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The typical hiring pipeline for software engineering occurs over several stages—from phone screening and technical on-site interviews, to offer and negotiation. When these hiring pipelines are “leaky,” otherwise qualified candidates are lost at some stage of the pipeline. These leaky pipelines impact companies in several ways, including hindering a company’s ability to recruit competitive candidates and build diverse software teams. To understand where candidates become disengaged in the hiring pipeline—and what companies can do to prevent it—we conducted a qualitative study on over 10,000 reviews on 19 companies from Glassdoor, a website where candidates can leave reviews about their hiring process experiences. We identified several poor practices which prematurely sabotage the hiring process—for example, not adequately communicating hiring criteria, conducting interviews with inexperienced interviewers, and ghosting candidates. Our findings provide a set of guidelines to help companies improve their hiring pipeline practices—such as being deliberate about phrasing and language during initial contact with the candidate, providing candidates with constructive feedback after their interviews, and bringing salary transparency and long-term career discussions into offers and negotiations. Operationalizing these guidelines helps make the hiring pipeline more transparent, fair, and inclusive. 

Software engineering candidates commonly participate in whiteboard technical interviews as part of a hiring assessment. During these sessions, candidates write code while thinking aloud as they work towards a solution, under the watchful eye of an interviewer. While technical interviews should allow for an unbiased and inclusive assessment of problem-solving ability, surprisingly, technical interviews may be instead a procedure for identifying candidates who best handle and migrate stress solely caused by being examined by an interviewer (performance anxiety). To understand if coding interviews---as administered today---can induce stress that significantly hinders performance, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with 48 Computer Science students, comparing them in private and public whiteboard settings. We found that performance is reduced by more than half, by simply being watched by an interviewer. We also observed that stress and cognitive load were significantly higher in a traditional technical interview when compared with our private interview. Consequently, interviewers may be filtering out qualified candidates by confounding assessment of problem-solving ability with unnecessary stress. We propose interview modifications to make problem-solving assessment more equitable and inclusive, such as through private focus sessions and retrospective think-aloud, allowing companies to hire from a larger and diverse pool of talent.