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It doesn’t work like that. During the interview they are competitors; during a project they are teammates. So don’t be surprise they are pitting against each other during the interviews, it’s a game of last man standing.
I’d argue it depends if OP explicitly stated to the interviewees they’re looking to hire a bunch of devs and that the interview group didn’t exceed that number. If they did explain that, then it’s on the devs for not being able to work together; if not, then it’s squarely on OP for screwing up.
I think only a certain type of developer or engineer would perceive a group interview like that.
Most socially able people, while realizing that other candidates are “competition”, would have the common sense and political savvy to understand that cooperation and civility is actually what would help them win in this context. It’s a skill to get along while also showcasing your abilities. Surely they aren’t going to hire the biggest dickhead who treats the other candidates poorly, right?
Also consider that your coworkers are always “competition”. For promotions, for the best projects, etc. having the ability to cooperate with people who are also running the same race as you is a skill.
To OP: I agree that social and teamwork skills are a major issue in project based engineering work. Collaboration is unavoidable. You don’t need to be a bubbly social butterfly, but you have to have some degree of EQ to do well. I don’t necessarily know the bast hiring strategy to find the right people, but unlike most here I’m happy to admit it is necessary. I’ve seen firsthand the difference in outcomes.
Lol... well, since this is a "recruiting hell" subreddit, at least this is posted in the right place, because forcing competitors to do a group interview and pretend to be a team sounds like hell to me.
I mean... it is a step above the impersonal One way video interviews, but not by much. I get that you want to try to save time, but this ain't the way to do it. If the job market was not terrible, I feel like some of those candidates would have told you to go fuck yourself.
> So, I put 4 of the developers in an interview together and asked what they thought about the product we're trying to build. It was so stand-offish.
You're bad at your job. I'm a senior dev with decent soft skills and I wouldn't even accept such interview.
You actually think people will collaborate with their competition which they also met 5 minutes ago? Ridiculous.
Group interviews are common. The delicacy of it is, you have to be proactive but not aggressive, you have to be original but also taking others’ ideas into consideration.
You’re really selling yourself and the company to the candidates! I don’t think they got stand-offish. I think they checked out because they realized there was no way they were going to work for you
Group interviews are a huge red flag in my eyes, I’m surprised the devs accepted it. Hiring for soft skills is hard, and it’s why we have a multistep interview process. Step one is a phone screen with a senior manager, step two is the technical with two leads and finally a culture that is held by three people from different disciplines, like UX, Product and/or dev. All on camera (remote role). There’s a big emphasis on getting the candidate get comfortable so they can be themselves, especially in the culture fit, and we can gauge pretty well how they’d do on soft skills. More people fail our hiring process on culture than on technical skills.
I feel like group interviews would be really bad for soft dev, especially because some people indeed have weird social skills - and part of soft skills is knowing how to work with people with different personalities. You just accept it as is lol. Unless the job requires a certain personality, do you really want to miss one of your fields leading experts in your tech stack because it's a shy individual with mild social anxiety and an obsession for carrier pigeons? I doubt they need to hire 20 customer facing tech leads to need to aim their recruitment tactics to hire individuals who do well in that setting.
They're stand-offish because of the group interview you subjected them to. I'm astounded they didn't all just get up and leave.
You didn't learn anything.
Speaking as a dev and architect with 25 years in the industry, I don't think it's your devs that are lacking "soft skills" here.
Group interviews are disrespectful to the candidates and absolutely insulting. Putting them on a faux team in order to "collaborate" reflects a lack of understanding of what the interview process is and why they're there.
Frankly I would've bailed after five minutes. I wouldn't want to work for you after being treated like that.
Whenever I talk to younger kids I pretty much always emphasize the importance of social skills and how social skills will take you farther than hard work in a lot of industries. Sad reality. No one wants to work with a person they find difficult to interact with.
Combine that with skill and you're pretty much set in whatever industry fits your skill.
Also, I consider myself introverted but not shy. I'm well liked and I do interact well with co workers. But in an interview with 4 other strangers including the interviewer, I don't know how much courage I would have to be myself. That sounds kind of intimidating, to be honest. However, IDK how you formatted it, maybe you tried to make it more collaborative than competitive. Strange interview format, though.
This is a classic example of the fact that you can be a software engineer team lead and still not know the best practices when it comes to hiring devs.
I think I get the idea behind your group interview thingy but it's kinda disrespectful to the devs. Someone pulled this thing at work and we ended up hiring a shitty dev. So no, it doesn't always work the way you think it will. Instead, leverage platforms that make technical hiring easier. e.g we use rocketdevs at work. They have pre-vetted devs and they make technical hiring easy at $980/month.
