Salesforce Hiring Edge

Why Your Interview Process is Costing You Talent

• Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire • Season 3 • Episode 73

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Your interview process might be broken—and costing you top talent.

Ex-Google & Salesforce engineer Mike Mroczka, author of Beyond Cracking the Coding

Interview, joins us again to break down what most companies get dead wrong about hiring.

Whether you're building a Salesforce team or scaling a broader tech org, this episode dives

deep into the mindset and mechanics of smarter hiring.

You’ll learn:

✔ The #1 red flag in most tech interviews (and how to fix it)

✔ Why great engineers bomb interviews—and bad ones pass

✔ The truth about "chemistry" vs. bias in hiring

✔ How to vet technical talent when you’re not technical

✔ What makes Big Tech hiring so effective (and what you can steal)

✔ Why your interview process needs to be written down—yesterday

🔥 Whether you're hiring your first developer or your fiftieth, this is the real talk every leader

needs.

🎧 Prefer audio? Listen to this episode on the Hiring Edge Podcast.

📌 Chapters

0:00 – Intro: Are You Hiring Wrong?

1:10 – Why You Need a Real Interview Process

3:30 – Vetting Engineers Without Being Technical

6:45 – Bias, Rapport & the "Likeability Trap"

9:10 – The Interview Systems That Actually Work

12:00 – Trial Periods: Good Idea or Red Flag?

14:20 – What Big Tech Gets Right (And You Can Too)

17:05 – Take-Home Tests: Pros, Cons, & Pay

19:30 – The Only Hiring Metric That Really Matters

21:45 – Final Thoughts & Podcast Info

👇 LINKS:

📕 Get Mike’s book: bctci.co/amazon🌐 Visit Mike: mikemroczka.com

📢 Subscribe for more unfiltered hiring insights.

⌚ Video Duration: 00:25:31

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⚠ DISCLAIMER:

entertainment only.

This channel does not promote or encourage any illegal activity. All content is for education and

#salesforce #techinterviews #hiringstrategy #scalefast #leadershiptips #engineeringteams

#culturefit #salesforcehiring #teamgrowth #startupleadership #businessleadership

#interviewprocess #recruitingtip


Speaker 1:

At the end of the day, you really need to just focus on your interview process. Do you even have an interview process? There's so many companies that are especially the smaller ones, where they have a rough idea of what the process should be. It's not written down anywhere, or if it is written down, it's not really codified. Making some sort of routine that you stick to makes you more fairly evaluate candidates.

Speaker 2:

it reduces biases and, at the end of the day, you're going to be better off candidates, it reduces biases and, at the end of the day, you're going to be better off.

Speaker 3:

Welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge, the show for leaders who want to hire smarter and scale faster with Salesforce, whether you're building a team or bringing in a consulting partner, we're breaking down what actually works in the real world.

Speaker 2:

All right, let's get into it. Welcome everybody. We are joined again by Mike Marochka, author of Beyond Cracking, the Coding Interview. He's a senior engineer, former Google and Salesforce employee, and he's an interview specialist. We are today going to talk about hiring the right people.

Speaker 3:

What advice would you give to non-technical leaders in a business to evaluate technical expertise when they may not have the tools or resources in the house?

Speaker 1:

Good question. I'd say there's kind of two responses. The question really is do you have any engineering in-house or not? And let's go kind of with the assumption for a second you don't have any engineering in-house and you've contracted all out.

Speaker 1:

I recommend having one core person that you trust and you can't really evaluate technical skills very well if you're not able to have somebody that can do that proper vetting. But having somebody that can do the vetting for you is great and that just comes down to having somebody that you can trust to actually get that done right Now, whether that's through small projects that they build trust over time. I'm not saying blindly go online and you know, trust the first person that looks remotely technical. But as soon as you have somebody, you can use them sort of as a proxy for that and I think not enough people kind of do that.

Speaker 1:

At the end of the day, if you're trying to do stuff yourself, again, this is something that you can do small projects to bid for it, rather than giving them the big, the huge project for the big client and waiting until the last minute to hire somebody, giving a few small things, things that you even maybe could do yourself, just to see how long did it take them to do? Wait, you know how to do that task. It took them four hours to do that task. That was a 20 minute thing. So being able to kind of give a smaller leash before you sort of let the leash go long, I think is a really important thing to do.

