Interview this guy



  • email from HR guy from Sunday: "Hey Snoofle, interview this guy " with no resume attached; just a phone number and time to call today

    Me: For which role (BA, QA, Developer)? At what level (senior/junior/trainee)?

    HRG: Unknown, just talk to him and see if he's any good

    Seriously?




  • @snoofle said:

    Me: For which role (HR, BA, QA, Developer)? At what level (senior/junior/trainee)?

    Does that look reasonable?



  •  Just wing it.

    HR: "I thought due diligence meant you do the diligence."



  • @snoofle said:

    HRG: Unknown, just talk to him and see if he's any good
     

    Post-interview:

    HRG: is he any good?

    You: Unknown.

    Surely they have a job vacancy they can throw in your direction.

    Perhaps they're just after an insight into his behaviour and attitude, rather than technical criteria, but I would have expected those details at least to come your way. What the hell is he going to think when you're sitting in the interview and not asking any questions about the position he's applied for, or if you actually let slip "tell me about this job you think you're going for"...

    Alternatively, you could play complete arsehole and tell HRG he's utterly brilliant with years of experience, then later reveal that you were referring to his matchbox-collecting skills of which you discussed at great length in the absence of any further HR criteria....



  • About 5 years ago my then line manager pulled something similar.

    LM: "We've finally got a candidate for the junior position, do you fancy helping me out with the interview?"

    ME: "Sure, let me have a copy of the CV so I can prepare a few decent questions"

    LM:  "Oh, no time for that, she's just arrived"



  • It's a trap. He's an HR plant, and they're trying to secretly find out if you're a good hiring manager.

    Ask if he likes snuff films.



  • @JimLahey said:

    LM:  "Oh, no time for that, she's just arrived"
     

    .. is the point at which you ask how much help you could provide if you're not given the chance to review/prepare - then back out.

    (or you attend the interview and spend all the time reading the CV/application and say nothing. But that's wasting the candidate's time, and it's not her fault your LM gerfucked up)



  • It's a step better than what I got. Let's go back 18 months to when my boss said they'd try to rotate me out of a system support position and get me back to full time programming. I wrote up a few things for my replacement to know about, Windows Server 2003/2008, IIS 6/7, SQL Server 2005 (I'm on-site support, they upgrade when they feel like it), ability to read and research event logs. Not a domain admin, just a mid-level person with a couple years experience in those things.

    I didn't get invited to the interview, I never got to see a resume. I got a courtesy note that my replacement had been hired and I should show him the ropes. After scouring the Google for a few minutes, I found his resume where he declared himself to be "proficient with Windows agriculture". He's also supposedly an expert in DOS, and making network shared folders. After getting here, it turns out he hadn't ever heard of cmd.exe or things like "dir" and "cd", and he "doesn't do well with typing things out like that". Also he had to be shown what a "service" is.

    For the first 6 months they said I wasn't giving him a fair shot. The second 6 months he put on a good show that he was learning, despite my protests that he was not. It's been 18 months, and they say he's been here so long it would be a waste to start over. I haven't gotten back to programming yet.



  • @Manni_reloaded said:

    After scouring the Google for a few minutes, I found his resume where he declared himself to be "proficient with Windows agriculture".

    That has something to do with server farms, right? You guys work in the Cloud?



  • @Manni_reloaded said:

    I wrote up a few things for my replacement to know about, Windows Server 2003/2008, IIS 6/7, SQL Server 2005
     

    All you need to write up is documentation showing how they're configured, their purposes and possible references to network diagrams or some relationship diagrams.

    i.e.: something that another sysadmin could read and understand from day one.

    It sounds like you've been tasked to write up a teaching guide on how to be a sysadmin, then expected to teach your replacement to do your job (but cheaper).

    The worst-case scenario is that you continue doing what you do (and bypass him) but with a pay increment since you now have added management responsibilities.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Manni_reloaded said:

    For the first 6 months they said I wasn't giving him a fair shot.
    That's true. It seems that a fair shot would have involved taking him out into the back yard and putting him out of the company's misery.



  • Heck, may as well interview me then ....


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