{"id":726,"date":"2011-11-17T17:26:30","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T17:26:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/?p=726"},"modified":"2011-11-17T17:26:30","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T17:26:30","slug":"worried-about-candidates-googling-during-a-phone-screen-youre-doing-it-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/2011\/11\/17\/worried-about-candidates-googling-during-a-phone-screen-youre-doing-it-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Worried about candidates googling during a phone screen? You&#8217;re doing it wrong."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" title=\"Phone Screen\" src=\"http:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/11\/phone-screen.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"250\" height=\"216\" \/><\/p>\n<div>Interviewing is time consuming, companies have a <a title=\"We only hire the best | fragile\" href=\"http:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/2011\/05\/we-only-hire-the-best-i-dont-believe-you\/\">finite amount of time to dedicate to recruitment<\/a> and inevitably some capable candidates are turned down at CV stage without ever having a chance to shine.<\/p>\n<p>Phone screens are a great way to address this problem, they are typically shorter and often run solo. They allow a company to take more risks and consider candidates from further afield.<\/p>\n<p>My company is still pretty new to phone screening, we\u2019ve been trialling it out in cases where it is difficult for the candidate to attend in person &#8211; perhaps they are based overseas. As a result I\u2019ve been doing a lot of reading on how best to construct a decent phone screen. By far the best writing I\u2019ve found is <a title=\"5 essential phone screen questions | Steve Yegge\" href=\"http:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/steveyegge2\/five-essential-phone-screen-questions\">Steve Yegge\u2019s take<\/a>. I\u2019m not sure how practical it is to fit everything Yegge mentions into a 45 minute call, but I consider it an excellent resource.<\/p>\n<p>A common fear I have seen in other discussions seems to be that candidates will use google to somehow game the system. If this is a genuine concern then one of two things has gone wrong. Either:-<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The questions are purely fact based and will tell the interviewer nothing about how the candidate thinks.<\/li>\n<li>Or, the questions are fine but the interviewer is focusing on the wrong part of the answer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>A question like \u2018In Java what is the difference between finally, final and finalize\u2019 will tell you very little about the candidate. Plenty of terrible programmers could answer that without problem and what\u2019s worse, a talented but inexperienced developer might stumble. In short these type of quick fire questions add little value to the overall process.<\/p>\n<p>Something like \u2018How does a Hash Map work? How would you write a naive implementation?\u2019 is more interesting, it\u2019s open ended but forces the candidate to talk about a specific area of knowledge &#8211; even if they don\u2019t know, you\u2019ll learn how good they are at thinking things through from first principles. The only way that it can be gamed through googling is if the interviewer simply waiting to hear specific terms and is not asking free form follow ups.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve just googled Hash Maps on wikipedia and could probably quickly extract \u2018Associative array\u2019, \u2018key-value pair\u2019, \u2018Collision\u2019 but really if that\u2019s all the interviewer wants to hear then the question is of limited value.<\/p>\n<p>So what I\u2019m saying is that if you\u2019re concerned about googling, then it\u2019s probably the questions or desired answers that are the problem. Furthermore if one in a hundred people do manage to game the system you\u2019ll pick them up in the face to face in an instant.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/2011\/11\/17\/worried-about-candidates-googling-during-a-phone-screen-youre-doing-it-wrong\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Worried about candidates googling during a phone screen? You&#8217;re doing it wrong.\"><p>Interviewing is time consuming, companies have a finite amount of time to dedicate to recruitment and inevitably some capable candidates are turned down at CV stage without ever having a chance to shine. Phone screens are a great way to address this problem, they are typically shorter and often run solo. They allow a company [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[20],"class_list":{"0":"post-726","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-management","7":"category-recruitment","8":"tag-interviews","9":"h-entry","10":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fragile.org.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}