Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/mistakes-job-interviewers-make/
As a developer who started his career many years ago, I’ve been interviewed a few times now. As many who have gone through this process have surely done, following every interview I take the time to think about what happened during the interview. Among other things, I reason about what I liked and what I disliked during the process, and what my interviewer did. I think it’s very important to do this, as in the end the developer will have a better idea of the company and its culture, and whether the company met your expectations.
People usually apply for companies they know and like, but following an interview it can turn out that a given company isn’t a good fit for him or her. It’s possible that this result can be due to you, the interviewer, making a mistake or two during the interview process.
In this article I’ll run through 5 mistakes, some taken from my personal experience, that you can work to avoid to give the candidate a good impression and avoid the risk of losing a potential employee.
1. Don’t overlap appointments
In my opinion, this is one of the biggest mistakes a company can make. Apart from very small companies, the interview process is usually quite long and involves a decent amount of time, sometimes up to few months. A company I once applied for, asked me to complete a test to verify my programming skills. The test consisted of developing a working web page that used third-party APIs. The task itself wasn’t very difficult to complete but doing it perfectly (you want to show the best of you, don’t you?) required several hours. I passed this step and the company invited me to an on-site, one-hour interview.
Once there, 25 minutes after the interview started the interviewer informed me that we’d have to wrap it up in 5 minutes as there was another meeting booked for the room. Once the interview was over I was upset because I felt I had been treated disrespectfully. I had spent a decent amount of time working on their technical test and then they didn’t make adequate time for my interview. You can understand that after this experience I didn’t want to move forward with this company.
What every interviewer can learn from this story is that you shouldn’t overlap an interview with another appointment, no matter how important it is. If you do have an important meeting it’s better to reschedule the interview rather than rush through it. If the candidate feels you’re in a rush, he or she will feel that they’re not important to your company and you might lose a good candidate. You’re not the only company on the planet after all.
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