Speaker 2:

Everyone here is probably aware, I work with a variety of companies. Not all of them do tech interviews. Some of them it's their first interview, Some of them it's their last interview, right, Some are take-home tests, Some are whiteboard tests, Some are solutioning, including BA-style requirements, gathering and then two days later you're presenting and so on. But none of these is perfect. They all kind of have holes right. So I'm kind of curious what are the main problems either with each of these or just in general with technical interviews that could be?

Speaker 1:

prevented. Let's talk about in general for a second. I think actually from just a company standpoint, if you're looking to see what you're doing wrong in the interview process, the two biggest things you have control over are the questions you're asking and then also the interviewers themselves. I've never met somebody that's done interviews and hasn't thought they are a great interviewer.

Speaker 2:

But believe it or not.

Speaker 1:

there are so many people that are bad at interviews. It's kind of hysterical. Now, some things that make things particularly challenging are an interviewer that insists on asking different questions every time. You really can't compare two candidates if you're asking different questions to different people. So a lot of people don't realize having, to a certain extent, some sort of curriculum that you're roughly following is kind of important. The other thing is the questions themselves. If we're vetting a technical person, we need to make sure that they're technical enough for the job. If we're vetting somebody non-technical, we're also needing to make sure that we're asking them fair things. You know it's very easy for bias to kind of creep in. A lot of these sorts of biases can be, you know, like a harmless thing. It's like oh, you went to the same school I did. There's a connection there. You're more likely to hire that person just based on that and that's not exactly the most robust hiring process that exists.

Speaker 2:

No, it's a total BS reason to hire anybody. People make a lot of decisions. Look what happens. This is exactly what happens. People feel familiarity. It's just called rapport.

Speaker 2:

We all three of us we have a certain level of rapport. You can develop it very quickly. I'll remember being five years old and you have a best friend within about 10 seconds. You like Legos, I like Legos, this is my best friend, I know I just met him, right. So that's rapport.

Speaker 2:

And it gets harder and harder to develop the older that we get. Excuse me, I don't mean develop. It's harder and harder to develop a deep level of rapport the older we get, as we get more and more set in our ways, unless we are practiced at getting good at developing rapport. And the older you get, if you're in a customer facing role, you will get better at it, and you will probably get slightly worse if you aren't engaged in those types of activities. But this creates bias, as you mentioned, and so I like we can have a rapport.

Speaker 2:

But that's. I'm not going to hire you to be a coder just because we both like dogs and both believe in training our dogs. Well, right. So what happens in our mind is we start skipping steps. We go I like this person. And so, number one, you're not going to ask them the tough questions because you don't want to know, right? That's one thing. And two, we're going to ignore obviously poor responses to fair questions. We're going to justify I'm sure they didn't mean that this is a nice guy. I'm sure he didn't really mean that.

Speaker 2:

And so the way around this and I'm sure, mike, I hope I'm not stealing your own words, but is, when you fall in love or fall in like with the candidates, you now must do everything that you can to try and find out why you might not like them. That's good advice. You would probably also be excluding really good candidates. Because of how rigid that system is and how tight and strong it is. It doesn't freaking work. So you got to do something else. But on the opposite side, what do you have to do Now? You don't like someone. Now you've got to give them an extra shot. Keep digging, keep finding that common ground. Help them relax, help them be themselves.

Speaker 2:

Just imagine like this person doesn't talk to their mom like this. They don't talk to their boyfriend or their girlfriend or their kids like this. Probably don't talk to their boss like this. They're probably nervous. How can I calm them down, relax them, get their prefrontal cortex 100% back online so that their brain can start working. And when I hear I'm just ranting for a minute, I'll probably cut this from the show.

Speaker 2:

Their prefrontal cortex 100% back online so that their brain can start working. And when I hear I'm just ranting for a minute, I'll probably cut this from the show. But when I hear this happen a lot, clients are like, well, they need to be good with customers and if they can't be comfortable in an interview, then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like no, I'm calling bullshit Because a customer might be a $20, or a hundred thousand dollar engagement and they've already signed the first check. Right, and it's not. They're not going to quit because this person stutters around and stumbles around on their words a little bit or acts a little nervous by the time the project's done. They're all going to be best friends, probably, or at least close, and they're going to have gone through the tough stuff of running a project collaboratively.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, Josh, you're pointing out some interesting things there, because it's not just the interview and hire that matters. It's the first week, month, three months on the job and how can this person assimilate to the team? I had candidates sail through the interview process I thought were exceptional and came in and were just not good hires, weren't going to fit. And then I've had, once they came through, we're like well, you know, we probably could go with candidate A or B, but we, like you know we see potential and see he or she has a great growth mindset. They come in and they just turn out to be the best hire we've ever made.