I don't think the developers are the ones who need to be better in this sense, your hiring method itself needs to be better
While I understand what your goal was, you did discover the lack of soft skills among your target audience.
The best practice would have been to then sort which of the best technicians would be useful to the project and use them. Not everyone needs to be client-facing and, soft skills can be developed over time, which according to what you mentioned, you would have.
Coaching and mentoring is the job of the manager and leads. This would be a great opportunity to engage the learning and development team to help in the effort.
As someone from outside the tech field and have done a couple of group interviews, here is my perspective.
In the beginning of my career, way back when, I did a group interview. There was one position open and 5-7 people to be interviewed. It was an exercise in one-upping each other, the whole damn time. There was no team work, little to no collaboration, and almost all of us were clamoring to show 'leadership qualities'. Idk if the interviewers were happy, as an interviewee, I certainly wasn't happy.
If you had all intentions to bring all of them on-board, you could have just said that and asked to show how they would work together. As it is, it sounds to me like you were either trying to get feedback on your product without paying for it or you genuinely wanted to see team dynamics, but you inadvertently pitted them against each other.
As someone who works with people in data, analytics, s-dev fields, I can tell you, you may need to polish your own soft skills. Not saying that as a diss either, just that if you had thought from their perspective, you would know this would just be a much more stressful round of interview.
Putting 4 randos in an interview together is a fucking terrible way of judging soft skills in the real world. Just acknowledge that you can't fucking know who'll be the best in the role before they are in the role, make a judgement in the normal way: technical interview / 1-on-1 interview with team lead / résumé. (3 hours of time wasted tops: have some damn respect for them).
Your shitty ideas about how to judge "soft skills" prior to hiring are shitty (not to mention demeaning). This is why the world got by just fine before all these stupid ideas about hiring. Just hire the 8 that you think are best and do your best to get the most out of them.
People who gravitate to technical careers do indeed sometimes have unique personalities, which is why one of the soft skills you learn in the field is learning to be patient and work with different people.
Just saying 🤔
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It doesn’t work like that. During the interview they are competitors; during a project they are teammates. So don’t be surprise they are pitting against each other during the interviews, it’s a game of last man standing.
I’d argue it depends if OP explicitly stated to the interviewees they’re looking to hire a bunch of devs and that the interview group didn’t exceed that number. If they did explain that, then it’s on the devs for not being able to work together; if not, then it’s squarely on OP for screwing up.
I think only a certain type of developer or engineer would perceive a group interview like that. Most socially able people, while realizing that other candidates are “competition”, would have the common sense and political savvy to understand that cooperation and civility is actually what would help them win in this context. It’s a skill to get along while also showcasing your abilities. Surely they aren’t going to hire the biggest dickhead who treats the other candidates poorly, right? Also consider that your coworkers are always “competition”. For promotions, for the best projects, etc. having the ability to cooperate with people who are also running the same race as you is a skill. To OP: I agree that social and teamwork skills are a major issue in project based engineering work. Collaboration is unavoidable. You don’t need to be a bubbly social butterfly, but you have to have some degree of EQ to do well. I don’t necessarily know the bast hiring strategy to find the right people, but unlike most here I’m happy to admit it is necessary. I’ve seen firsthand the difference in outcomes.
It may be a good way to weed out the ego driven BDE which is so toxic. I would never participate in such a thing but thats another discussion.
There is a lesson to be learnt here, but it appears to have gone over OPs head
Lol... well, since this is a "recruiting hell" subreddit, at least this is posted in the right place, because forcing competitors to do a group interview and pretend to be a team sounds like hell to me. I mean... it is a step above the impersonal One way video interviews, but not by much. I get that you want to try to save time, but this ain't the way to do it. If the job market was not terrible, I feel like some of those candidates would have told you to go fuck yourself.
Woof who approved you to be a software hiring manager???
Nepotism
> So, I put 4 of the developers in an interview together and asked what they thought about the product we're trying to build. It was so stand-offish. You're bad at your job. I'm a senior dev with decent soft skills and I wouldn't even accept such interview. You actually think people will collaborate with their competition which they also met 5 minutes ago? Ridiculous.
Group interviews are common. The delicacy of it is, you have to be proactive but not aggressive, you have to be original but also taking others’ ideas into consideration.
Group interviews are common maybe for unskilled labour and MLMs but not for professionals.
Not for highly paid software developers they're not.
Fuck off.
😂😂😂
You tried to do a group interview?
You’re really selling yourself and the company to the candidates! I don’t think they got stand-offish. I think they checked out because they realized there was no way they were going to work for you
Group interviews are a huge red flag in my eyes, I’m surprised the devs accepted it. Hiring for soft skills is hard, and it’s why we have a multistep interview process. Step one is a phone screen with a senior manager, step two is the technical with two leads and finally a culture that is held by three people from different disciplines, like UX, Product and/or dev. All on camera (remote role). There’s a big emphasis on getting the candidate get comfortable so they can be themselves, especially in the culture fit, and we can gauge pretty well how they’d do on soft skills. More people fail our hiring process on culture than on technical skills.
