The Other Side of the Table

What changed

Twenty years ago, the thing I'd have told you about interviewing is that it's a conversation. That's still true.

What's changed is that people lie. And people lie a lot.

I lead a team now, which means I'm on the other side of the table. Here's what it looks like from that chair.

The take-home

We had a candidate come through whose résumé lined up with the posting almost perfectly. The first conversation over Teams went well. There was some choppiness, some long pauses before answers, but we put that down to a language barrier. He seemed like a nice guy who knew what he was doing.

So we sent the take-home. Not a trick. Not "place as many queens on a chessboard as you can in fifteen minutes," which is a real question I once got and which tanked that interview on the spot. Ours was an honest little app, something we'd use day to day.

Then we put together a panel. Six people, four of whom are hard to get an hour from. He demoed the project, and the demo was fine.

I asked him to make one small change. Copy a function, adjust a couple of parameters. Five minutes later he was still poking around. The answer popped up in IntelliSense once and he skipped past it. He didn't know the structure of his own code. He'd prepared a presentation, and that was all he had.

Afterward, I fed his résumé to an AI and told it what had happened. Where were the red flags? It found products attributed to well-known companies that those companies don't sell. Work history that didn't hold together. The résumé was made up. The interview answers were being typed into a chat window while we waited for the "language barrier." The whole thing was a farce, and it cost six people an afternoon.

The flood

The other thing that's changed is volume.

I posted an open role on my personal LinkedIn. Within an hour I had twenty messages, several from people who weren't remotely qualified. We posted it on the company site and had hundreds of applications within hours.

Most were garbage. And the pattern was obvious once you saw it: the same cover letter, over and over, with only the name changed. Bots. Services that charge you to apply to a hundred jobs a day.

Here's the thing about those hundred jobs: you can't interview for them. You don't know the company. You have no feeling for the project. You're the fiftieth interview for someone who's going through the motions, and it shows.

So Bridani will never have an auto-apply button. That's a decision, not an oversight. The whole point is to help you stand out from that pile, and you don't stand out by joining it.

What actually stands out

From this side, the candidates who get through are the ones who did the thing everyone tells you to do and almost nobody does.

They read the company site. They know what we build. They ask a question about it that couldn't have come from a template.

They can talk about anything on their résumé without looking at it, and fill in the parts that aren't written down, because they lived it.

When I ask them to change something in their own code, they change it.

And when they don't know something, they say so. That's not a mark against you. That's the one thing in the whole loop that can't be faked, and it's the thing we're looking for.

Be honest. In a market full of people who aren't, it's the biggest advantage you've got.

Next: using AI in your search without pretending to be an expert, and without letting it get you caught.