Everyone has exactly the same process, with the exception of interns. Interns have an abbreviated interview (shorthand: we switch from assessing aptitude to assessing enthusiasm), and any time one came back looking for a full time job, they got fast-tracked. I'm not saying that was the best policy (it did keep us from collecting some extra data), but by the end of an internship you had a really good idea that you wanted to work with someone.
The lede I buried in this post is that we hired more-or-less resume-blind. I had final call on every hire and went through some effort not to look at resumes. On our first-calls, I'd ask some questions that would give me background hints about candidates, but that was primarily to tune my spiel (I didn't want to explain blind SQL injection to someone who'd spent 3 years as a pentester already, for instance).
If I had it to do over again at Matasano, I'd have done it formally resume-blind. Only Dina would have had access to resumes, and interviewers would be forbidden to ask resume questions. The process would have worked better if resumes were firewalled out completely.
There was no culture fit score; in fact, if you gave subjective feedback ("passion", "confidence", "work ethic") your feedback was likely to be discounted. We were proud of the culture diversity we managed to scrounge out of our candidate pool; to have team members with kids who needed to keep strict hours, and team members who'd roll in at 11 and still be there at 8 working on a pet problem. We had drinkers and non drinkers, college students and people with 15+ years of dev experience.
You could get booted from the process for being overtly an asshole (I, for instance, might not get hired), but that happened very rarely and with crystalline clarity.
It's interesting that you make an effort to not read resumes. Do you explain that to people you interview during the first call? The reason I ask is that, if a hiring manager asked me things that are already written on my resume (e.g. what did you study in college?), I would definitely be annoyed, as my default expectation is that they should read the resume before the interview.
Don't get me wrong, I understand and agree with your reasoning. I'm just curious how transparent it is to the other side.
We weren't super transparent about it, but we tried really hard in a lot of other ways to take hiring seriously as a customer service problem, so maybe we came out ahead anyways.
The way we do it now, the initial call person reads your resume, but we categorically do not reject based on the initial call (or the subsequent tech phone interview(s)). So, we get the advantage of being able to talk to someone about their experience and helping them make a plan to get hired, but also the advantage that our process is actually resume-blind.
this is true and at many companies the hiring process is so broken, the interviewer might have only an hour or less heads up that they will be interviewing someone. i have done that maybe twice, and since then i refuse tomdo interviews on candidates without more prep time.
on the reverse of that, i have sometimes avoided topics that the candidate was familiar with because i didnt see relevant experience on a resume. that was a major miss, and ive tried to avoid using resumes for shaping the interview topics since.. i see the resume now as more of a signal of what the person is interested in (since most of us carve huge swaths of our experiences out, and tailor them for the job we apply to anyways).
When I was at EA, I would get an email saying I had to interview someone that afternoon, here's their resume, and here's the title they're interviewing for. It was ridiculous.
The lede I buried in this post is that we hired more-or-less resume-blind. I had final call on every hire and went through some effort not to look at resumes. On our first-calls, I'd ask some questions that would give me background hints about candidates, but that was primarily to tune my spiel (I didn't want to explain blind SQL injection to someone who'd spent 3 years as a pentester already, for instance).
If I had it to do over again at Matasano, I'd have done it formally resume-blind. Only Dina would have had access to resumes, and interviewers would be forbidden to ask resume questions. The process would have worked better if resumes were firewalled out completely.
There was no culture fit score; in fact, if you gave subjective feedback ("passion", "confidence", "work ethic") your feedback was likely to be discounted. We were proud of the culture diversity we managed to scrounge out of our candidate pool; to have team members with kids who needed to keep strict hours, and team members who'd roll in at 11 and still be there at 8 working on a pet problem. We had drinkers and non drinkers, college students and people with 15+ years of dev experience.
You could get booted from the process for being overtly an asshole (I, for instance, might not get hired), but that happened very rarely and with crystalline clarity.