Speaker 2:

Yes, it's that song. Listen, it's that song that you heard on the radio that got you to go buy that album. So you bought the album and that song wore its welcome after 15 or 20 plays. But it's the weird shit. It's that prog rock track that they had. That's complex. That may have, even when you're 14 years old and you're like that sounds a little heavy for me. I don't know about that. And that's the song that you're going to love for the rest of your life, Right? So it's the same thing.

Speaker 2:

So you've got to remember that when you're interviewing these people, they're interviewing sometimes for their whole lives, and I don't mean for their entire life, I mean for their livelihood. You know, I just placed a woman at an SI partner out of New York City. She hadn't worked in two years. Wonderful woman. A week before I interviewed her her husband lost his job. They have children. They don't have a lot of savings because they're fairly young still. He needed this job. Oh my God, Her nerves. And in those first interviews they were on and I could see it and I called her on it and she adapted and she adjusted. And you just got to point it out and say, Mike, are you feeling a little bit nervous? There's a lot on the line because of this conversation right now.

Speaker 1:

No, not personally.

Speaker 2:

No, not personally, but in an interview you may, not you but a candidate might, and when you call them out on it, they can go. Is it showing that badly? Am I really coming off that nervous? And now you like you shied some light on the problem, so I just wanted to rant for a few minutes. I haven't ranted in a long time on the show, so I just wanted to rant for a minute.

Speaker 3:

Josh. How do you feel now that you've ranted?

Speaker 2:

I feel better.

Speaker 1:

Just to go on it. I think there's a lot of good nuggets in there. One of the other things to note is, at the end of the day, we talked about this idea of liking somebody for some particular reason, and I think everyone kind of knows, you know, just because they went to the same school, it's not no reason to treat them specifically in any particular way. But there's also, you know, the opposite bias too. It's like you know the number of people I've seen that are like, actually they went to the school that was my rival or something like that and again I use school as the example or like like, let's say, if somebody went to Harvard or something like that, there's, there's immediate bias around anything that you see with their resume and just being aware of like, hey, what is biased information on here?

Speaker 1:

Yes, maybe I worked at Google, maybe I went to Georgia Tech. Those are positive, certainly in the direction. But you know, if I can't talk, if I can't communicate, if I can't use the technical skills that I need to on the job, none of that's really relevant. So both positive and negative bias is something that we need to be aware of. What is the?

Speaker 1:

best and worst interview processes that you've ever seen or heard of man there are some processes that exist now where they sort of go in the opposite direction. They're like oh coding interviews are too hard, they're too technical, we make people too nervous. Let's do the opposite. Let's give them a take-home test, let's give them a lot of time. If they want to code off-camera, that's fine, and, of course, even just hearing this, that sounds ridiculous. But there are companies that do this that will actually hire people based on that, and the only why they exist again is because there are big salaries on the line and the process tends to involve a lot of different interview types.

Speaker 1:

It's not can you code or did you answer what your greatest strength and weakness was? Well, it's can you code, can you communicate, but can you design a big system? And then can you do it repeatedly. So it's not just was it like were you lucky or were you able to do it more than once? Netflix is well known for having somewhere between six and eight interviews to get a single job, but they also pay, you know, five $600,000. So it's definitely well worth it if you can get through the whole process, but you really have to show multiple times that you know what you're talking about in multiple different dimensions with multiple different people.

Speaker 1:

Maybe that person that gave you a passing interview at the coding for the first one maybe they liked you, maybe they didn't get as far as they wanted to, but they assume, like you said, bias Maybe they assume that they liked you. We talked a little bit too much but you basically had the answer. But in that second one, maybe the second coding interview, you realize, oh no, there's a problem. It's not actually the right fit. Just processes that are more robust, that have test a lot of different things really is kind of the way to go.

Speaker 3:

How much rigor do you want to put into the process? I would assume for deeper technical roles, more senior expertise, it's a more rigorous interview process versus junior. Can you talk to that a little bit? I'm curious because you've seen a lot of processes, you know what works what doesn't work.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think the more senior the role is, the more you really really need to be sure. And one of the best ways I've seen especially smaller companies kind of make that work. Well, it's just a trial. It's like, hey, I'll pay you more than what I should for the first month, but then you know, after a month I'll have a really good sense of what you can and can't do and that's a really kind of good way to go about it.

