Bartram: Switch from evaluation to teaching mode when candidates fail interviews
Ammon Bartram · Hiring Engineers with Ammon Bartram · Y Combinator · May 17, 2017 · at 40:08
Ammon Bartram, co-founder of technical recruiting platform Triplebyte, outlines techniques to prevent interviewer frustration and hazing during technical assessments.
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“And a trick that, that we use that I think helps in that case is to sort of, in the case where a candidate is totally failing the interview, like, flipping a switch in your brain and going from, like, evaluation mode into teaching mode. You know, you're like, full goal now is just to explain and as friendly as possible, like, I mean, generally, you're the other person failed, right? This happens when the person has already essentially failed, at least the problem, if not the interviewer. And so you're like, you already have in the brain found, okay, this person is not passing. So I'm going to spend the remaining 15 minutes being friendly and explaining the answer to this question. Rather than continuing to try to elicit responses from them.”
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