Do IT-recruiters dream of round sewers?

And why, in principle, from year to year, Euchar continues to be interested in this strange question, which has already defiled developers of all stripes.

My name is Alexey Bukin, I am the head of the JavaScript competence center at Alfa-Bank, and today I would like to talk with you about strange questions and templates for interviews, about how to negotiate with candidates, and about how we in the Alpha IT department managed to build the correct chain of selection.

Interviews in IT

Here I wouldn’t make IT people different from someone else, it would work for all types of people - everyone wants a human relationship, a friendly conversation, they don’t want a “king and god” vs. “newcomer” relationship, they don’t want to be permanently contacted - or not. I want to communicate, we are trying to give him, to do interviews on an equal footing, in a friendly atmosphere. If you create this atmosphere - it is easier for people to communicate with you, they are relaxed. We will be able to get to know a person better, he will be able to express himself better.
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When they leave such an interview, they get pleasure, moreover - they will tell their friends, they say, went there to the social network, everything was cool, I liked it, it was pleasant to communicate with the guys, the atmosphere was cool. That is, at the interview we immerse the person immediately in the atmosphere in which we work ourselves - look, that's how it works here, that's our culture, try it, and then decide whether you want this level or not, whether it suits you. Plus, word of mouth works very well, reinforces the HR brand, people talk about the interview in Alpha, and in general they like to share their opinions about interviews in different companies.

We started to receive pleasant reviews even on specialized communities, it seems, here, on Habré, under one of the articles, I saw a comment like “I was on Alpha’s meeting room, in general, everything is done abruptly” - this is very nice to hear, no joke. Usually, comments of this kind (after interviews) are very different, and such comments are 90 percent; people very often leave interviews with negative experiences.

Communication

As for the questions, we are trying to build a full-fledged dialogue with the candidate, and in it it is important not only to ask, but also to tell, and to tell a lot. We constantly clarify with a person whether he has any questions about us, about our work organization, so that he also receives information about us after the interview. So it will be much easier for him to make a choice. And we, in fact.

We do not have the goal of everyone by all means and deceiving to drag us to work, just to close the empty slot in the set.

If a person has a mindset with ours, we are ready to work together. If it is very cool, but we understand that we are not working together - it means that we are going in different ways, and instead of mutually beneficial cooperation, in the future, no one needs a conflict. If a person looks at us as an employer - we openly say who we are and what we are doing, if there are some negative points in our work right now - we must also tell them so that the person does not build himself some ideal picture, of which not really. After all, then he will still leave after some time, if we draw him a rainbow world with unicorns, and everything turns out to be a little wrong.

We are looking for people who are suitable for us, and who are also suitable for us. This should be a win-win situation.

If it is immediately clear that the person does not fit

Usually for people in such a situation, the trigger is the phrase “Thank you, we will call you back” - everyone starts to think that they either will not call and score, or call for a tick and say that it didn’t come up.

It may be a secret for someone, but at the end of the interview, the candidate is not immediately told anyway - everything is OK or all is sad. This is a good tone rule for interviews. The reasons for this are many, including the reluctance to cause a negative reaction. Imagine if you immediately deny the candidate directly - he will leave with a clear feeling that in the middle of the interview he was kicked in the ass. So it is impossible to do, it is inhuman.

There are situations when in the process of dialogue you immediately understand - well, not the same person. He does not work with the team. Personally, I always bring the interview to the end for any intermediate result. Of course, during the optimization of the interview process, we thought about how to reduce this, so as not to spend too much time, but still - the interview will never end in the middle, and will be brought to a logical conclusion.

Why you should not immediately make decisions or voice it - the cases are different. Maybe a person is confused, nervous, worried. Maybe he has a hellish migraine in the morning. It happens that specifically you did not like the candidate, and your colleague is delighted and believes that we must take. It is necessary to share opinions after the interview, but the candidate should not know this, this is a banal etiquette.

If it is immediately clear that the person is suitable

All the same, we do not say this immediately, even if the results of the negotiations are very positive. And the interview is still brought to the end, maybe your colleagues do not share your enthusiasm at all. An interview can last for a long time, and only at the very end some nuance will emerge that will put an end to everything, for example, that a person is ready to work only from 14.00 to 22.00, but this will not work for us at all. Therefore, all interviews are completed, and the candidate is not informed about the decision on the same day.

In some cases, I can give a person a kind of super mini-feedback, such as “See you soon,” “See you tomorrow,” and so on, if you like the candidate.

The very first interview

Discussion of the general conditions and the first contact is always HR. With HJC, the candidate discusses all this over the phone, this kind of super-express interview. Eychary is a category of people who have a professional duty to feel other people adequately.

For example, we tried to do this as an experiment. Eychar calls the technical question by phone, writes the answer on a piece of paper, and then transfers it to the technical specialists.

No shit this does not work.

When a techie talks to non-tech, he always understands that. And Eychar also understands this, and begins to look silly in the eyes of a techie.

In such situations, eychara scripts, as in the call center. He has a question, there are two possible answers - right and wrong. What if the candidate on the phone in response to the question will begin to talk about some technical aspects of the question? What then do Eicharu? Therefore, in such cases, the candidate hears in response, "Thank you, I will write it down now, and then I will give it to the technical specialists." Why do it - is unknown.

