Item — HN Reader

I have hired for or at 5 companies so far.

I've never used video, and I have hired people based solely on phone conversations, or IRC conversations -- but usually phone/irc followed by an in-person interview.

I can't think of any value of recorded video over realtime chat for anything except "create a video clip for me!" For a sales job involving in-person meetings with clients, a realtime video chat might be a bit better than realtime audio, but the difference is much less than the value of an in-person meeting.

For a developer job, I would consider this totally without value. "IM presence" and "how well can he explain something in words" (voice or text) would be worth vastly more, and "sit next to me and do this task and explain it to me" would be the ultimate test.

1 comments

The response we've heard so far is that companies have found the videos to be quite helpful. We don't see them as a replacement for the entire hiring process, and certainly for hiring developers it's still important to do in-person interviews, have them write code (which they can also do using HireHive, since we support multiple types of responses, not just videos), etc.

If you could be a framework for any kind of question/response (and I think timed and interactive would be a plus), that would be great. If you could then make the "grading and evaluation" workflow on the employer side support routing through subject matter experts, a prospective team, manager, etc., based on either employer-specified rules, or some kind of policies which you suggest and which can be tweaked, I would probably use this, even without ever using the video portion.

We support questions with a few different types of answers (video, short, medium and long text responses, file uploads).

We're working on the grading/evaluation features on the employer-side right now. This is something we're excited about, because it allows for more people to give input in the hiring process and opens up the possibility for coordination among companies as we're doing with the YCommonApp.

Always happy to hear what real people find useful :) Feel free to email me (nick [at] hirehive.com) if have you any other suggestions or questions if you try out the service.

Time limits per question or per questionnaire would be useful. There are really two reasons: 1) Intelligence (and often job performance) is measured by how fast a problem can be solved. Within limits, it doesn't matter, and often a better solution that takes slightly longer to come up with is better overall. However, for a problem which is bounded in difficulty (such that a normal job applicant willing to put 2 hours into the interview could answer everything), being able to solve the problem in 24h vs. 2h is not really a good thing.

2) It's a lot harder to "cheat" on a realtime exam, especially on video. The purpose of the interview is to evaluate a candidate, and it's unlikely that candidate's much smarter (or paid) friend would be part of the long-term package, but it's entirely possible someone could be getting assistance during the interview. (it's basically like when a law or consulting firm sends a partner to win the business, and then has summer associates doing the actual work once they're engaged...)

Assuming remote-interview-only, this would be a problem. Also, I view in-person interviews as fundamentally somewhat random. If you really like a candidate on paper (or on video), and he shows up and is close but not necessarily 100%, a lot of interviewers are willing to explain away problems as "he was nervous" or "having a bad day". Once an interviewer emotionally bonds with a candidate, it's a lot harder to be objective -- this is why I like to do early-stage objective/automatic screenings to determine basic competence.

All good feedback. We've got time limits per questionnaire already, and I'll add per-question limits to the list of feature requests.

Also, we currently let you set a time limit for a questionnaire overall (e.g., expire 30 minutes after page load). Is this useful to you, or did you mean timed on a per-question basis?