How are hiring decisions made?

“HMs know these aren’t good predictors of performance”. It isn’t about predicting performance. That’s not really measurable. It is a bar that exists. The hope is to see how you think and adapt, as well as your existing knowledge and skill.

I know it doesn’t seem like it with current interviewing, but companies like Amazon spend a ton of time and money researching interviewing practices, measuring outcomes, doing analysis of different approaches, and ultimately this shapes how interview loops are structured. Imperfect, but huge effort goes in.

Anyway! I really only know Amazon’s process. In the debrief, what you did is discussed, but how you approached it, how you handled twists, how you handled feedback, and so on. At Amazon the HM and Bar Raiser make a hiring decisions. They discuss the data with the rest of the loop, dig in, and try to find if the gaps the candidate has are risks they are willing to assume, and if they have enough bar raising abilities to make it a good hire. If someone has average performance in everything, and a couple of yellow or red flags, there’s nothing to “pull them up”. If someone has a few stumbles but kills a couple of sessions then it is easier to accept what’s missing and still push them over the bar.

After the onsite loop is finished, the interviewing team gathers to take the decision. This meeting has multiple parties involved:

• The recruiter: He is your defending partner inside the loop, he does his best to make sure you are hired if you deserve that.
• The HM: He is the manager that has a position open, he interviews you, and if he thinks you are a good candidate, it’s in his best interest to hire you as well.
• The Bar Raiser: He can be one of the technical interviewers, or a non-technical with just all-LP round, or even just an observer in the meeting without actually interviewing you, his job is to defend the company’s policy, and make sure to hire you only when you raise the bar for the company. This is the only person that has veto power to reject a person.
• The interview team: This includes all other SDEs that interviewed you.

The bar raiser starts by going around, taking any high level comments, then commencing with all the competencies that Amazon measures against. Every interviewer gets to show his feedback, gets asked on it, tries to convince the team with his decision.
Prior to the meeting, every interviewer must input his feedback, that includes if he agrees with hiring you or not, then the bar raiser challenges each person to make sure the feedback is fair, and that the decision the interviewer chose is justified.

This is basically the summary of how it's done, but more details can be added if needed..

This varies from company to company.

Meta Interview Process

The candidate review and feedback process is usually completely asynchronous. Sometimes, they’ll do a live debrief but it’s rare. This means there’s a low likelihood for an interviewer to “fight” for a candidate. Socially influencing interviewers won’t go very far here.

Meta is also the only FAANG that asks interviewers for a confidence score when filling out post-onsite feedback forms. As a result, the process at Meta can be more forgiving on failed rounds because a lower confidence score means a failed round carries less weight. Also, Meta is the only FAANG that directly asks interviewers about downleveling. In cases where the hiring panel is hung, it’s possible they may request one more follow-up interview to help them get more signal.

Google Interview Process

Most of the time, the post-interview feedback process at Google is completely asynchronous, and interviewers don’t meet live to discuss hiring decisions. That’s one reason why interviewing at Google isn’t like interviewing with humans: it’s more akin to interviewing with a machine.

Each interviewer rates candidates on the following seven-point scale: Strong No-Hire, No Hire, Leaning No-Hire, On The Fence, Leaning Hire, Hire, and Strong Hire.

How this affects candidates is simple: a Strong Hire can get you an offer, but it can also buy you a second chance. If you don’t get an offer, but you get a Strong Hire from one of your interviewers, you might be offered one bonus interview round to decide whether you get an offer or not.

That said, you don’t need to get a “Strong Hire” to get a second chance. Overall, if you showed enough signal to not-fail but not enough to pass, sometimes they will ask you to do an additional round.

A “Strong No-Hire” bars you from interviewing at Google for some time. Reports vary here, but one of our Google interviewers told us that if you get a Strong No-Hire, you might be frozen out for several years.

Go Deeper

We wrote about how all the FAANGs make hiring decisions here: https://interviewing.io/guides/hiring-process#introduction-to-faang-interviews (just click on each FAANG and then go to "How X makes hiring decisions" in the right panel)