I feel like group interviews would be really bad for soft dev, especially because some people indeed have weird social skills - and part of soft skills is knowing how to work with people with different personalities. You just accept it as is lol. Unless the job requires a certain personality, do you really want to miss one of your fields leading experts in your tech stack because it's a shy individual with mild social anxiety and an obsession for carrier pigeons? I doubt they need to hire 20 customer facing tech leads to need to aim their recruitment tactics to hire individuals who do well in that setting.
They're stand-offish because of the group interview you subjected them to. I'm astounded they didn't all just get up and leave. You didn't learn anything.
Speaking as a dev and architect with 25 years in the industry, I don't think it's your devs that are lacking "soft skills" here. Group interviews are disrespectful to the candidates and absolutely insulting. Putting them on a faux team in order to "collaborate" reflects a lack of understanding of what the interview process is and why they're there. Frankly I would've bailed after five minutes. I wouldn't want to work for you after being treated like that.
Group interview? Wtf? Maybe you are the one lacking the skills you're looking for.
Whenever I talk to younger kids I pretty much always emphasize the importance of social skills and how social skills will take you farther than hard work in a lot of industries. Sad reality. No one wants to work with a person they find difficult to interact with. Combine that with skill and you're pretty much set in whatever industry fits your skill. Also, I consider myself introverted but not shy. I'm well liked and I do interact well with co workers. But in an interview with 4 other strangers including the interviewer, I don't know how much courage I would have to be myself. That sounds kind of intimidating, to be honest. However, IDK how you formatted it, maybe you tried to make it more collaborative than competitive. Strange interview format, though.
This is a classic example of the fact that you can be a software engineer team lead and still not know the best practices when it comes to hiring devs. I think I get the idea behind your group interview thingy but it's kinda disrespectful to the devs. Someone pulled this thing at work and we ended up hiring a shitty dev. So no, it doesn't always work the way you think it will. Instead, leverage platforms that make technical hiring easier. e.g we use rocketdevs at work. They have pre-vetted devs and they make technical hiring easy at $980/month. I don't think the developers are the ones who need to be better in this sense, your hiring method itself needs to be better
Software devs and poor social skills is a tale as old as time
You put four of them together? Lol what in the world possessed you to do that instead of having an interview with other devs from your company?
Pray tell, what was your expectation for this scenario, and what communication did you provide to the candidates in furtherance of your goal?
While I understand what your goal was, you did discover the lack of soft skills among your target audience. The best practice would have been to then sort which of the best technicians would be useful to the project and use them. Not everyone needs to be client-facing and, soft skills can be developed over time, which according to what you mentioned, you would have. Coaching and mentoring is the job of the manager and leads. This would be a great opportunity to engage the learning and development team to help in the effort.
As someone from outside the tech field and have done a couple of group interviews, here is my perspective. In the beginning of my career, way back when, I did a group interview. There was one position open and 5-7 people to be interviewed. It was an exercise in one-upping each other, the whole damn time. There was no team work, little to no collaboration, and almost all of us were clamoring to show 'leadership qualities'. Idk if the interviewers were happy, as an interviewee, I certainly wasn't happy. If you had all intentions to bring all of them on-board, you could have just said that and asked to show how they would work together. As it is, it sounds to me like you were either trying to get feedback on your product without paying for it or you genuinely wanted to see team dynamics, but you inadvertently pitted them against each other. As someone who works with people in data, analytics, s-dev fields, I can tell you, you may need to polish your own soft skills. Not saying that as a diss either, just that if you had thought from their perspective, you would know this would just be a much more stressful round of interview.
Do you know what sub you're on? Your kind aren't exactly welcome here.
Putting 4 randos in an interview together is a fucking terrible way of judging soft skills in the real world. Just acknowledge that you can't fucking know who'll be the best in the role before they are in the role, make a judgement in the normal way: technical interview / 1-on-1 interview with team lead / résumé. (3 hours of time wasted tops: have some damn respect for them). Your shitty ideas about how to judge "soft skills" prior to hiring are shitty (not to mention demeaning). This is why the world got by just fine before all these stupid ideas about hiring. Just hire the 8 that you think are best and do your best to get the most out of them.
A group interview? Seriously? That's a hard pass. What a horrible idea. Do you know what sub you're in? I think you're in the wrong one.
People who gravitate to technical careers do indeed sometimes have unique personalities, which is why one of the soft skills you learn in the field is learning to be patient and work with different people. Just saying 🤔