Speaker 1:

A lot of engineers, especially the really high demand ones, don't like the trial experience. But the way to sort of counteract that is being willing to give a little more than you maybe should in that first month and then cut it off and be like, hey, this isn't working early and have that kind of early right to terminate. It's kind of a delicate balance because you know as engineers, engineers make a good chunk of money. They want to be able to make that good chunk of money, so they're willing to work hard. But even after that first month it's a really good. It's really hard for somebody to hide that long in the interview process and not realize whether or not they're actually capable of doing what you're asking them to do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Mike, there are companies that I've worked with that will pay for people's time to do some of these at tests or evaluations. What are your thoughts on that? And I just want to sort of mini preamble when people are in high demand and they're talking to multiple companies, they don't always want to dedicate five, six, eight hours to some sort of technical examination. They couldn't do it for every single company. So now companies are actually paying for their time a hundred bucks an hour or something like that. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1:

I think for the most part, it doesn't really solve the problem. You know, the really really good engineers for one are going to skip right over it. They're going to go to the companies that don't ask them to cause. Like a hundred dollars an hour might be great for some folks, but again, if it's, it depends on, I guess to a certain extent, the level, and not everyone can afford to pay every single candidate a crazy amount of money. So usually for the for the best sort of engineers, it ends up being ones that they'll actually skip altogether.

Speaker 1:

There's actually data that we've collected in the past just about how hard it is to get the good engineers to go through the interview process. Again, it's like with Netflix there's five, six, eight different interviews that might exist. It's like that's a big commitment. To ask Eight interviews is a lot of time off if you're still working and if you're not working it's still a lot of time. So at the end of the day, the balance and the reward really needs to be worth it and you just need to make sure you're aligned with it Is. And to a certain extent you have to decide what a senior engineer's time is worth, and that's kind of dependent on their own company as well.

Speaker 3:

In the year 25, at least in the Salesforce industry. Right now we're seeing it's not like a couple of years ago where you couldn't find talent and there was this escalating salary war for all levels of talent and now Pendulum's kind of swung the other way. Does that have an impact on how you can recruit talent? I would say there's probably a larger supply of really good talent on the market right now. So if I'm a hiring manager and I'm talking to Josh to either fulfill roles in-house or I'm talking to other Josh me to pull on a team, how does that factor into my decision-making and how I find talent?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, at the end of the day, I think so many people are looking to like if there's 2000 candidates in the pipeline for the job they're like, let's pick the top 10. That's that's not the right way to approach recruiting. A lot of the time I don't think it's actually just pick the top or the big 10 that work, 10, that will do the job. But you don't need the 10 best candidates, you just need 10 qualified candidates. At the end of the day, I think people are really worried about the FOMO, fear of missing out, you know, and it doesn't really matter too much about picking the best one, provided they do the right thing for the job. You're right. This market currently makes it so that certain things, like the trials that I talked about earlier, like give them a month and see whether or not it works Engineers are more willing to do that now, when it's harder to find a job. So definitely it's something that I think companies can use to their advantage.

Speaker 2:

Are you still involved in the Salesforce ecosystem to a degree, or have you been kind of out of it for a little bit? I'm kind of curious.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I've got friends, I have contacts in it, but it's not something that I actively work in. At the end of the day, the Salesforce ecosystem isn't all that different from any other engineering jobs, though, because the markets are still the same. When you look at the big companies that are laying off tech workers left and right, salesforce was one of them for sure. So this focus on tech work and sort of finding the best people is kind of relevant, regardless of where you're interviewing at.

Speaker 2:

Mike, could you please share the number one thing that companies should be doing differently than they're doing right now, in general that you're seeing when it comes to bringing on top talent, especially technical talent?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. At the end of the day, you really need to just focus on your interview process. Do you even have an interview process? There are so many companies that are, especially the smaller ones, where they have a rough idea of what the process should be. It's not written down anywhere, or if it is written down, it's not really codified. Making some sort of routine that you stick to makes you more fairly evaluate candidates. If you end with a routine in any interview process, you're going to be better off. Makes sense.

Speaker 2:

Everyone. This has been the Salesforce Hiring Edge with Josh Matthews, josh LaQuire and Mike Marochka. You can find Mike on LinkedIn. Last name M-R-O-C-Z-K-A. First name Mike. You can find him on Amazon. You can find him on GitHub. He's an incredible guest. We can't thank you enough for being on this show today. My friend, you're welcome back at any time and we wish you vast amounts of success with your consulting career and everything that you're doing to help companies out there in the ecosystem to get better and better at bringing on better teams. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on.

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