Being selected to conduct online interviews for your organization is a huge responsibility. Interviewers are not only responsible for identifying the best potential team member. They’re equally responsible for representing the organization—which means they need to be able to conduct effective, developer-friendly online interviews. But holes in preparation can negatively impact candidate experience, or worse, accidentally reject qualified candidates.
In many ways, that process becomes more complex with the shift to online interviews. With interviewers, hiring managers, and recruiters spread across multiple locations, it’s even more challenging to align on online interview expectations and best practices. Potential gaps in communication leave interviewers on their own to determine how to conduct strong online interviews.
To help avoid those scenarios—and to help streamline the online interview process for interviewers—we’ve made a number of updates to our remote technical interviewing solution, CodePair*. Here’s what we’ve changed:
Facilitating online interviews using CodePair* recommended questions
More often than not, technical interviews aren’t standardized. That leaves interviewers to decide how to approach the interview on their own, often forcing them to come up with interview questions on the fly.
But without detailed pre-planning around interview questions, they encounter a few key problems:
First, they run into time constraints. The average technical interview is usually scheduled for no more than an hour—so choosing questions that can be solved and discussed within that window is a challenge. Choosing the wrong question can mean incomplete or rushed interviews. That, in turn, will affect the accuracy of evaluation, and downgrade candidate experience.
Second, interviewers may struggle to maintain continuity and consistency across all their interviews. Interviews with great candidate experience usually involve the interviewer giving hints, verifying code, and asking more follow-up questions. It’s important that interviewers follow that same format across all their interviews.
Simplifying interview facilitation with recommended questions
To make it easier to conduct engaging online interviews, we’re introducing recommended questions for CodePair*. Recommended questions are a curated subset of interview questions that take less than 30 minutes to solve. Each of the recommended questions is available directly through CodePair*, making it easier to choose questions that can be completed and discussed within the span of an interview.
Built-in interview guidelines to walk you through the interview
Each of the recommended questions will also come with a set of interviewer guidelines. Once the interviewer selects a question, the guidelines provide hints, solution pseudo-code, time and space complexity, and potential follow-up questions for the problem at hand.
These questions help interviewers conduct more consistent, and more informed interviews without intensive prep. It means a better experience for both parties, and ultimately, an even stronger evaluation.
Recommended questions are available in CodePair*. Start a session today to try it yourself.
We've refocused our engineering efforts on refining and enhancing our remote hiring technology. To that end, we'll be sharing a number of new improvements to support remote hiring in the coming weeks. To be the first to know about new updates, check back on this post, or follow us on LinkedIn.
*Disclaimer: This blog post contains messaging around the "CodePair" and "CodeScreen" features which are now called "Interview" within the HackerRank product as of 10/06/20.