had a basic skill-set. The recruiter and manager often have NO CLUE about the actual skill sets needed for the team, so they keep things superficial. Don't ask detailed technical questions if this is the case.
  
  
• Then we do a 1 hour interview with the Hiring Manager and a team member, or two team members, where we ask more in-depth questions, mostly hard skills and experience.
  
  
• Then we would sometimes ask for a take-home assignment that you’d need to spend about a day on. Then another interview to go over the results, about 1.5 hours or so.

We would then get together and if anyone had doubts, we would not continue. The recruiter gave the feedback to the candidate. No clue if it was useful feedback.

Lessons learned

• The interviewer / main contact person sometimes has no clue what the job will actually entail, they just help in “filling the seats”
  
  
• Feedback might be very impersonal, because your contact person gets low-quality feedback from the team, and everyone is very busy.
  
  
• Sometimes the goal is just "to hire X people", and it's not exactly clear what you're going to do. In other cases (like below), they are really desperate to find you and it was a big discussion to make budget available to hire you. This makes a big difference in how much the Hiring Manager cares about the process.

Scenario 2 - startup A

At easee our team had grown big enough that we needed a full-time Quality Assurance engineer to make sure we found all the bugs. I was the CTO and had to find this person.

For some reason QA is an “entry-level” position, so many people with not much software experience apply for jobs. For difficult jobs we typically used external recruiters, but it’s never nice using them as it’s very expensive and you always get the feeling they are playing games. I mean saying things to the candidates that are not true, and to us as well. So, I opened the position on our own careers page, which was linked to all kinds of job boards, and within hours we had many candidates. Over a week or two I had to look at about 200 CVs. I feel like I have to reply personally to everyone that puts effort in, but often candidates will just submit a CV and hit send. Then I also don’t feel like putting in feedback. Now with AI, this is MUCH MUCH worse. I feel like I have to respond seriously, but often feel like motivation letters are just AI generated bullshit.

Of the 200 applicants, I interviewed about 40 in screening calls. About 10 went on to 1 hour interviews, and 3 to the final interviews with the team.

What I remember most from this experience is how much work it is, and also that you need a system. If you don't, there's no way you'll remember all the people that you spoke with.

Lessons learned

• If the job is in high-demand, make sure you have something that shows you put effort in, or something that is memorable.
  
  
• Always check if the recruiter is external or internal, and if they work with the team or not. If the recruiter is external, realize they probably get more money if you get a high salary, so they will want to boost your value towards the company, and tell you a higher budget than might actually exist.
  
  
• Even though for you, this single interview process might be very important and you’ve pinned all your hopes on it, the person on the other side might be overwhelmed and just sees you as “one of the 10 persons I interviewed on Tuesday and hardly remember, and now I have to decide if I have to drag them from column 1 to column 2”. Feel free to ask the company questions about how many candidates there are. 

Scenario 3 - startup B

This company will remain nameless, but it’s pretty chaotic. There are around 10 people. The CEO uses a platform like honeypot.io where you can find talent and he interviews the candidates he likes. He mostly talks about his vision and sees if the candidates are enthusiastic about it. Sometimes there’s a second interview, sometimes the person is just hired right away if he feels like it.

Why is such a light process good enough here? Well, if the person has the right qualifications, they can be outsourced to other companies, because larger companies only hire if people are “certified”. So this company might not care too much about how well you fit in the team, if they can place you at another company for a high rate and you don’t cause any problems, they will earn a lot of money and be happy. Also, because the first interviewer is the final decision maker, he can do whatever he wants.

I’m painting the picture worse than it is, but it’s still the most random process I’ve ever seen.

Lessons learned

• Sometimes the interviewers might not be convinced that his job is actually that great, and might even be interviewing for other positions themselves. Obviously they can’t tell anyone that, but if something feels off, or you sense apathy, this might be it.
  
  
• If an interview process sometimes feels chaotic, then yes, it can be that there is no clear process, and the decision maker just decides randomly based on gut feeling.

General tips

• Interviewers have ego too, if you show genuine interest in their position, what the company does and how their day is going, they’ll feel pleasant after talking to you. If there’s a review round for the candidates, make sure someone remembers you and cares so they speak up for you.
  
  
• Not knowing what you are doing in life is a bad sign for hiring managers. It means you might figure out that this is not right for you after all and we have to start over with hiring. And maybe, the manager will have to think about how to fit your career path into the company’s journey. They have no time for that! Think about what you want and what “the story” is of you and the company working together. Why does it make sense that you should get this job? Make sure you feel it, and then do the interviews. Ask questions about what needs to be cleared up.
  
  
• If it’s not a good match, it’s not a good match. Sometimes it’s better if early in the process, one of the parties decides it’s not a good match.
  
  
• Confidence without bragging is contagious. It’s very easy to hire a person who believes in what they can do and really looks forward to working in this team. It feels like you won’t have to hand-hold this person while they do their jobs, which is always nice for a manager.
  
  
• An efficient process reduces a LOT of people in each step, with the least amount of effort from the company’s side. That’s why we do a simple CV check first, then a 1 person screening call, then a 2 person longer call, then a 2 person “collaboration sessions” of about 2 hours. Each step is more thorough. The quicker we can reject a candidate the better.
  
  
• Always show genuine interest, have a list of questions you want to ask and feel free to ask any questions. Show that you have your own agenda and are also checking to see if the company fits your vision.
  
  
• Try to figure out how desperate the company is. Has the role been open long, are they having lots of candidates or very few? If they reject many people, why do they do so? Feel free to ask!

I was a bit rushed to write this post, but hope it was useful. If you have further questions, feel free to send me an email or connect on LinkedIn.