Interviews have always seemed a somewhat unreliable means of assessing someone’s skills and capabilities, but new research from North Carolina State University shows just how ineffective they are.  The research, which explored the technical interviews commonly used for software engineering positions, finds that rather than testing the competence of the individual, they often end up testing nothing but the performance anxiety the individual may or may not have.

“Technical interviews are feared and hated in the industry, and it turns out that these interview techniques may also be hurting the industry’s ability to find and hire skilled software engineers,” the researchers explain. “Our study suggests that a lot of well-qualified job candidates are being eliminated because they’re not used to working on a whiteboard in front of an audience.”

Technical interviewing

In software engineering, technical interviews are designed to present candidates with a problem to solve that typically requires thNem to write some code on a whiteboard, whilst explaining their working as they go to the interviewer.

It’s a process that many in the industry feel is flawed, so the researchers set out to try and find empirical evidence to test that hypothesis.  The researchers did so by conducting technical interviews on nearly 50 computer science students, half of whom were given a conventional technical interview, whilst the other half were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room, with no explanations required regarding their solution.

The performance of each candidate was measured according to both the accuracy and efficiency of their solution.  In other words, would the code work, and would it do so whilst using an efficient amount of computing resources.

“People who took the traditional interview performed half as well as people that were able to interview in private,” the researchers say. “In short, the findings suggest that companies are missing out on really good programmers because those programmers aren’t good at writing on a whiteboard and explaining their work out loud while coding.”

Non-inclusive

As well as not being a particularly effective method of testing one’s abilities, the technical interviews also appeared to exclude certain job candidates.

“For example, interviewers may give easier problems to candidates they prefer,” the researchers explain. “But the format may also serve as a barrier to entire classes of candidates. For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed.”

The highly specific nature of the interview process can also result in many candidates spending months training specifically for them

What’s more, the specific nature of the technical interview process means that many job candidates try to spend weeks or months training specifically for the technical interview, rather than for the actual job they’d be doing.

“The technical interview process gives people with industry connections an advantage,” the researchers conclude. “But it gives a particularly large advantage to people who can afford to take the time to focus solely on preparing for an interview process that has very little to do with the nature of the work itself.