How tech bosses manage their teams for fun and profit

> "the one-hour interview [...] is still the norm"

Try telephone pre-screening. Saves a lot of time, particularly for the interviewees.

Good interviewing skills

In a past job, we actually got some training in how to interview people for a position. The basic idea is simple, and works well when you have a team interviewing and the team has various levels of expertise and skills.

So you all meet ahead of time to discuss the questions everyone will ask. Not the specific questions, but the areas. And so each team member is asked to rate the victim^Winterviewee on a 1-5 scale in two dimensions. First is how well they know the area, and second is how deep you got into the area in terms of questioning. I'm not explaining it well, but the idea was that you had a list of skills/abilities you wanted to know about. So each person who interviewed would ask their questions, then immediately afterwards go and rate them for how well they knew an area, and how deep you got into talking about that area.

This ends up giving you a pretty good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of the victim, and gives everyone a consistent want to ask questions and get a feel for that person and how they would fit into the team. It's not perfect, but it does help get a more consistent scheme for finding the right person to join.

Oh, and of course you all meet right after the victim leaves and you go over the results and see how well you all liked the person. You had to be able to back up your recommendation with numbers too, you coulnd't just say "Sheila knew storage really well". You had to say "Sheila knew storage, but we only got middling deep into it. I was concentrating on deeper questions in area XYZ instead..." which let people focus on their area, but also still contribute when the grilling invariably drifted into other areas of discussion. I found it a great way to get good people into a team, esp when looking for specific skills to enhance those already in the team.

Never trust the words on a resume or the words of a recruiter, always verify.

I'm also posting anonymously since I too am looking to leave and more and more toxic environment, mostly because it's all shifted to the other coast and I'm fairly alone and three hours off in terms of most of my co-workers... blech.

Very interesting but would question the sampling mechanism

You have recruited probably very proactive and self-aware execs, what about the self-involved numpties who think they are perfect already?

My previous employer held coffee mornings once a month, where groups of technical personnel were invited along to talk to the CEO and CIO with no middle managers or HR present. They quickly found out how many of their middle managers were outright lying to them about how things were going.