Before the Interview

How to prepare

How to help the candidate prepare

During the Interview

Writing an effective job description is crucial for attracting top tech talent and ensuring a smooth hiring process.

A great job description not only clearly outlines the role but also engages the right candidates.

To write a perfect job description, it's essential to focus on both format and structure, incorporating best practices that highlight key responsibilities and qualifications.

Quality job descriptions provide clarity while remaining concise; using actionable tips and examples can guide you in crafting yours. In this article, we'll explore the best practices for writing a compelling job description, ensuring it stands out and draws in the right tech talent.

Why does it matter?

Sometimes, when companies hire for an open tech position, they take extra care to consider the soft skills a candidate needs to possess and forget to mention all required and desired tech skills applicants must have to be able to pass to the interview stage.

Why does this matter? This list of required and desired skills will serve as a check point during quarterly reviews in the future. It will be the guiding star when deciding whether the new hire meets and exceeds expectations. And, of course, it is best to list those requirements as early as possible - even in the job description.

Other times, the hiring team concentrates too much on the tech skills needed in the company that they forget to mention what soft skills a successful candidate must possess.

Why does it matter? If you need the lead engineer to be able to have productive conversations with sales and leadership, for example, they need to have great communication skills and to be able to translate complex tech concepts into simple words.

Job Description Format and Structure

You can decide to leave the job description in a series of lists - listing the desired and required skills for the job, enumerating the benefits you provide as a company alongside the responsibilities the hired person will have.

I like text formats - either a word document or a PDF which can be sent as attachments in emails and messages, or text which appears on your career page.

Guide to writing the perfect job description

Follow these simple steps when writing your effective job description

Things to keep in mind

This is it.

Our 4-step process to designing a technical task to give to your candidates during their tech assessments.

This can also work for open positions in devOPS (ask the candidate to set up some infrastructure on the cloud for you), Product and QA.

If you'd like extra help on designing the tech challenges for your candidates, reach out to us here.

This is how many hours a company spends in the preparation of the first technical interview (or tech assessment) after a handful of applicants have been selected to reach to this stage of the interview process:

Total time - 25 man hours of preparation for 1 open position.

Can we do better?

Yes!

Here is how we can do better

Work with an experienced technical interviewer.

What is a technical interviewer?

This is a technical person who is a master of the required technical skills which a successful candidate should possess.

The technical interviewer has also gone through rigorous training to make sure that:

How many hours working with an eternal technical interviewer saves you and your company?

The same interview preparation time from above shrinks down to:

You can expect an email like that which will help you be efficient during the 3 hour kick-off


What will you do with those 21 hours you just saved?

During the Interview

Post-interview

Tech Assessment feedback template - here is one you can use starting today.

Why?
Many hiring managers and interviewers struggle to send meaningful and actionable feedback to the candidates they have interviewed. Sometimes, no feedback is sent at all.

Let me make writing it a breeze so you can follow up properly with every candidate who has invested their time in interviewing with you.

A great interview feedback consists of:
- a thank you note for the candidate's time and energy.
- what went well
- what went wrong
- (in case of rejection) what the candidate is missing to be a great fit for the current job opening
- (above and beyond) links to resources to read/listen/engage with to improve

These 5 elements can guide you to writing the 2-3 sentence to send to candidates. Giving actionable feedback helps your company in a few way too:
- improved reputation of the brand
- keeping a happy and ready to engage talent pool for the future
- happy employees >> more productivity >> increased profitability

How long does it take to write

Invite your tech interviewers to consider the following from the very beginning of the interview:
- think about what the candidate did well
- what they should work on
- what resources we can share with them to help them improve

Then ask the interviewers to write one sentence about each of these 3 points right after the end of the interview. In total, with the conversation still fresh in mind, it takes less than 5 minutes.

When to send

We like to send it up to 72 hours after the interview has taken place. The candidate evaluation is usually done up to 24 hours after the interview - the notes have been cleaned, the answers and tasks provided evaluated and the feedback written and ready to send.

But don't know if this is the candidate we will hire

That's totally okay. Send the feedback to the candidate and add a paragraph at the end of the message mentioning that the evaluation process is still on-going, until and end date, and that they will hear back again from you then.

Add a note for the correct answers

𝐈 𝐞𝐧𝐣𝐨𝐲𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐬𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬!

This is what a candidate I interviewed this week told me.

Do you notice?
She did not compare the interview to an interrogation but to a conversation.
She thanks me for the suggestions? What are suggestions?

Suggestions are actually the correct or more complete answers to the questions I have asked her.
Sure, we as human being can never answer all the question perfectly.
But this does not mean that we cannot know all the great answers by the end of the interview.

So when a candidate gives me an incomplete answers, or they simply don't know what to say,
I give it to them.
I teach them something so the interview turns useful for them too.

Selfishly I do this because I might end up working with this person.
And the more they know, the better for my company and my projects. ☺️

From their point of view, a senior has shares a piece of wisdom or knowledge with them.
From the point of view of the company hiring, if it is not mine, their online employer brand goes through the roof.

Triple win.
This is how I like it.

Not Providing it hurts your business

Bad word travels fast, and candidates talk to each other. When one is ghosted and no feedback given after they have invested at lest 1 hour of their free time in your company without getting paid, it is only natural that they do not say good things about your interview process and company as a whole.

