How To Write Interviewee Feedback / Post-Mortem

interviewee-feedback.md

Hello,

Thank you for the opportunity to interview for the Site Reliability Engineer position at $company. I appreciate the time and effort you've invested with me in your interview process. I admit I could have done a lot better, but as a technical interviewer myself, I know that interviews are subject to high variance on both the interviewer and candidate ends. While disappointed with the outcome, I want to take this opportunity to provide some candid feedback about your interview process with the hope it may be improved.

What went well:

• The interviewer who conducted my phone screen ($phone_interviewer) was very engaging and asked relevant questions about my background and overall, portrayed $company's SRE team in a very positive light.
• Three of the five onsite interviewers ($interviewer_1, $interviewer_2 and $interviewer_3) offered a great experience and were actively engaged in the interviews. Were all of my interviewers like this, I would have had a more enjoyable experience, regardless of outcome.
• The recruiting staff ($recruiter_1, $recruiter_2 and $recruiter_3) I worked with were great and proactive with scheduling and moving forward.
• The onsite recruiting coordinator ($recruiter_2) was diligent in ensuring I was well-hydrated and kept the interviews on schedule.
• Overall process speed was very fast from initial contact to decision.

What did not go well:

• $interviewer_4 and $interviewer_5 were disengaged, disinterested and robotic. Not only did they make no engagement effort, they actively avoided engagement throughout the course of the interview. Their confirmation bias was palpable, having formed an immutable opinion of me within the first 60 seconds of the interview. Both were condescending and appeared intent on conducting a deposition as opposed to a bilateral interview. Overall, these are not the type of people I would want to work with.
• $interviewer_5 chose an off-putting deposition-style interview. Toward the end, he asked a wildly inappropriate and irrelevant brain-teaser-style question about the average angle of circles.
• $interviewer_4 opted for trivia questions, which do nothing to assess a candidate's technical strength; only whether a candidate has rote memorization of a given command / concept. When I blanked on a few things, I’m certain $interviewer_4 interpreted it as not being technically skilled enough as opposed to just not knowing the name of a specific command or its behavior; thus the problem with asking trivia questions in an interview. Additionally, even though this specific interview was conducted via a videoconferencing setup, it was obvious $interviewer_4 was not devoting his full attention to the interview; due to his mechanical keyboard. This is very inconsiderate because of the time commitment I made to being fully present and available for this interview.
• For the programming portion of the interview, I was subjected to a whiteboard coding exercise. Whiteboard coding is an outdated and outmoded technique for assessing programming skills. Even the interviewer who did my whiteboarding interview ($interviewer_2) acknowledged this, yet proceeded anyway. Whiteboarding is known to produce a lot of false-negatives since it is a distinct skill that not all programmers have. That doesn’t mean they’re bad or inexperienced programmers.
• Only two of my interviewers ($interviewer_3 and $interviewer_4) allocated time for me to ask questions. Of those two, only $interviewer_3 was genuinely interested in speaking with me and took a great amount of time and care in answering my questions. $interviewer_4 opted to provide terse and condescending answers.
• Four of the five interviewers showed no concern for my well-being, leaving this task to the interview coordinator, who was diligent in ensuring I was well-hydrated. However, at no point until just before the last interview began was I afforded an opportunity to step out of the interview room. Being confined in a dark and uncomfortable space for 4 hours is demoralizing and does little to help one think clearly.

As you can see, this was not the most positive interview experience and doesn’t portray $company in the most flattering way. Given $company’s track record of disruption and innovation, I expected a more out-of-the-box interview approach and a more positive experience, doubly-so when $company claims there is a local talent shortage.

In the interest of giving back, here is a talk I gave to my city's local tech community about the deleterious effect tech interviewing has on candidates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIrKC41NwC0.

Despite my feelings about the interview, I'm happy to provide additional details about my experience, should you wish. Either way, I wish you the best of luck in your talent search.

Sincerely,

Zack Z.