Interview fatigue is real. Even a seasoned hiring manager gets a little discomposed when a calendar alert shows up with the subject “Interview with ….”.
This is because interviews get repetitive after a point. Managers in high-growth companies easily do 100+ interviews in a year. Interviews become mechanical, more of a ritual. They become labeled as an overhead that you cannot avoid or outsource to someone else.
To manage the boredom, interviewers even ask for scheduling not more than 1 interview a day so that their energy is not sucked.
Is there a way out of this problem?
These are the following things that helped me to turn interviews into activities that become a refreshing break from my day-to-day routine.
1. Joint problem-solving – I am generally curious and try to understand things around me. Once, when waiting at an intersection, I wondered what would be the algorithm for changing traffic lights and the kind of configuration that a policeman needs to operate effectively in different scenarios (peak, non-peak, emergency vehicles, etc). When I scroll through the youtube home page feed, I ask myself how 100 odd videos are selected amongst billions of videos and sorted. I get questions like how will Google maps make money? And many more….
Instead of solving these questions myself, I note them down and discuss them with the candidates. This makes interviews interesting
2. Industry understanding – I get curious about the industry/domain the candidate comes from and use the opportunity to learn about the domain, cross-question ideas that don’t fit my worldview and learn from it.
3. Opinion or biases? – I read through the candidate’s resume and ask myself – what kind of opinion I might have on the candidates and their background. Even small biases like ‘no startup experience, so he/she can’t hustle’ can be broken when discussing deeper with the candidates.
The above three techniques have helped me turn a ritual into a learning experience.
What are other methods you have used/seen to make interviewing worthwhile?
