Umair Aziz

OK – so i’ve met them all – software engineers, developers, coders, geeks, gurus, script kiddies, hackers, crackers, slackers and smooth talkers. I conduct between 35 and 50 interviews every month (about 2-3 every day). That’s an average of 500 interviews every year and would equate to 3 months of straight interviewing (each interview is an hour long). This is roughly 25% of the total time I spend at work. I take interviewing very seriously. Hiring mistakes are costly and difficult to fix.

My intense interviewing schedule has nothing to do with attrition. We are fortunate enough to have customers who like our work, have confidence in our teams, capability and infrastructure and are always looking at increasing their offshore resources. This has all been possible because of the fantastic team we have and continue to build here at Creative Chaos.

I briefly mentioned our interviewing process in ‘Office Space’. In a nutshell the process involves 5 basic stages.

1) Short-listing Resumes

2) Phone screening

3) Interviewing (Minimum 3 technical interviews)

4) YES / NO decision based on scientific method.

5) If (3 Yeses); an economic decision to hire is made based on current / expected salary which results in an offer.

Candidates are short-listed by HR through keywords screening. We screen for good universities, high GPA’s, skills, competencies and good previous companies. All candidates that pass keyword screening are then briefly interviewed over the phone before getting called in for onsite interviews.

In order for us to fairly evaluate a candidate – at least 3 people must interview them. We make sure that the interviews are conducted by our best engineers. All interviews are very technical and candidates are required to write code and algorithms. At the end of the interview each interviewer fills out a simple evaluation sheet and checking off ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Yes means ‘hire’, No means ‘reject’. There is no maybe! If one is not sure, they are asked to mark ‘No’.

Evaluation sheets are submitted to HR within 30 minutes of the interview. Interviewers are not allowed to talk to other interviewers about the candidate until all 3 interviews have been conducted. This ensures fair evaluation and eliminates biases. We want to make the process as scientific as possible and want interviewers to form their own opinions about each candidate.

If there are 3 ‘Yeses’ – the candidate is accepted. One ‘No’ and the candidate is sent a regret email. There is no exception to the rule. We don’t want to waste time on candidates we are not 100% sure about.

Finding a candidate that goes through 3 technical interviews and gets an undisputed nod of approval is difficult. And just how difficult you may ask?

Here are some statistics for interviews conducted last year between May and December at Creative Chaos compiled by our diligent HR executive Sharmeen.

No. of Candidates Interviewed: 513

Total Interviews: 1300+ **

Resumes Screened (Approx): 3500+

Avg. No. of Candidates Interviewed in a month: 73

Avg. No. of Interviews conducted in a month: 190

* We started maintaining evaluation statistics and data after May 2007.

*All candidates go through 3 technical interviews. Very weak candidates are sometimes ruled out after the first or second interview by HR.

Between May and December – we interviewed 513 candidates, made an offer to 39 candidates (9%) of which 24 accepted (60%). That’s a mere 5% acceptance rate.

This low acceptance rate in no way signifies the quality of candidates. In fact if we were to relax our policy and allow offers to be made to candidates who get 2 Yeses, the acceptance rate would shoot up from 5% to 25% – 1 in 4 instead of 1 in 20. We would never do that. The business of outsourcing and software development revolves around quality and commitments. I’d rather be meticulous and spend the extra 16 hours in finding the right candidate than be relaxed and bring onboard people I’m not sure off and put my business, clients, and their projects at risk. It’s just not worth it.