I just did an interview where the company used “HireVue” (https://www.hirevue.com/) . . . one of those hiring tools where you do an interview but are recording video answers instead of talking to a person.
I was avoiding it like crazy thinking it was so impersonal and just didn’t feel real. But once I did it I actually really liked it and wish all the first interviews worked this way.
Here are a few reasons I liked it:
1) They present you with a question and you can look at it and think about it as long as you want. There is no awkward pause after someone asks you the question. You can read it as many times as you want to really form your thoughts.
2) Once you click record, you get a little timer that tells you how long you have gone. It limits your time so you really can’t ramble. That helps a ton!
3) As you answer . . . you can look at the question again! This means that while you are answering you can make sure you are sticking to the subject! That really really helps. I don’t like to admit it but sometimes I forget the original question and when I’m done with a thought I’m not sure if I answered the question and with a real person it’s not like you can be like Pam and ask “what was the question?”.
4) You can record your answer again but I never even used that feature . . . I was fine with whatever I said even if it wasn’t perfect. Hopefully they are understanding!
5) There was a coding challenge! Which is what made the the most nervous. I did the sample one and the answer was fairly easy so I was hopeful that the real one wouldn’t be that big a deal. It was a little bigger and took me like 20 minutes but I was totally fine with it and it was actually a fun challenge! DM me and I’ll share if you are interested. But anyway it was unlimited time and I just didn’t feel like I was making someone wait on me as I was looking up stuff and thinking and it was just SO MUCH BETTER than white boards or some shared VS Code thing that we used to do. It was in Python which I haven’t written in awhile. It was easy enough to just go look up how to define a function and do loops, etc. I think I legit did well at the challenge in that I thought through it myself, wrote some functions so the code looked clean, etc. I didn’t write test cases but whatever. I figured it out and didn’t just have some AI do it. And it’s been awhile since I wrote any Python but I knew it well enough to figure it out. That’s a good sign right?
6) The questions were really good and one of them was after the coding challenge . . . they asked about my approach to solving the problem so I just said “I don’t do a ton in Python so I had to look up how to make functions and for loops but once I did that I just kept making changes a little at a time checking for errors and fixing stuff as I went along . . it was actually fun!”
Anyway, I think I did well but who knows. Most importantly I won’t be afraid of doing a HireVue interview ever again!
Sheldon