Bio CPU

#0002 Recruiter Interview: What, Why and How Part 1

At the start of your career journey as a software engineer, you will most probably apply to many job posts and get many rejections until one of your applications pass the resume review stage to the next stage.

This next stage in many companies is the recruiter interview. If you reached it, you are lucky because ~95% of the job post applicants get filtered out at the previous stages.

Overview

The recruiter is responsible for finding suitable candidates to work for their clients (i.e. the recruiter’s employer or other employers served by them). Their success at their job is measured by how many suitable candidates did they find and get hired so it is to the best interest for them that you (as a job applicant) land the job.

At some companies, the one responsible for this could also be the HR representative. This could lead to poor interviewing process quality since recruitment and HR management are two different jobs with their own set of complexities. Doing both of them together with good performance is hard.

At the recruiter interview, the recruiter’s goals are to:

  1. Detect lies on resume.
  2. Check applicant suitablity for employer’s needs.
  3. Check employer suitablity for applicant’s needs.

Detect lies on resume

Some people write lies on their resume to pass the previous stages. The recruiter tries to detect them by inquiring details about what is written on the resume.

Even if the applicant passed this interview, many companies do a more thorough background check before hiring the applicant by verifying every fact provided by them (i.e. verify their degree and past professional experience via contacting relevant entities). If any lie get detected, the applicant will be banned from applying to any job from this employer.

To be continued

This is all for now, I will cover the other two goals and how to prepare for the interview in later posts.

Let me know if you have any feedback in the comments section below.

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