Why you shouldn’t be stressed in a job interview.

In the past couple of years, a part of my technical leadership-role in different companies was to participate in or run interviews for open various positions. These were mainly technical or tech-related roles, such as software engineers, infrastructure engineers, UX/UI designers or product owners. During all these sessions, I always stumbled upon one fact, that many candidates mentioned positively surprised during the interview and that I experienced by myself many times.

Why do job interviews happen so often in an uncomfortable atmosphere?

You have probably experienced a related situation by yourself:

• Have you been in a room or call with interviewers, where you have the feeling to attend a funeral? No smiling, no friendly words, just a question-and-answer game for an hour or two, making you feel like a supplicant.
• Did you feel like you were in an interrogation? Or in an exam, tested on your skills, treated like a cheater instead of a professional?
• Have you spend ages in long interview marathons with a handful or more stages (often generously called “assessment center”), where you got to know the whole company without knowing if all your effort will pay off at the end?
• Did you (as a software engineer) particiate in coding tests, where you were asked about writing down some fancy algorithms in front of other people, who, unlike you, had the chance to prepare extensively? Wondering if they ever use these algorithms in daily business?

The list of experiences like these could be continued. The sad truth is: it is surprisingly common to observe such a behavior on the side of the interviewing person(s), with the unspoken message: I am in control, you are only the candidate.

I am somehow not convinced if that is really a good way of hiring the most valuable “capital” of a company…

Why recruiting is about equality

Starting at OnlineDoctor, I began to introduce a different way of recruiting for technical roles. I defined three main goals for the hiring process (besides the obvious fact that I’d like to hire a person for the role):

• After the first interview, the candidate should know all important information about the company and I should have gotten a feel wether the person is a good fit for us – personally and technically.
• The interview atmosphere should be relaxed. Just like meeting for a cup of coffee. Because that reveals how people really are. When they are stressed, they pretend to be someone they are not, and it’s probably the worst start into a new job you can imagine.
• At OnlineDoctor, we work by trusting our employees. Therefore trust is what I want to build: make it clear for the candidate how the hiring process will look like, ensure fast feedback loops, openness and transparency about the work at OnlineDoctor, including challenges and problems we are facing.

Looking at these three bullet points, it becomes obvious that there is (or at least should be) an equal interest on both sides for a relaxed, informative and transparent chat about the job, the company and the individual expectations. The next question was, how do I get there. Well, it was remarkable easy. Instead of preparing loads of questions and topics upfront, just to recognize during the interview that following the storybook doesn’t feel right and hinders a natural conversation.

I simply started to have a chat. One of those chats you have with someone you meet on the street. Who are you, what are you looking for, and hey, that’s how we work at OnlineDoctor, wouldn’t it be cool to discuss this open position a little bit more in detail?

As soon as the mood in the interview is down to this pragmatic “let’s just talk” attitude, the conversation feels easy, natural – and gives both sides a feeling of psychological safety, transparency and understanding, if we want to work with each other. And that’s the only thing we want to find out, right?

In the Product & Tech department, we have an overseeable interview process with three stages. While the last stage is only a non-technical chat and meetup with one of the founders and/or the rest of the team, only the first two interviews are more about technologies and processes, projects and the OnlineDoctor healthtech platform. Only two? Yes, that’s right. Two interviews, three hours. If we don’t know after three hours if the candidate is a fit for us, why should we find out in another three hours?

The tech interview structure at OnlineDoctor

We have gained some experience over the last years with our interview structure, acknowledged by the feedback of some candidates.

The first interview is (as I already described above) mainly about getting to know each other. It is the storefront of OnlineDoctor and my chance to present the company in a transparent and convincing way to the candidate. For the candidate, it is the opportunity to demonstrate that they will be a good fit for our team and our culture.

The second interview (in most cases just a handful of days later) is a so-called deep dive interview. For software engineers that means, that they spend two hours with two software engineers of OnlineDoctor, where they give the candidate an overview of our tech stack, based on a small example project that combines the typical technical setup we use. It is a chat about what we are currently working on, about the architecture approach we decided to use, about challenges we are facing. There is no right or wrong, it is not a test and the candidate writes only some lines of code. Does that make it easy to become part of the team? I would say not at all. It is not easier or harder, it is fairer. Because we imitate a real day at OnlineDoctor, and not an exam situation, that hardly represents the daily life in a company. Have you ever written code under time pressure (I’m talking about minutes, not hours)? The argument that this is daily life for a software engineer is a bummer – and obviously something completely wrong with the company culture.

A recent feedback from a candidate was that the person really appreciated the fact that we give deep insights into the daily work as software engineer at OnlineDoctor during an interview. This is what I mean when talking about transparency, and this is how decisions should be made: get all the data and information you can get (the good ones, but also the negative/challenging/hidden ones) and you will be able to make a decision. As a candidate, don’t forget that you own 50% of the interest to close the deal. As a recruiter, leave your ego at the door. You are serving the company and the team and candidates shouldn’t be afraid of you. 👻

Happy recruiting!