Knowledge Day - Student Recruiting

    Many, even medium-sized companies, often do not mind to engage in the cultivation of specialists from scratch. The question is how to conduct the selection. With proper advertising in the surrounding universities and a good reputation of the company, there may be a lot of people who want to. And conducting a traditional interview aimed at testing practical skills, it is not always possible to correctly assess the main qualities that you want to get from the intern - the ability to learn and the desire to work.

    Not so long ago, in our company, we opened three vacancies for students and instructed me to engage in the selection of candidates. At the dawn of my career, I myself had the opportunity to go through a contest organized by one of the American offices for students on the vacancies of their Russian office. According to a similar scheme, I decided to act.

    I want to share with the habrasociety the experience of conducting an interview and a list of questions. Freshly accepted employees are still embarrassed to criticize the old-timers, I hope to get some objections, or alternative ideas on the selection mechanism here.

    Tasks


    So, the two main goals that we wanted to achieve by selecting students:
    • Find out if a person can effectively combine work and study
    • Understand whether a person knows how to learn and understand what has been learned.
    The ability to apply knowledge in practice is what a job in a company should already teach.

    First iteration


    The entire selection process revolves around the same list of questions. The questions should be complex, perhaps even those that students have never encountered before. There should be many questions. I don’t remember exactly how much was offered to me personally, but for our selection, together, we were able to compose 90 questions, divided into 9 categories. Questions are not designed for everyone to know by heart. But if you dig around, google, read, then, having understood, you can write a short answer without any problems. Of all the options, I sought to select useful questions, the search for answers to which would bring useful knowledge to students.

    At the first stage, students were asked to answer everything they could by sending an answer the next day.

    At this stage, the lazy ones dropped out, those who simply decided to try, but were not ready to perform complex tasks. The time limit serves two purposes - to understand who is responsible for the deadlines, and in a sense to get a slice of the student’s current knowledge. Yes, many already at this stage google, copy-paste from msdn, but this is also good.

    Second iteration


    After checking and commenting on the answers, at the second stage, students were asked to answer all, including those that were not answered earlier, and those for which we considered the answers incorrect or incomplete. The duration of the second stage is two weeks.

    So, by the end of the second stage, I had the answers of only 10 people. We evaluated the final answers on a four-point scale: not true / incomplete / counted / true. After that, we could compare each student with each according to the chess system: comparing the answers to each of the questions in pairs, giving 2 points for a victory, one point for a draw, and zero for a loss. Points added up. Thus, the student who answered a difficult question that no one else could answer got an advantage, and too light questions or questions that no one could answer did not affect the final results.

    By comparing each with each, we received a general rating of applicants, and comparing the person’s answers in the second stage with his own answers in the first, we received an inaccurate, but characterization of learning ability and willingness to work.

    Iteration three


    Having received a numerical assessment, it became clear to us that a group of five leaders has a significant margin from the rest of the applicants in all respects. It was these five people, it was decided to invite for an interview.

    After all the work done, conducting an interview is very simple. We discussed issues to find out if the candidate under study understood. They asked what questions they liked, which they didn’t, and what they wanted to hear the answer to.

    The main purpose of a personal interview is to understand how the help of friends influenced the results.

    Total


    I still happily recall the days of work in my first company. And I hope to assemble an equally strong team under the current roof.

    According to the results of the interview, we revealed two who we wanted to take and grab for work. We have no doubt that they will become excellent members of our team.

    If anyone is interested, then with general permission a list of questions is published here . There, of course, not all questions are ideal, many do not quite serve the declared goals and are needed only for the masses.

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