[HN Gopher] Tips for Interviewing over Zoom
___________________________________________________________________
Tips for Interviewing over Zoom
Author : mooreds
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-06-05 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dev.jimgrey.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dev.jimgrey.net)
| xyzelement wrote:
| Just like being late to a physical interview is a bad signal
| (sure there was traffic but what does it say about your planning
| skills?) I feel totally justified "reading" into how people are
| on their zoom interviews.
|
| Recently I interviewed someone and kept hearing another
| conversation at the same time. I finally asked him about it and
| he said "oh yeah that's my wife doing a meeting, let me go to
| another room." It's hard for me to imagine someone's throught
| process that led them to think it's fine to have the conversation
| with another meeting in the room when there was another option
| easily available, but it was a quick "tell" that this person has
| bad judgement, low empathy or simply doesn't care - none of which
| made me want to hire him.
|
| To a smaller degree I judge people's technology. I am
| interviewing for technical roles and if you are a year+ into WFH
| and you are still having silly wifi issues or haven't figured out
| how to sound clear on your mike, it's a bad sign about your
| ability to troubleshoot and solve problems (or again, low empathy
| - if you care that your video constantly stutters and your
| colleagues can't make you out, you'd figure out a wired solution
| or upgrade your router or whatever)
|
| An interview is an assessment of your capabilities and there's
| such a thing as basic competence. If you can't nail Zooming after
| so much time, the whole thing is a little suspect.
|
| I'd take a very different attitude if I was hiring for a non
| technical roles where solving tech problems is far remote from
| the job.
| dathinab wrote:
| > having silly wifi issues
|
| Except that this "silly wifi issues" might be unexpectable
| temporary, but in short time unfix-able issues of your ISP
| which just popped up recently.
|
| > can't nail Zooming
|
| You kinda imply people use Zoom all the time but they don't,
| they might use video-conference systems all the time but not
| necessary Zoom, and Zoom is kinda well known to sometimes have
| arbitrary issues as long as you are not on a Mac with the
| native Zoom client.
|
| When doing interviews recently Zoom was the only Video
| Conference software which sometimes had arbitrary issues which
| where far beyond "it's selected a non-existing microphone" or
| similar, i.e. short term unfixable issues. Worse they sometimes
| popped up out of nowhere even after doing other calls where it
| worked... (Other conference software which had been used
| included MS Teams, Google Hangouts, Jitsi Meets. All in the end
| providing a better interview experience then Zoom, even through
| zoom might be better if it works...).
| hawaiianbrah wrote:
| I live on a houseboat in Seattle. I'm a software developer
| that's been working remote even before the pandemic.
|
| It's great generally, but the worst thing about houseboat life
| is the crappy internet. I somewhat recently upgraded to 40mbps
| down, but that isn't super consistent.
|
| Internet problems don't always have easy or reasonable
| solutions. I'm wired in but still sometimes have to drop from
| calls because it lags and stutters.
|
| Judging someone for their internet problems doesn't make any
| sense to me.
| rokobobo wrote:
| I would encourage you to be a bit more open-minded when judging
| people with technical issues. Debugging WiFi or microphone
| might seem intuitive to you, but there's a good amount of
| people out there that are experts at coding or data science,
| who haven't had to deal with any of the scrappiness. Of course,
| if you're hiring for a startup and that level of scrappiness is
| part of the job, by all means, continue to extract signal.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Debugging WiFi
|
| Honestly, debugging WiFi issues is a nightmare I don't expect
| _anyone_ to be guaranteed in doing a good job (except someone
| specialized in Wireless Access Points with specialized
| equipment).
|
| I have seen more then a view cases where ISP provided Routers
| sometimes arbitrary caused havoc and in some countries you
| can't just switch out the Router and the issues might not be
| limited to WiFi but look like WiFi issues and if you are
| unlucky they are a temp. problem with your ISP and...
|
| The best choice is to not use WiFi if you need to do Video
| Conferences, but sadly this is not always the case. (E.g. in
| my case I only have WiFi due to reasons I can't really change
| and while it works completely fine I would be very worried if
| I ever had to do a Conference around 1-3AM in the night,
| because my ISP tend to has issues (short for max. 10min)
| around that time from time to time, and all other ISPs I can
| buy go through that same ISP and have the same issue... Well
| it's in the middle of the night so luckily not a problem for
| me.)
