It’s amazing how many startup founders get caught up in the idea of looking like they’re moving fast at the expense of everything else.
Doing a phone screen on 20 people in a day would be a stretch, let alone full interviews. This sounds more like a hazing ritual than anything else.
Ironically, I know plenty of people who would have pseudo-succeeded at this task by pretending to have interviewed the 20 candidates but instead just hired their friends. These types of startups are magnets for people who can put on a good show while doing everything in their power to enrich their own careers.
There are too many good startups with genuine founders out there to waste your time on these hustle-and-grind founders.
I would never be able to have interviews with them all in a single day (the constraint was me and the two founders had to travel to another city to get all interviews done in one day and I was asked if I can organize it). So what I, in my naivety, did was to invite them all to single room for an exam-like event and gave them programming tasks in Scratch, if I remember well.
Once we had results, we took 10 with best scores and had half an hour short interview with each one, after which we debated and selected 6.
Yes. That did happen. I even felt quite proud that I was so efficient. I still feel dirty. Have a laugh.
Only after I came back home I have realized what happened and that these people are going to be backbone of the company for years to come. I have realized the founders, coming from a larger company have absolutely no ability to form a team. Because they have always been joining an existing team they have always looked at the team as a collection of random people and decided that it doesn't make much difference how the people are selected as long as they have a team of people who can demonstrate they can program.
Doing a phone screen on 20 people in a day would be a stretch, let alone full interviews. This sounds more like a hazing ritual than anything else.
Ironically, I know plenty of people who would have pseudo-succeeded at this task by pretending to have interviewed the 20 candidates but instead just hired their friends. These types of startups are magnets for people who can put on a good show while doing everything in their power to enrich their own careers.
There are too many good startups with genuine founders out there to waste your time on these hustle-and-grind founders.