Oooh, this lets me tell a great anecdote that didn't have a place in the post.
So it turns out you were not alone. Getting people who did well on the quiz - whose parameters were trained on interview performance, by the way, so "did well on the quiz" was synonymous with "had a good shot at the interview" - to sign up for interviews was a major problem for a while.
The solution? We told them the first booking was just a "practice" interview. And then if they did well, surprise, it was a real interview all along. (If they didn't, we'd let them try again, though it almost never changed the outcome.) IIRC this like doubled booking rates overnight. I don't really plan to do this at Otherbranch (partly because being aggressively upfront about things is a founding value, even when it comes to white lies of that sort), but it's a fun story that I don't think was actually unethical.
There's a lot I could (do [1]) say about the psychology of interviewing, and it's something I'd love to write more about down the line. Mental health - especially around anxiety and depression - is my #1 personal cause and job hunting touches so concretely on so much of it.
> *The solution? We told them the first booking was just a "practice" interview. And then if they did well, surprise, it was a real interview all along. (If they didn't, we'd let them try again, though it almost never changed the outcome.)
Honestly, saying it's a "practice" interview, and then saying "Oh, you did so well we're just going to let you skip the real one" isn't lying. Some people might need to believe there's a safety net in order to join. Other people might really need practice.
The triplebyte interviews were pretty tightly scripted to try and remove interviewer bias. If you did two interviews with TB, you would have found them pretty similar.
We also did tell candidates what to expect and how to prepare. Most candidates didn’t read our preparation notes. The people who did did better in the interview.
And it turned out “fine” anyway because HR didn’t read the job posting and now the hiring manager is somehow interviewing an SAP developer for a Dynamics position.
Even though interviews between companies are wildly different, there is a correlation between doing more and getting good at them.
There’s a lot of performance and interview skills involved in the talking part of an interview. It’s not just the hacker code part that benefits from training
They told you (or me at least) almost exactly everything that would be in the interview ahead of time, to the point that I just recalled a lot from my notes I made the night before the call. Source: I completed the TB process, but it was 8ish years ago.
I think practice interviews can still be helpful. Some of the reasons I’ve seen candidates blow an interview boil down to nerves. I think practice interviews help in these situations as things that are more familiar tend to be less nerve wracking.
Now I feel like I should name all my strategic initiatives like I'm a Dragonball Z character. Maybe I should stop posting in this thread and go...lie down or something. That feeling can't possibly be good.
So it turns out you were not alone. Getting people who did well on the quiz - whose parameters were trained on interview performance, by the way, so "did well on the quiz" was synonymous with "had a good shot at the interview" - to sign up for interviews was a major problem for a while.
The solution? We told them the first booking was just a "practice" interview. And then if they did well, surprise, it was a real interview all along. (If they didn't, we'd let them try again, though it almost never changed the outcome.) IIRC this like doubled booking rates overnight. I don't really plan to do this at Otherbranch (partly because being aggressively upfront about things is a founding value, even when it comes to white lies of that sort), but it's a fun story that I don't think was actually unethical.
There's a lot I could (do [1]) say about the psychology of interviewing, and it's something I'd love to write more about down the line. Mental health - especially around anxiety and depression - is my #1 personal cause and job hunting touches so concretely on so much of it.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1daumg4/...