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| I get where you're coming from, but I personally can't do
| anything about my bad wifi, because I rent a room in a shared
| flat and don't have control over it. The router is in another
| room and I can't run a cable there either.
|
| There's also going to be noise I don't have full control over,
| because there are three other people here (who you can
| sometimes hear despite us being in different rooms), and it's
| summer so I either need the window open (my room is on the
| ground floor near a noisy road) or a fan on.
|
| I'd urge a bit more empathy before coming to the conclusion
| that people are lazy/incompetent.
| thih9 wrote:
| > If you can't nail Zooming after so much time, the whole thing
| is a little suspect.
|
| This assumes they spent a lot of time Zooming already, which
| seems a bit risky. E.g. some workplaces focus more on text
| chats, emails, etc.
| Yoric wrote:
| > Just like being late to a physical interview is a bad signal
| (sure there was traffic but what does it say about your
| planning skills?) I feel totally justified "reading" into how
| people are on their zoom interviews.
|
| Fun fact: depending on your cultural background, one person's
| "late" is another person's "giving you time to prepare".
|
| It is my understanding that Anglo-Saxon and German education
| insist on starting a meeting at the time written on the
| calendar, while some other countries understand the time
| written on the calendar as the moment the main presenter (or
| interviewer, in that case) is getting ready, so if you arrive
| then, you embarrass them and/or prevent them from doing their
| work.
|
| Coming from a Latin country, it took me some time to understand
| the unspoken rules for working in a US company. After ~10
| years, I'm not sure I still know them all. All along the way, I
| have been judged for compliance with these rules that
| culturally make no sense to me and nobody cared to explain.
| There are dozens of examples I could quote, including different
| meanings of "Yes" and "No" or "I" or "responsibility".
|
| Where I'm coming at is: please don't be too fast to judge
| people on unspoken rules, especially across cultures.
| jshmrsn wrote:
| Also, don't forget about your internet connection. As an
| interviewer, it is really hard to look past the first impression
| of blurry and stuttered audio/video. Check if the speed you're
| paying for is reasonable and if better service is available (and
| affordable to you), check WiFi vs. Ethernet speeds, check if
| other users on your LAN are hogging your connection. If your
| connection is unavoidably slow, I would suggest being upfront
| with the interviewer that you're aware of the situation and that
| you have put effort into getting the best possible result,
| instead of leaving me to wonder if you're not detail oriented
| enough for the position.
| dheera wrote:
| If you're aware of it another thing that helps is to put the
| audio over a normal phone call and mute all the audio on the
| video call.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But phone call audio quality is terrible.
| dheera wrote:
| Yes, but at least intelligible. Both Zoom and Hangouts suck
| and drop audio when the connection is bad. They are also
| seemingly excellent at dropping the most important words
| while keeping the most irrelevant words. :)
|
| Clubhouse, which uses Agora for voice, actually does a much
| better job at this, it buffers the missed audio and then
| when the connection comes back, it continues playing the
| audio slightly faster (it uses some signal processing
| trickery to speed up voice without shifting the spectrum)
| until it catches up to the real-time stream, and avoids
| dropping any audio.
|
| What I really want to see eventually, when we have the
| hardware to do it real-time, is sending minimal data (on
| the order of just text and a pose) and deepfaking the voice
| and video on the receiving end during short periods of bad
| connectivity.
| dheera wrote:
| If you have a RealSense D455, I made a virtual camera for Linux
| that does bokeh based on the actual depth instead of the fake
| segmentation-based stuff.
|
| https://github.com/dheera/bokeh-camera
|
| It could be edited to work on a D435 or L515 but those have
| pretty narrow RGB cameras and may not look as good.
| mmartinson wrote:
| I interview a lot of candidates over zoom for remote positions.
