Myth: Good engineers are, by default, good identifiers of talent when conducting interviews.
It’s universally acknowledged in the sports world that great players are not always capable of becoming good coaches or managers. Some of the greatest coaches of all time were not necessarily gifted players at the highest level. Coaching and playing are different skills. The engineering industry by and large has not seemed to catch on to the analogous problem with technical ability and interview effectiveness. An assortment of soft skills, which we may sometimes refer to as emotional intelligence at least in part, must be brought to bear during the hiring process and they aren't necessarily exercised all that often on the job in the STEM fields.
Most companies assume that experts in their technical field are good interviewers automatically, capable of identifying other good workers in the field. This has shown to be completely false and inaccurate. - RG, senior embedded software engineer
Interviewing is hard. Failure is common. We can acknowledge that, while simultaneously accepting that if we put some effort into training our intelligent engineers we can turn them into more intelligent interviewers. Like any other skill, practice helps. Rather than strictly limit your interview panels to specific team members, we actually promote being as inclusive in the process as you can. We believe it's essential to have candidates speak with every engineer with whom they'll be working closely before making an offer. You should be able to rely on a stable of quality interviewers on your team. However, they are not universally interchangeable cogs by default. You must pay rapt attention to which of your engineers are doing which part of the interview. Without a doubt, certain team members will be naturals in some ways but need training in others.
The dearth of interview training in our industry would be truly unbelievable if we weren’t all witnesses. The old adage “you get what you pay for” is never more aptly applied than it is here. When garbage goes in, garbage comes out. For example, many hiring managers in our industry believe that in a 30 minute conversation they can make judgments about an engineer’s complete technical skills package that are more accurate than the score reports issued by highly experienced university faculty that are experts in the topic of training engineers and assessing their progress.
Many people simply don’t know how to conduct an interview because they’ve never been taught. Most of us passed from the college ranks into industry through horribly mismanaged interview procedures. The bungling of the job is perpetuated from one generation to the next. Inexperienced or apathetic hiring managers simply choose to allow interviews to be terrible experiences and highly ineffective. Why do we accept this state of affairs? Let’s break the cycle of abuse.
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