Here are some of the negative effects:

Here is a list of some of the negative effects:
- high cost per hire
- hours of wasted leadership meetings
- the digital reputation of the company plummets
- people talk, and would be applicants choose against applying

The problem then is that it becomes difficult for them to think straight and this may affect their performance.

We, the interviewers, do not want that. We aim at creating the best environment so the interview feels like a conversation rather than an interrogation.

Here is a list of proven things any tech interview can use to help their candidate loosen up their nerves.

Interviewer Soft Skills

• be patient
• use humour
• act friendly
• do not interrogate
• allow thinking time
• avoid gloating if you know more than the candidate
  

Practical Advice

(a misleading irrelevant question) Don't you think JavaScript is better than Python for web development?

Positive Reinforcement

Provide the answer the candidate struggles with. THey will learn something during their interview and will never forget the amazing candidate experience you created for them.

This is how I would answer the question. I would use a heap to find the median of a sequence of numbers. The reason behind this is ...

The HR screen, the step in the interview process before that, exists to make sure that the candidate has the skills and knowledge required to be great at the job.

Here are 3 modern ways to test developers while building a great candidate experience.

Live Coding Tasks

Live Coding tasks are usually the last part of the first technical interview with a candidate. They are time-boxed (from 30 minutes up to 1.5 hours).

The job of the interviewer, who is an experienced technical person, is to help the candidate give their best. This means the interviewer is there to provide hints, support and work as a pair programming buddy to the candidate.

DOS

Make it work-related, avoid

Send constructive feedback after the interview.

Deliver value - get the candidate excited about the small task you ask them to complete.

DON'TS

Don't make it a time sink.

Don't give the candidate a task which will teach them nothing.

Don't set unrealistic goals. Like asking the candidate to create a production-ready application. This just won't do.

Don't use interviews to get free labor. If you can use the output the candidate delivers to you at work, pay for their effort, and give them thanks.

Take-Home Tests

Take-home tests, or take-home challenges as some call them, is a practical exercise given to the candidate to work on from home. They can consume from a few hours up to 2 days of work before the candidate meets with the interviewing team to present their findings and results.

DOS

Pay the candidate for the hours taken to complete the task.

Offer constructive value.

If you are going to use the output they deliver anywhere in the company, let the candidate know.

DON'TS

Consider them as a way to get free labor.

Don't give the candidate a task which will teach them nothing.

Don't set unrealistic goals. Like asking the candidate to create a production-ready application. This just won't do.

Online Coding Tests

Online coding tests are simulated problems done for a set amount of time. Many online platforms offer pre-recorded questions and challenges from which the hiring team can choose from. The candidates then enter in the platform and do the work there. When completed, the candidates output is sent to the employer for evaluation.

DOS

The work is done via browser.

This is a scalable solution for companies which expect a high number of applicants per job opening.

DON'TS

Don't fully reflect real-world work.

Sessions could be recorded.

Candidates could cheat and present someone else's work.

I and my team have designed 248 of those processes. We have interviewed more than 1000 people already. This has been our work for the past 3 years.

Here are a thing or two we learned during this time.

A rock-solid tech interview process has all of the following:

👉 Questions/tasks that mimic actual work the candidate would be doing in their job (that stay the same during all interviews)
👉 Clear and consistent evaluation metrics (that stay the same during all interviews)
👉 3 interview stages (maximum 4)
👉 Feedback at each stage
👉 72 hours to follow up

How do you incorporate those 5 points in your process?

What can you expect when you incorporate these 5 suggestions?

✅ have a less biased evaluation process
✅ save the time of your team who interviews
✅ attract and retain candidates throughout the whole process
✅ avoid interview fatigue which lowers internal team's productivity

Resources you can learn more from

🙋 And if you still need a bit on advice on how to design it, feel free to book a 15-min call with me in which I will help you out.

There are the top 8 worst mistakes I and my team have seen hiring teams do when interviewing tech candidates.

❌ No interview structure

❌ Hiring for the wrong position. Re-think the job title and responsibilities

❌ Published poorly written job descriptions

❌ Beg candidates to join their company after blowing the candidate experience

❌ Ask irrelevant questions

❌ Disrespect candidate's time and availability

❌ Forget to follow-up after each stage of the interview process

Here is what to do to avoid them

✅ Create a 3-part interview agenda. Here is a detailed explanation on how you can do it.

✅ Re-think whether the job title reflects what you need the person to do in their daily job. Sometimes you do not need a CTO but a data scientist. If you struggle with that, get clarity here. It takes 1 hour.

✅ List the following 3 things in the job description: a. a list of required skills, b. what the daily work looks like, c. what you offer the candidate (instead of what you require - make it about them).

✅ Learn how to provide a strong candidate experience during the entire interview process. Then candidates will be begging you to work for you instead the other way around.

✅ Ask thoughtful intelligent questions. Read this LinkedIn post which shows you how.

✅ Keep the entire process short. 3, maximum 4 stages. The HR screen should be between 10 and 30 minutes long. Each individual stage after that, or meeting, should not be longer than 1.5 hours.

✅ Send a follow up email after each stage of the interview process. Use templates for those messages so you don't get overwhelmed. Send emails with rejections, no updates, and next steps. Bonus points if you add something kind about the candidate themselves.

Happy interviewing!

p.s.: What would you add here? Send your suggestion here.