Students – The Many Month Interview
Filed under: Big Company, HR, Management, Small Company
The purpose of students is recruiting for full time employees. Their work terms are their interview. At the end of the term, you will have a good idea if they would fit into your organization.
Many companies have a probationary period, but it is usually not long enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the employee. With students, you have a 4 to 18 month term. Students will leave at the end of the term unless you ask them to stay. Full timers stay at the end of the probation term unless you ask them to leave (which usually tones of paper work).
Many people say, students are cheap. I would say that this needs to be clarified. Students are a cheap way to recruit new hires, but expensive when you factor in training from your full timers. Here are some of the costs associated with hiring students:
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Resume Reading – I’ve found that marks are not necessarily the best judge of future work place performance. There have been many good people I’ve worked with who have had mediocre marks. The reason I bring up marks is that the filers offered by the schools for the employers are typically useless, resulting in a huge pile of resumes. Multiply this by the number of schools you are hiring from, then you start to see that this starts to add up.
Interviewing – The interview process for students goes much faster than full timers, but you will still need to dedicate half a day to a full day depending on the number of schools and candidates that have been selected.
Work Plan – With most students, I spend time to create a work plan for the term. This plan contains the training plan, ramp up information, and outline of their work for the term. This plan will be added as a template to the template section.
Training – People must be assigned to train this new resource, not manuals. This training (or interruptions) of your regular team members daily activities will reduce their productivity.
Salary – The salary of the student is lower than your full timers. Make sure to talk to accounting if you are in a small company as there may be government grants available to help subsidize their salary.
Now that you’ve got the student, it is important to give them real work. No one enjoys make work projects. The purpose of the student is to help determine if they are material to be a full time hire. This is best evaluated by giving them work just as if they were a regular employee.
Once the work term is over, you should have a good idea if they would make a good full time hire. When you bring this person on full time, their is much less risk and training.
Note: On the government student hiring incentives, there are many strings attached. Ensure that the accounting department doesn’t dictate that the new hires must qualify for the program. I have seen some programs structured so that a student who is in a coop program is unable to qualify as a new student hire because the qualification formula used involves number of hours worked over a period (which can be exceed by those in a coop program).
The Hiring Process
Hiring is one of the biggest challenges faced. This process I have successfully used many times. This is a macro post of the process, detailed descriptions of the individual steps may follow in future posts. It is a combination of processes from Joel Spolsky, Michael Loop, Guy Kawasaki, and coworkers of mine. The following image shows the entire process:
Gathering Inputs
Once you have your req, it is time to get the word out. Get the word out to everyone that you are hiring. Ensure that people within the company know as well. Use sources such as linkedin as well to inform your network that you are hiring. Pretty much anyone who comes to me through a referral jumps straight to interview day. If someone in my network is willing to vouch for the candidate, I’ll interview them.
Give me all the possible candidates. HR offers to pre-screen the resumes, but I prefer to receive all of them. One of the best guys I worked with had a degree in geology, what are the odds he would have made it through the HR filter? So, give me all the resumes and I’ll make my own decision.
Lets start off first with the huge pile of resumes. I create a directory which all resumes go into. I go through each resume and sort them into three buckets, {No Interview, Maybe, Interview}. Once we have all the candidates, I will review all of the Maybe’s again against the Interview pile.
If you have made it past here, congratulations, your odds are hugely increased.
Prescreen
The purpose of the prescreen is to ensure that you are able to communicate with people in the real world and have represented yourself fairly accurately on your resume. I do not perform the prescreen. HR will contact you with a script, which is usually the same for each candidate. HR does not know the answers to the script, they are simply recording the results. When HR presents me with the results, I also ask for the “soft skills” rating. I’m looking to find out if the candidate can communicate their ideas to a non-technical person. The candidate does not need to be able to explain the complexities of their thesis to HR, but should be able to boil down their thesis a 30 second description of the problem or solution.
If the candidate appears to check out ok, HR will setup the interview.
