Corporate Tales #1

I read of lot of copy pasted anecdotal interview stories on LinkedIn everyday. Here’s one true story from my books.


2 years back I was assisting a weekend recruitment drive for my company. As per my experience level I didn’t have much authority and only served as a kind of gatekeeper handling the initial screening round. Because I’ve been at the receiving end of a broken interview system all my life, I used to take extra care and diligence to understand the candidate and make sure nobody deserving is denied a chance. On the other hand, I couldn’t let too many pass through, then the seniors would scold me for being too lenient.

While interviewing one such candidate that day, with a decent profile and some great academic/coding extra curricular achievements, I found the person wasn’t fully convincing on some basic questions. Comparing to the CV, I guessed it could be the stress of travelling and uneasiness of waiting in the halls for whole day might have been draining. So I instead started asking more about those extra curriculars to ease up the situation. Whenever the person spoke about those, and did that with much depth, the voice lit up with passion and dedication. I knew this was a catch, and marked the CV with a star for next round.

At the end of the afternoon, before leaving after completing all my screening rounds, I asked the hiring manager if my star marked CVs had cleared 2nd round. Unfortunately I was told that one CV was ruled out at next round because of that person not being able to write a SQL query correctly. I facepalm’d myself and left. As stated earlier, I didn’t have any authority to challenge 2nd round rulings.



Few months later, I came to know that the candidate ended up getting hired in the company after all, not by our unit, but by another unit in a different vertical for the same technical level position. I was really happy and congratulated the candidate. After that the world went into chaos and we all left office for WFH and didn’t interact for next 1.5 years.

It was only during my last week at the company, we crossed paths again. It was an internal company wide online event which included unorthodox coding and brain teasers. The team matching was totally random and coincidentally we were in the same team. The other two members in the team didn’t show up and I suspect this was a common case in 140 teams that were formed. After struggling for 2hrs we were able to solve the full puzzle and came out as one of the only two teams who completed it within time among 140 teams. Disclaimer: I love coding puzzles but the other person contributed as much and solved a blocker where I had given up.

So why did I write down this incredibly long story? To prove my point – that on that afternoon, when I starred that CV, I was right, and the system was wrong. You don’t judge a person by their ability to write a piece of SQL after a tiring day of physical and mental stress. If you judge by that criteria, you’re bound to miss one of the top 5 among 560 employees of your company (140 teams x 4 members each). Why I count 560? Well, it includes the passion to show up, and then have the enthusiasm to sit through 2hrs on a Friday evening, and then still possess enough active grey matter to solve the given problem – the criteria which only 5 out of 560 were able to fulfill that day. We aren’t even counting all those who don’t even have the zeal to register or simply don’t bother. Yes, it’s very hypothetical, but at least it’s more comprehensive than judging employees by SQL query skills. Right?

I firmly believe all these qualities reflect in our daily work as well, but our industry’s performance and grading system is too broken to account and measure those qualities properly. Till that is fixed, I’ll take these small wins as a morale booster to keep advocating better interview systems.