On more than one occasion I’ve been interviewed by someone and they’ve told me, point blank, that they “didn’t prepare at all for this” or “didn’t even look at your resume.”

Really?

While this is lame no matter what industry or role, with front end engineers it’s incredibly frustrating.

Throughout the “Ajax era” any other experienced front end engineer has been interviewing from a relative position of strength. In my personal situation, I’ve been employed over the past five years by good companies, working with people I like and respect; but anyone with a strong background in HTML, CSS and (especially) JavaScript who is looking for a job is going to have several options available at any given time. That’s just the nature of the industry right now. We’re in an extremely fortunate place right now.

So… with that in mind it should be clear that if you’re hiring on the front end you have to actively recruit. This is just the reality of hiring front end engineers. Everyone wants someone great and there just aren’t that many great people around. If you find someone you’ve got to put forth some actual effort. I know all about this from both sides of the table. For example, we’ve had this role open at Isobar for ages and we haven’t found the right fit just yet.* There aren’t all that many people that fit those requirements.

So, what’s a candidate supposed to think when someone walks in and admits, in effect, that the candidate’s time and/or the role isn’t important enough to merit even minimum effort?

How is that recruiting?

It’s not, and speaking from experience, being on the other side of some of those comments it reflects poorly on the organization as a whole. People picked to screen and interview staff should recognize that it’s important for a team or organization. It should never be such a burden that they can’t even do the minimum, and in the rare occasions where it’s impossible to do proper set-up they have the common decency to pretend that they did so as to not insult the candidate. If the person you’ve picked to do interviews can’t do that minimum, it’s probably time to pull them out of the rotation.

Putting it simply: it’s hard hiring people that do what we do. You’ve got to take it seriously.

*Hopefully moving downtown will help us fill it (plus don’t you want to work closely with me? Wouldn’t that be awesome?)