Interview Day
The interview day is a long day. Many people advocate day long interviews, but I’ve never been able to block off that much time for my team. We typically do half day interviews. I have listed the interviews in the order which I prefer to run them, but due to scheduling constraints, the ordering usually changes a bit. I try to schedule all the interviews as closely together as possible. A rule I have during interviews is that people do not discuss the interview impressions until we get together for the review meeting.
The introduction is to give the candidate a context for the company along with help on how to calibrate your answers. Listen carefully in this, I’m giving the candidate subtle hints on what I am hoping to hear. Along with the brief company bio, I’ll usually do the elevator pitch for the company.
The management interview is where I am looking to see what level of developer you are. How do you estimate, how much testing do you do on your code, etc. The goal of this is to determine if I think you can work with the myself and the team. I’ll be looking to determine what areas you will be contributing to the team and the areas we will need to work together on.
Technical interview #1 is hard. Buckle up, it will be a ride. We want to know how much you actually know. This is where you hope you have not lied on your resume. We will pick an area of your resume and drill down on it. These questions will be in an area where the interviewer has an in-depth knowledge. We are looking to:
- Gauge your knowledge range
- How you have learned in the past
- Capability of getting things done
- Is the candidate afraid of saying “I don’t know”?
- How well do they respond to criticism?
Yes, everyone is on their best behavior during an interview, but it can be surprisingly easy to coax out truth when people are challenged.
The HR interview is where we are trying to sell you on the company. HR will present our company as a great place to work. They will discuss our benefits and determine what it will take for the candidate to choose us.
Technical interview #2 is my favorite interview. This is where we allow the candidate to choose a technical area, and explain it in-depth. I love this interview because it allows me to learn about a new topic and evaluate the candidate at the same time. The purpose of this is to figure out what the candidate has accomplished before, what challenges appeared, how they overcame the challenges, and that they can explain their accomplishments with pride to us.
Now that the interview is almost done, it is time to bring in the closer. No matter if the candidate is going to be made an offer, the closer always comes in to sell. Their purpose is to close the interview and sell the candidate on the position. The closer will typically give a product demonstration and answer any final questions the candidate has.
The review meeting should happen soon after the candidate leaves. Prior to the review meeting, all participants send their interview result notes to me. During the meeting, everyone speaks about the candidate and a consensus is usually found quickly.
Selection
The group who has performed all the interviews is gather again one last time to provide input on the candidates. We will rank the candidates and setup the final interviews.
Decision and Negotiation
Many places have a member of the senior management team who reviews each new hire. This persons concern is corporate culture. This is a rubber stamp interview. They are simply their to sell the company and get a feel for how you will contribute to the company culture. After this, we will meet to get down to negotiation. Here, we will discuss salary, benefits, options, vacation,and everything else. The letter of offer is not the place to do this. The letter of offer is to confirm in writing our agreement in the meeting.
Signing Off
It is important to get your legal and HR department to move quickly. Once you have a verbal agreement with the candidate, move as quickly as possible to get the offer out. What I find successful is to ask them to wait for a few minutes after our negotiation phase. I’ll go to HR and get them to print the offer letter at that time along with the employment contacts.
It is important for hiring manager to read the employment contract as much as the candidate. Very often these are copy / pasted and contain mistakes. If there are mistakes, you will unfortunately be the one responsible for fixing them.
When the candidate comes in to sign the contracts, go over the important areas of the contract with them. Ensure that they understand what they are signing.
Second Thoughts
After communicating with a candidate only three times, it is hard to ensure that you have selected the right candidate. Most employment contracts in my region have a standard 3 month at will employment clause, where either party can terminate employment for any reason with no notice. Termination during this phase is 100 times easier than afterwords, so ensure that you evaluate the candidate to ensure you have the right person.
At the four week mark, discuss with the employees supervisor and peers to determine how the candidate is doing. Most of the time, everyone will still be in the honeymoon period, but you may see some small signals.
At the ten week mark, discuss with the employees again to determine if we have chosen the right person.