| For me, few to none of the specific details matter. What's
| important is if the candidate demonstrates that they've had the
| empathy and self awareness to consider how their call setup
| affects others' ability to communicate with them. All the
| suggestions in the linked article seem painfully obvious for
| anyone working in 2021.
|
| I actually prefer when the candidate has some sort of
| uncontrollable distraction that comes up during the interview. It
| provides a good opportunity to see how they handle the real world
| challenges of remote work. For anyone not sure how to handle
| this, interrupting with "excuse me, I'm going to mute for 20
| seconds while garbage truck passes" is completely reasonable,
| even in a fairly formal situation.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I had an in-person interview for a job a couple of years ago,
| and I'd turned up with my two year old son.
|
| I later heard that the way I dealt with him helped enormously
| in getting a good impression of me.
|
| (Not the first time I've taken a child to an interview; people
| generally seem to take it in their stride here in Finland,
| which is a little odd to me as a Brit.)
| riffraff wrote:
| > how they handle the real world challenges of remote work
|
| But an interview is not normal work, if I'm in a meeting with
| my colleagues and my kids start screaming it's ok to mute
| myself and tell them off, possibly drop from the call.
|
| During an interview I could do the same but that would also
| stress me out a lot at a time where I'm already stressed out.
| I've interviewed people who freaked out because of a bad
| connection.
|
| Of course, Your Candidates May Vary.
| nyx wrote:
| Yeah, every so often I'll encounter someone who somehow still
| hasn't figured out basic conference call courtesy, and it
| boggles my mind especially given how we've all been remote for
| over a year. That should have been plenty of time to smooth
| over any rough habits...
|
| But still there's the odd meeting where, with 30 people
| attending, one person shows up and blasts everyone with heavy
| breathing, dog barks, screaming kids and forces the presenter
| to say "hey, we've got some background noise, can everyone make
| sure they're muted?"
|
| In my mind this kind of thing is akin to failing at basic
| hygiene, and it probably infuriates me more than it should.
| Joeboy wrote:
| Interviewing sometimes involves using an unfamiliar platform,
| which involves things like not being sure which variant of
| mic icon means you're muted.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Or a pair of icons: one of which mites your microphone and
| the other drops you out of the audio conference completely.
| handrous wrote:
| You get enough people on a call, someone's gonna miss
| something, even if everyone knows how to handle calls and is
| trying to do the right thing.
| nyx wrote:
| Yeah, that's fair. I can't imagine being that person, but
| perhaps I'm uncommonly neurotic about making sure I'm
| muted.
| handrous wrote:
| The other factor is that, once calls start getting large
| enough, it's highly likely that you've got people on who
| _don 't_ do many group calls or video chats, or don't
| often use the program the organizer's chosen so are more
| likely to not notice they aren't muted, or not realize
| that this one doesn't join muted-by-default like their
| preferred one does, or whatever.
|
| I've noticed a strong preference for _actual_ conference
| calls, as in, calling a phone number, in certain
| companies, and I think consistency-of-interface and the
| fact that no-one, including people from outside the org,
| need to have a certain program available or installed, is
| part of the reason.
| dathinab wrote:
| Tipp 1, don't use Zoom.
|
| It's the only video conference program which sometimes didn't
| work at all last time I was doing conferences.
|
| Also slack isn't a good choice because its quality is sometimes
| terrible (for the same internet connection I had experiences like
| slack being unbearable bad quality and then switching to Teams
| made thinks work reasonable).
|
| Hangouts is boring and not fancy but works for more or less
| anyone.
|
| Some of the best experiences I had with Jitsi Meet.
|
| Teams doesn't really work on Firefox, and seems pretty bad for
| anything but video conferences. But its doing a reliable job for
| video conferences. Only problem is that the UI/UX can be very
| different depending on the platform you use it from. And that
| chrome still hasn't added by-default support for Wayland screen
| sharing (you need to enable pipewire support and might need to
| install additional pipewire packages as Chrome uses a
| old/deprecated pipewire interface, this isn't a problem under
| Firefox but neither Slack or Teams work under Firefox, mainly
| because they don't want to, it's not too hard to support).
| remram wrote:
| Hangouts no longer offers video calls and just directs you to
| use Google Meet (or is it Gmail Chat now?)
