Interviewing & Hiring Like a Boss • Kristine Howard • YOW! 2023
Interesting. speech Kristine Howard from Amazon, who talked about how to conduct interviews better. I am interested in this topic because I am very involved in hiring processes and I try to improve them as much as I can. If you go back to the speech Christine, who is the AWS Head of Developer Relations APJ, then she began the speech with the fact that she was a young woman. 8 Back when I hated doing interviews, but as you know, from love to hate, one step and once she did it in the opposite direction, as is customary at Amazon:)
She then moved on to the main points of her speech.
- What to do before an interview - a story about the preparation of the job description, about the CV review (and their preparation by candidates)How to structure the interview chain, how to test hard skills and leadership principles (shaming checking different skills on different interviewers)How to conduct a preebrief, where you can get more information about the requirements for the candidate, how to prepare specific questions for the candidate (selecting from a prepared list of questions)
- How to conduct interviews - help them calm down, tell about the rules of conducting interviews, why and how to ask candidates to tell stories - in fact, the speaker talks about the use of STAR (situation-task-action-result) SBI (situation-behavior-impact) for the interview:) Then she talks about what to pay attention to when communicating with the candidate: look at the numbers, scope, impact. Find out what the candidate did to get the result. Do not be afraid to interrupt the flow of water and move on to the next question. How to write a feedback about a candidate - here the speaker talks about how to reduce the influence of prejudices and objectively evaluate the candidate according to a pre-made list of criteria.
- How to make decisions after all interviews - here we are talking about the debrief and review of the final results of the candidate and whether he should be hired. Here are standard approaches to group decision-making. And how to discuss a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as an interesting question about an insurmountable reason to hire a candidate. Immediately dealt with the question of how to coach interviewers and give them feedback for their growth. And this part ends with the fact that the whole hiring process is hung with metrics and there is an SLA for the speed and quality of each step of the process.
- Hints The speaker talks about the importance of calendar management and the time spent on conducting an interview, as well as about a separate interview, where the candidate can ask off-the-record about how he works in the company. (Useful for minority representatives)The importance of the interviewer training process, as well as improving the candidate experience.
P.S.
Za. 7 I spent years in Tinkoff. 700+ interview and went from a fan of hiring to a team with a custom interview in one stage to a person who understands why you need a clear and understandable process, divided into separate stages with formal evaluation criteria for each of them. And the main difference in the size of the company and the cost of errors of the first and second kind. (false positives and false negatives respectively).
Now I often talk about our approach to hiring:
- Testing design skills (system design interview) We ask the software development engineer and the technical executives about it. Materials on this type of interview Testing your incident handling skills (troubleshooting interview) - we ask about this site reliability engineers and their managers - more details can be found here
- About interview management - this type of interview varies for team leaders and managers level above - here here you can read more
#Management #Hiring #Leadership #Process #Software