#42: Candidate Centricity—Shrinking the Access Gap With Better Interviewing

Episode DescriptionThis week we welcome Jeffrey Spector to the podcast. Jeffrey spent more than six years at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he served as Chief of Staff to Melinda Gates, before co-founding Karat, a service that helps CTO’s and CHRO’s make technical interviewing a customer-centric experience. Topics include: the surging demand for software engineers, the parallels between training effective teachers and training effective interviewers, why interviewing can be a lonely craft, the notion of a professional interviewer, soft vs. hard skills often found in professional interviewers, the importance of offering “redo” interviews, the concept of a “false negative” as applied to candidate interviews, how candidate interviews can be leveraged post-hire, the meaning of the “access gap,” why many well-intentioned DE&I efforts are ineffective, how democratizing information about interview processes supports diversity efforts, and alternate education paths for technical roles.