| dathinab wrote:
| Sorry, I meant Google Meet.
| extra88 wrote:
| Zoom has been the best for me. I haven't used Jitsi Meet, I've
| heard it can be good but an interviewee is rarely the one to
| pick the call medium.
|
| > Teams doesn't really work on Firefox
|
| Don't use the browser version of any videoconferencing system
| you use with any regularity, use their desktop app. It would be
| nice if that you could use any old browser (especially when the
| desktop app may well be an Electron app) but the reliability
| isn't currently there. The desktop app is the "happy path," use
| what works now, not what _should_ work.
|
| > Wayland screen sharing
|
| Ah, a Linux user. You should lead with that, your experience
| will have little relation to the vast majority of other people.
| graphtrader wrote:
| I think you should just view it like a podcast or music video.
| You have full control over the presentation. I wouldn't doubt
| there is a huge bias in interviews towards the more aesthetically
| pleasing video.
| retrac wrote:
| Assuming it's legal in your jurisdiction, consider recording the
| interview. Mostly so you can go back, cringe, and hopefully note
| where you could do better next time. But it never hurts to have
| some documentation of the hiring stage if you need it in the
| future, either.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| No mention of whiteboarding tools. Just a bunch of fluff.
| sneak wrote:
| Point 1 is bad advice.
|
| If you want clear and good communication, the internal mic in
| your laptop is insufficient. Get a wired headset with a boom mic.
| Audio is waaaay more important than video.
|
| He also lists a bunch of stuff (grooming? really?) that is
| standard interview/business stuff and has nothing to do with
| video calling.
|
| Good video conferencing is simple: good light on your face, wired
| ethernet connection (wifi off), wired headset with boom mic close
| to your mouth. Avoid sources of background noise.
|
| If you need to be told to shower and brush your hair/teeth, you
| probably shouldn't be giving interviews in the first place.
| u8mybrownies wrote:
| I often find these to be worse. Audio quality for boom mics is
| unnatural and often very cheap and on the odd occasion you can
| hear heavy breathing the whole time.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > If you need to be told to shower and brush your hair/teeth,
| you probably shouldn't be giving interviews in the first place.
|
| Some people are unaware that basic hygiene and appearance
| matter on video calls. Just look at any virtual class from
| school or university, you will see people in pajamas, bed-head
| hair, various states of dress from normal to nearly naked.
| scsilver wrote:
| I have a feeling that over then next few years people with apple
| devices will do disporportionatly well in interviews due to
| better video and audio components and a attention to presentation
| (where that camera is located, image processing to handle weird
| lighting/different skin tones, multi mic arrays with processing
| to help remove unwanted noise and clarify speech.
|
| In a way its sad, some people dont even know how much better some
| brands are at projecting you to a viewer, and you would never
| know unless you study your zoom calls.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| I'd add that it helps to imagine that the audio is a mostly one-
| way thing.
|
| Let the other person speak when they are speaking, and make it
| clear when you're finished speaking. Doing this can avoid those
| annoying block-outs that occur when sound from speaker "A" is
| interrupted for a half second, because listener "B" is making
| "hm" sounds or inserting affirmative or I-hear-you words like
| "yup" or "right" after every phrase.
|
| Try to develop a habit of waiting for pauses, and providing
| pauses when you are speaking.
|
| Demonstrate that you understand and value communication. Because,
| if you don't show this during an interview, you're providing
| evidence that you won't do it in the job.
|
| PS. this applies to all interviews. Some reporters are so bad at
| this that their interviews are unlistenable.
| seanwilson wrote:
| Tip from me I keep forgetting: if you've got bad lighting you
| can't fix and you're using a laptop, turn your screen brightness
| up to full and it'll help a lot by illuminating your face.
| bnt wrote:
| Yesterday I had a candidate late for her interview (senior tech
| recruiter position). What happened next was absurd: she joined
| from her phone, in her bra. A moment later her partner was
| running in the background naked. She realized the situation and
| in panic turned off the video and then (like in comedy movies)
| faked her wifi was breaking and was faking her voice as if she
| was in a tunnel. Then she just quit the call and I haven't heard
| back, no response to my email request to reschedule.
