Why are interviews harder than the job?

In my experience, technical interviews are not really useful past the very basic "Can this candidate actually write a conditional and has the slightest clue about programming?". Ability to solve hard leetcode-like problems under time pressure in a stressful environment doesn't meaningfully translate to "will be a great contributor to the team work on the kind of problem we have".

Our best hires are nearly always coming from the network of a team member or people we contracted with and decided to hire full time.

Most of my time in interview nowadays is spent understanding what the candidate has done before, explaining to them what we do and asking open questions to see how they would approach our issues and how they link them to their experience. If it seems to fit, we hire. My country standard contract offers a fairly long probation period for new hire and we don't hesite about parting with people when it's not working after a quarter. We are very explicit about this policy.

> Our best hires are nearly always coming from the network of a team member or people we contracted with and decided to hire full time.

I love this approach.

However, at least in the USA, there are substantial costs to candidates for this approach:

- no health care while contracting (unless the candidate pays for it)

- being a contractor is a different level of risk than moving from FTE to FTE

- if the employer decides it isn't a fit, candidate has to find another contractor

Do you have any great candidates who approach you and then, finding out your approach, pass?

I find problem-solving questions always pretty good at weeding out candidates. Give them a real world problem with a fictional situation from their future job and just ask how they would tackle the problem.

> Do you have any great candidates who approach you and then, finding out your approach, pass?

We never generalised the contractors to employee thing. It's just that we hire contractors fairly often to fill in temporary needs and we generally extend offer for full time employment to the ones we would like to keep with us when we can. They generally say no because they like being contractors.

For candidate applying, I have yet to see one explicitely refuse an offer because they know we don't always keep going after the probation period. Then again, the standard probation period for engineers in my country is 3 months which can be renewed once so they would get the same offer anywhere.

But I have never seen someone being surprised when we parted after the 3 months. If someone told me they were during our offboarding meeting, I would take it as us having done something seriously wrong during our onboarding.

To be honest, we don't have that many hirings which end up not working and of them I can only remember one being due to an actual lack of skill from someone who clearly padded their resume yet managed to go through the interview. Some people needed a bit more time than others to reach the level of delivery we expect but that's ok. We don't always need rock stars, just professional who can deliver consistently and are open to learning new things. When we need specialists and don't have someone sufficently skilled internally, we contract. Working together with a specialist tends to raise the level of the team as a whole.

Most what I consider our true hiring failures have come from a mismatch between what the person expected and what the job actually is. That's why I now take time to ensure the person I'm interviewing actually has a good idea of what we are doing.