While I see the value and need, I'm afraid a candidate that applied to for the job would be put off by having a 3rd party interview them (especially if it's their first call). It's not the most welcoming interaction and might make them question leadership's ability.
Thoughts, @akshayibanez / @aatifh?
Hi @rrhoover, you have got a valid point. :-)
We have seen apprehensions in the beginning related to this from some companies. So, we decided to leave that decision to the companies whether they want to disclose to the candidate that there is a 3rd party who would do the interview or it's just an extension of their team. In most of the cases, Aircto represents the company.
Hence the candidate’s interaction with the company is not affected.
@aatifh@rrhoover until the candidate asks questions like, "what's it like to work at XYZ?". This is an interesting challenge to overcome. Curious to see how candidates take both scenarios.
@kunalslab True. Usually (if these questions comes up), we tell the candidates that we will arrange a follow-up call with the HR to answer these queries. Also, we have a very sorted interview guidelines for the experts to follow. So, our experts keep the conversation completely as a technical interview.
@rrhoover@akshayibanez@aatifh I could see the potential for a non-technical team needing help in vetting tech talent. If you have a tech team and you're outsourcing the vetting process, it's a red flag for the candidate.
this is a great idea. at the start of Vungle, we had to ask our engineering friends (that we were lucky to meet via the angelpad incubator) to help interview our first few engineering hires.
@aatifh@akshayibanez This is awesome! Nice work. Are you planning to only work directly with businesses, or will you also be working with 3rd party recruiting firms / headhunters? I can see it being a great tool in both scenarios.
Hey @arrev - thanks for the kind words. :)
Very good question. Actually, we are already working with a limited number of recruitment agencies where they get their candidates interviewed with our technical experts before they share the candidates with their clients. This helps them source qualified candidates to their clients and improves their conversion rates.
I feel like the CTA should be more: "Hiring shouldn't be based on your gut." And target this more to startups/PMs/etc looking to hire engineers but want an outside opinion on their skill alone. Most engineers at startups would probably _want_ to talk to the person they will work with; but, most founders/CEOs don't have the skill to be able to really drill into their ability to do great work on Day 1.
@tarungangwani True that. Even if founders do have the technical skills then spending umpteen hours on interviewing unqualified candidates is just a sheer waste of both time and productivity. Our experts take the interviews and with the help of detailed feedback report of each interview, startups/companies get to make good and precise hiring decision very quickly.
Greetings! Product hunters.
Engineers are the backbone of a company. True! But there is something that disturbs their overall productivity. It is nothing but devoting their productive hours on interviewing unqualified candidates.
Primarily, because of the discrepancies between the resume and actual skills of the candidate. As a result, you often end up interviewing unqualified candidates.
We have developed a solution for it. Aircto has a curated list of technical experts who would screen candidates for you. Moreover, you get comprehensive feedback report of each interview sharing in-depth insights on the skills of the candidate.
Let me give you the simple process as to how aircto works
1. Company uploads the resumes of the candidate to aircto system.
2. The proprietary algorithm then schedules the interview with relevant experts with the candidate.
3. The interview happens over a call.
4. A detailed feedback report is sent to the company for each interview.
Let us know your views in the comments. We’ll truly appreciate it. :)
Great idea. We had our friends with strong tech backgrounds help us build our early tech team. And it helps enormously if the founding team doesn't have an engineering background
Hi @aparkhills, thanks. :)
Yes. Once you get into the system and share the candidate (with a brief JD) then we will share the list of potential interviewers who could do the interview for the given job position. So, you do get to decide who you want to pick as an interviewer.
@aatifh
1. What defines a “technical expert” or a “top engineer”? (Please gimme something more than “Googler”, “ex-Googler”, “Microsoft veteran”, etc.)
2. As a software engineer who’s actually interviewed many engineering candidates (for my own startups, for startups I advise, for friends’ startups, and for companies I’ve worked for), I know that being a software engineer doesn’t immediately make you qualified to *properly* interview engineering candidates. Proper interviewing involves more than dealing with code and I’ve seen software engineers fuck up interviews so many times already. (Let’s not even mention dealing with minority candidates.) Do you understand this problem and how are you dealing with it?
Hi @jonathanmarvens, good points.
1. We have a strong internal curation process where we look at the developers' credentials in terms of their contribution to the open source projects, vast experience (anything above 7 years) in programming, have worked with more than 8-10 programming languages, Stackoverflow, Github, etc. followed by a couple of 1:1 calls with the developers before we get them on board as a "technical expert".
2. Totally agreed with you. Being a programmer myself for the last 8 years, I know for the fact that, being a great software engineer doesn't necessarily mean that one could be a great interviewer. Interviewing requires a lot of soft skills. We do a mock interview with our experts to get a complete sense on their interviewing skills. We also have a rating process where we rate interviewer in order to maintain the quality of the interviews.
Let me know if this makes sense to you. :)
As someone who has done several interviews I don't see this being great for me having an outsider interview. They know nothing of the culture of that business.
Hi @nickprkins, makes sense. Aircto's interviews are technical interviews. Our experts never gauge for the candidate's cultural fit for the company because every business has their own culture. Though, we do vet for the passion for programming apart from the technical skills of the candidate.
Hi @brucebolton,
Good question. Scheduling is handled by our system. So, while uploading the resume of the candidate (with a brief JD) you can decide the turn-around time for the interview with your preferred date/time. We have 2 methods:
1. Priority Interviews: The interviews are conducted within 24-36 hours.
2. Standard Interviews: The interviews are conducted within 3-5 days.
Let me know if you have any more questions related to this.
Cool concept... and could be quite useful, but I'd recommend redoing the audio track of the video with a person that is accent neutral, she is hard to understand quite a few times and this takes away from what you are trying to do.
[I'm foreign myself so I understand and value diversity in case it's not clear from my comment but in sales you have to remove the barriers sadly... ]
@akshayibanez great idea! To those concerned that candidates will be turned off when they discover the interview is being conducted by a 3rd party, I think honesty is the best policy. The CEO / hiring manager could explain they don't have a technical background or have had trouble evaluating tech ability in the past. I'd be way cooler with that than discovering the Aircto doesn't actually work for the company.
If I completely bomb an interview with company x I know I'm done with company x. But that's it. If I completely bomb an interview with aircto, it's on my record for every company that uses you. So I closed the door on a lot of potential companies with one bad interview. I would never take that risk...
@bulleitandcoke Possibly. But if a candidate is technically bad for a specific job then he is more likely going to be a bad fit for other companies as well (at least for some time till he improves his technical skills). With our interview data, we have found that 68% of the candidates are bad fits. And that's the whole point, why waste company's time if he is anyway not going to pass the technical round successfully. :)
@aatifh I'm talking from the candidate point of you. Why would I agree to interview with you, knowing that one bad interview, blocks me from future opportunities. I'd just pass on that particular opportunity. And BTW. I think not letting candidates know that they are interviewing with a third party that is going to host their data, and possibly share it with other future opportunities, is unethical. You should think about that.
Hi @bulleitandcoke, we leave that decision to the company whether they want to bring Aircto into the scene or not. More importantly, we're not sharing any data without anyone's consent. Be it companies or candidates. Also, fresh interviews can always be conducted with the candidate for future companies since the job requirements often changes.
Btw, we have done over 600 interviews and have never encountered any issues like this so far. :)
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