The art of interviewing

Yesterday, I was having a cup of coffee with a long lost friend from college who is smart, intelligent and a true engineer at heart. He was a problem solver and carved his path as an individual contributor in a reputed fortune 500 company.

Slowly sipping his coffee, he muttered “I am changing my job. I am joining this new startup next week!”.

Quite surprised, I asked, “I thought u are happy in your current job.  What happened? Why this sudden shift?”

“Oh yeah, I do love my current job. I was happily busy .  I was not at all  looking for a change.”, he said.

Looking at my confused expression he continued, “Well, I was glancing through an email that I got from a recruiter and was intrigued by the job description. It was not only interesting but sounded like fun.  So I responded to that.”

“Hmm.. So you are the typical passive candidate that they talk about in the recruiting blogs”

“Very much so. As soon as I responded, things started rolling fast. The manager talked and immediately scheduled an interview with their technical guru.  I had a long video chat with him and then everything just moved fast. I was impressed with their interviewing process and more so with their interviewer!”.

Then for about five minutes, my friend went on and on about the interesting discussion that he had with the interviewer. He continued,  “it felt like a discussion, nothing like an interview. He started with a simple question but soon interweaved it with the multiple challenges in solving it. We discussed in depth the algorithm to be used, optimizations to consider and implementation stacks to use. By the end of the hour, I decided that I want to work with this guy !”.

I started thinking,  is it that easy to get a good hire? Just have a good interview session with him?  The “interview session” was the one that made him decide to take the job, not how the company is doing or what  he is being offered. He knew that he could negotiate everything else. And he is convinced that if the company had great people like his interviewer, it has to succeed sooner or later.

So here I am,  more than ever convinced that if you want to attract great, passive talent, have a great interview session. No doubt, one frequently overlooked challenge in recruiting is finding a good interviewer!