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Why Phone Screens Matter
AI Notes
The loud, exasperated companion to Five Essential Phone Screen
Questions, written the same week. An SDE-2 candidate with fifteen
years of C++ on Unix and Windows is flown out, hotel'd, walked through
five interviews, and voted unanimously no-hire after two phone
screeners had said yes. Steve reproduces his interview feedback nearly
verbatim. The candidate has no Linux experience, can't remember
man, has never encountered regular expressions, has never
heard the word graph in a CS sense (even after Steve draws
one), can't compute the depth of a binary tree without help, thinks
the inverse of 2N is sqrt(n), eventually
identifies "recursion" as a magic word for tree traversal but can't
describe what it does. Eleven items. None of it needed a whiteboard.
None of it needed an on-site. The piece indicts the pipeline, not the
candidate: the pipeline silently treated fifteen years of C++ as proof
of basics it never established.
The ask is small and practical. Use the cheapest stage of the funnel — a twenty-minute phone call with a deliberate, fixed set of basics — to screen basics. The advice is quaint in 2026 (every shop now has a phone-screen rubric) but the observation underneath it holds: when a loop routinely seats candidates who should never have got past stage one, the loop is the bug, not the candidates. In the comments thread, engineers swap their own phone-screen anxieties and training gaps.
Related listings
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2005
Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
The companion methodology piece. Why Phone Screens Matter is the diagnosis; the Five Essential Questions are the prescription. The two are usually read together.
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2005
The Miracle Interview
Same loop shape — fail every question for twenty straight minutes — but with a reversal that this candidate doesn't get to make. The two essays sit together as the unhappy and happy versions of the same setup.
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2008
Get That Job at Google
Three years and one employer later, Steve writes the same advice from the other side of the table. The Amazon version is about what to screen for; the Google version is about how to walk into the screen.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 2 more
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Now I'm curious to see what the phone screen feedback was like.
But you've hit on a strong point here: SDE training needs to include training on how to identify and select quality SDEs.
We have a limited amount of recruiting training and process documentation. But it's all very high level, and none of it is geared towards technical interviewing.
Combined with our disposition for one-on-one interviews, and our systemic lack of pre-interview strategizing, and you end up with engineers being plopped down in rooms, or on phones, with no clue about how to run an interview, good kinds of questions to ask, or even what they're looking for.
We carp on people for not doing adequate phone screening, but I'd maintain that phone screens are the hardest part of the interview process, and that it's hard to run one well unless you've got extensive in-person interviewing experience. Phone screens flow differently, and you have to work harder to corral the candidate.
What we really need is a strong progression of interviewing skills training:
Lecture/training materials to introduce the interview process, guide engineers on technical skills assessment, and set in their minds what our bars are for the various SDE positions.
Pair in-person interviewing, with an experienced interviewer (bar raiser?).
Solo in-person interviewing (although my personal opinion is that we should abolish this entirely).
Pair/team phone screens (more of a leader/monitor type situation, though).
Solo phone screens.
I guess my point is that we shouldn't be having green SDEs be doing phone screens here.
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I just recently brought in a candidate like this... (it was my 2nd phone screen so I think I deserve some slack :) )...
I was trying hard to do the right thing in the phone screen, I even had this particular blog open on my laptop at the time! I'd like like to echo that I think there needs to be some training associated with this process... The last two times I've phone screened I felt like I'm made major mistakes... The first one didn't go well, and I'm confident not bringing him in was the right move, it was stressful... And the second one bombed the loop.
I'd stress that, for anyone new to phone screens to really carefully prepare for it, and read all the material on the intranet and in this blog really carefully...
My first reaction reading this is that the person on the phone screen isn't the same as the one who flew in. Any guesses on what the rate of this happening is?
— Albert W · January 19, 2005 10:55 PM
I'm amazed at how many questions he managed to bomb in only 20 minutes. My experience is that after a candidate bombs several questions in a row, I find it very hard to cut a line off to ask something new without sounding like I've made up my mind. Any key phrases to keep things moving along (and avoiding letting the candidate waste both our time digging a hole)?
— Ami F · January 18, 2005 04:59 AM
Doesn't seem surprising. Don't most people just suck at most things?
I've seen cases here where a hiring manager will bring in a sub-par candidate just because the manager thought the team needed that body that badly.
I'm not sure I want to work at a company that does that kind of thing.
— Andrew W · January 19, 2005 11:39 PM