Do not make out of Eychara pass.

Let Eychach ask only those questions that are of particular interest to him. And technical issues are the diocese of the technical specialist. All of these attempts at rapid screening are much more negative than good. We have refused this, but in many companies, including large ones, this is still the case.

We now things are like this. The candidate communicates with Eychar. Then he has an interview with techies. For our part, there are two technical specialists, one of whom directly conducts the interview, and the second listens more and asks additional questions if necessary.

For all the time of my work here I spent from 70 to 100 interviews, I will not say for sure. Of course, there are technical, there are final ones. A year ago, I conducted technicals, now they are all on the side of the guys, and I switched to the final ones, talking with candidates about soft skills, discussing conditions, salary, features of teamwork and everything about us in general. I discuss technical issues much less now, only if you need to replace someone.

Interview time

The longest time interview can take 2.5 hours. But these are very rare cases. And usually this is not due to the fact that we have not been able to test the technical level for so long, but because conversations on abstract topics begin.

The shortest interview is 20 minutes. Usually it is from an hour to one and a half, this is almost standard.

The final interview is about 20-30 minutes, when everything is already, in general, it is clear that the person with us on the same wave will take root in the team. By this time, I already have a full-fledged feedback from the guys from the technical interview, and they are also interested in not only the technical skills of the candidate, but also his social portrait. After all, different things happen - a person can be technically awesome, but it is impossible to communicate with him. At all. No Or vice versa - technically he is a strong middling, but very cool in soft-skills.

What is missing selection

We built the selection according to the Pareto principle (to get 80 percent of the result, you need to spend 20 percent of the effort). We took the selection to a certain level, showed excellent results, having spent not so much effort on it.

Of course, the process is not perfect (any process can be improved infinitely), and if it is improved further, it will take much more effort. It will be necessary to look for unobvious dependencies, conduct experiments, modify something. We set ourselves a rather high bar at the very beginning, and we have reached it, now everything is going well. In 2017, the selection was generally quite massive.

Developer motivation in the bank - money or cool tasks

Here everything is different. As my former head said, there are two ways to motivate employees - loot and epaulets. High salary or a beautiful important position. All come for different.

That is to come only for the money - a rather rare case. Nevertheless, we have average salaries in the market.

But we are actively learning and pumping skills. Developers want to improve the technical level. To do this, they need to work in a team with more cool specialists (and we have them). Most people come to us for this. After all, objectively - the banking sector as an application area is not the most interesting, so there are few hyper-interesting projects here.

We are now transforming into an IT company, but at the same time we must understand that there are enough obvious IT companies on the market.

Growth for developers is a very important thing. Development is equally necessary for both the junior and the already established developer. But June is unlikely to get to us - we prefer more powerful developers, at least from the middle. Junami is well trained in web-studios, start-ups, it is possible to gain some experience from an integrator or vendor. And for such people we are already the next step in the qualitative development of skills. We have more interesting tasks and a high technical level.

Well, about the hatches

As soon as we started to engage in IT-selection, we immediately agreed with the guys that all this nonsense about the hatches will remain outside the door. That is, all these trivial questions they repel and do not bring any benefit to anyone.

That's what you find out by asking a person this question? No shit do not know. Whatever you write in all kinds of books, first of all, you need to think that you want to know about a person when you ask a specific question.

Everyone was reading brochures and it began - a test of logical thinking. OK, you want to check your logical thinking - give the candidate a technical task and see how he handles it, how he logically thinks.

With technical tasks it is more interesting, you have to invent them yourself so that it is interesting. Of course, then all these tasks begin to google and prepare for the interview in advance, but even if the candidate did so - OK, he could find information, knew what and how to search and how to apply this knowledge. But tasks still need to be updated frequently.

Because every task in 10 years turns into a task with hatches. Everybody knows her. And all she zadolbala.

Honestly, about the hatches - I do not understand what I will get from the answer to this question, from the word at all.

What we pay attention

We look at everything. If there is a link to the githabb in the response and there are practically no projects commits, or there are a couple of test projectors who talk about the candidate, rather, it’s bad - then he did himself nasty and lowered his chances.

It would have been better if he didn’t show anything at all.

Github necessarily look. And we all also look at previous projects, if this is a web and you can poke something - that's fine, we all stick it.

In general, we look at the stack with which the person is familiar. The main thing I look at is with which libraries it worked and how interesting it is for us. After all, if a person has an awesome experience, but that we don’t need - well, why do we need that.

Secondly, this is rarely written in a resume, but I personally wonder why a person goes to work with us. Money, growth, some other reasons. And there is no right answer - I’m interested in precisely the conclusion that can be made in the course of goal setting and reasoning.

If the candidate says bluntly - guys, I'm coming to you, because you pay 50k more than the old job, this is not a minus. This is normal.

People are different, and each of them comes to us for something different.

If you have any questions on IT selection, ask in the comments, I will try to answer.

If you want to try it on yourself (or even go to work with us at all) - here is a list of current vacancies:

• design
• frontend
• backend
• testing
• control