|
| Not my weirdest experience, but the lack of professionalism for
| such a serious role just caught me off guard.
| [deleted]
| IsopropylMalbec wrote:
| I have to ask what your weirdest experience is then?
| bnt wrote:
| Guy from China logged into a video tech interview. Fully
| nude, only wearing sunglasses, and behind him a huge
| swastika. That was an instant disconnect for me and a
| rejection email to the candidate.
|
| Edit for concerned folks: it was a Nazi swastika. Red flag,
| black tilted swastika.
| sahila wrote:
| Clearly no excuse for being naked with sunglasses, but you
| should know that the swastika is not a universally bad
| symbol.
|
| In India you'll see the symbol plastered all around in
| front of people's home, rickshaws (taxis), and on
| buildings. Nazis repurposed it for their use but its roots
| stem from East Asia.
|
| I once got into trouble and had to see the principal in 2nd
| grade for drawing the swastika while bored in class. It
| sucks that the Western world is largely ignorant of its
| positive roots and usage.
|
| Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
| tass wrote:
| The naked thing, sure, weird, but maybe the camera was on
| by accident.
|
| The swastika is used in some countries as a religious
| symbol, among other things. Tourist maps in Japan when I
| was last there still used it to represent temple locations.
|
| Example:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Swastika_Society
| [deleted]
| acheron wrote:
| Wow, a lot of people power-tripping on interviews in the comments
| here. Though I guess everyone being "rejected" is dodging some
| bullets; if someone is an awful person when interviewing then
| imagine having to work with them every day.
| mobilene wrote:
| I'm the OP, and this is my first time making the HN front page.
| It's been great fun. Thanks all for the great discussion, and
| especially for the additional tips listed here!
| majormjr wrote:
| Good lighting makes a big difference as well, even low quality
| webcams on laptops look much better if your face is well lit.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Ring lights help in this area as well and are cheap enough
| nowadays.
| handrous wrote:
| Thanks to ring lights and Youtube, I'm pretty sure my kids
| are going to grow up thinking there's some variety of eye-
| color that features a bright white ring in the center of the
| pupil.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or a desk lamp pointed at the wall behind your laptop if
| you're at a desk.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| This list doesn't really have anything to do with interviewing.
| All of these tips are things that you should do on any
| professional zoom call (although I don't really see the purpose
| of advising people that their laptop mic is adequate and that
| high quality audio is unnecessary - in my experience it makes a
| huge difference)
| guenthert wrote:
| One more: (might be obvious, but I managed to forget) for longer
| interviews where you can be expected to talk a lot, have a glass
| of water within reach. Particularly important if you're not used
| to talking a lot.
| achow wrote:
| I never could understand why my laptop (Macbook Pro) camera
| doesn't allow me to do digital zoom to eliminate some background
| or appear closer to the camera. I assume that this feature is
| very trivial to implement.
|
| Also there are no free or paid util tool that allows me to do the
| same.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I think you can do this in OBS with the virtual cam driver.
|
| You would just expand the camera input and crop and position it
| as a 'scene'.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Can confirm this is trivial in OBS as this is exactly what I
| do.
| [deleted]
| phamilton wrote:
| A virtual camera like OBS can do that for you.
| achow wrote:
| The point is it would be so much more intuitive and friction
| free if it is part of native camera UI.
|
| I didn't know about OBS. It sounds much complicated for me to
| explore that option.. https://streamshark.io/obs-
| guide/adding-webcam
|
| I wanted a util which would have placed + and - overlay icon
| on top of the camera ui itself (or something of equivalent
| simplicity).
| humblepie wrote:
| Thanks for this tip, gonna try it.
| lflux wrote:
| I'd recommend some sort of headset over the internal mic and
| speakers, otherwise you end up fighting the echo cancelling when
| you're trying to get a word into a conversation or interrupt
| someone.
|
| In general I feel that zoom convos don't flow as naturally as
| IRL, but they're even worse when a counterpart doesn't have a
| headset with a good mic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-06-05 23:00 UTC)