Conducting Interviews

So far, we’ve been talking about recruiting as if it were an Elixir pipeline. Recall the flow:

candidate_pool → interview → offer

We’ve discussed some ways to increase the talent pool, possibly beyond Elixir developers. Let’s look at the second way to improve the quality of recruits, by improving the interview filter. After exchanging experiences, we realized the processes we coordinate at our respective companies were fairly similar. In this lesson, we’ll highlight what has been working for most of the companies. Feel free to try those ideas and cherry-pick what is most suitable. Let’s break down that interview pipeline:

candidate_pool → phone_screen → code_test → onsite_interviews

In programming terms, the phone_screen, the code_test, and the onsite_interviews are all filters. The strength of the filters in the chain shapes recruiting progress, but the source for the filter matters too. Filters can be more selective if the candidate_pool is deeper.

Whenever there is an open position and resumes arrive, the process generally works the same. The recruiting team looks at a resume and at any attached project links. If all are in agreement, it is time for a phone screen.

Phone screens

The first filter is the phone screen. It is an opportunity to reduce your candidate pool without much energy. Since you’ll invest many hours in recruiting and interviewing a single candidate, removing pretenders from the pool as early as possible is important.