Perhaps unintentionally, this made me chuckle.
Before choosing to work with my good chums Tara and Chris, I did my fair share of Silicon Valley/San Francisco interviews. And boy, were they different to what I’m used to here in London.
In his post, Guy accurately stereotypes the various types of interviewer you can expect to meet:
- Wunderkind – the Stanford drop-out
- Mom – the only adult on the team. Part office manager, part psychiatrist, part mother, and part school principal
- Mr. CPG – Marketing guy who can’t do a demo of the product but believes that everything is a consumer packaged good
- Sunil – VP of Engineering, the wunderkinds finally settled on someone who they thought could scale the infrastructure
- Jasmine McGuire – The wunderkinds found a sales person they they could stand
- Lifer – Started at the company when computers were as big as a room and “partner” was a noun, not a verb.
- Grecian Gray – Mr CPG who’s too old to go to another startup but too young to retire.
- HR Professional – You may think she’s “just an HR person,” but she’ll torpedo you if you piss her off.
- Ms CEO – Tough, talented. Shattered the glass ceiling into a thousand pieces. Sports a trophy husband.
- Don Corleone – Executive with the company for twenty years. Secretary answers his email.
Wow, I can certainly put most of the people I met and was interviewed by into one these categories. Especially so for the folks I met at a notoriously long interview process at a popular search engine.
I’m also pleased to say that neither Tara, Chris or myself are like any of these pegion hole personas. So when we start hiring, be prepared for something very different! 🙂