"Don't be just a good interviewer, be the best one." 😎

This blog will walk you through some amazing features demonstration of meetcolab. You can create, schedule, edit, cancel, delete interviews and even change interviewers, just at your fingertips. Have complete flexibility over all your interviews and conduct only when you are free.

Create instant interviews

Need to start an interview immediately while still wanting to have all the features of meetcolab. Simply create a new interview by just entering candidate name and interviewtype.

• Additionally you can also provide candidate's email and upload resume. These are optional fields.

• Candidate name and email help keep track of interview history. We do not send any emails to candidates.

• As soon as you create interview successfully, a new row is created in interviews table and you're ready to start your interview.

Wasn't that super easy 😀? Let's talk more about how you can modify your interview details, after it has been created. Just click the three dots in front of your interview and have all the flexibility at your fingertips.

Edit Interview

Made some mistake while creating an interview or just wanted to update the resume? Simply update the interview details without having the need to create a new interview.

Change Interviewer

Create interview yourself and assign an interviewer of your choice. You can select from the list of interviewers from your team of current interviewtype.

Learn more about how to build your team on meetcolab and share various functionalities among team members.

Cancel or Delete Interviews

Meetcolab gives you an option to easily cancel or delete interviews as per your requirements.

1. Cancel Interview

   • Delete the calendar invites if it exists and mark the interview as cancelled.
   • The interview cannot be opened once cancelled.

2. Delete Interview

   • Delete all data about the interview including feedback and code if it exists.
   • All record is deleted from interviews table.

Thanks for reading 😊

Feel free to try meetcolab for conducting your next interview. It's completely free and built with latest cutting edge technology.

Let us know our areas of improvement in the comment section. You can also share any feedback in-app or by direct email to us at hello@meetcolab.com

What's new?

Your favorite whiteboard now with an option to save and clear

Whiteboard Mode allows you and candidates to visualize your thought process using shapes, lines, arrows and freeform drawing. The goal is to take you one step closer to the experience of a live on-site technical interview.

Take notes during the meeting with our best in town whiteboard which now comes with a feature to save all your work with just one click. Isn't this pretty cool! 😎 Review the sketch drawn during the meeting later to get a deeper insight of the meeting.

We're excited about this feature and hope it will upgrade your interviewing process - no need for screen sharing or third-party whiteboarding tools anymore!

Learn more about our realtime code-editor and collaborative whiteboard.

Set permission level for your team members

Have complete control over the accessibility of your interviewtype while still having the flexibility to invite other interviewers to your team The option to add interviewer comes with two permission level

• Admin : Can add/remove members, see all interviews of this interviewtype and see slots of all interviewers in team

• Member : No control over adding/removing members, can only see interviews conducted by them for this interviewtype, can only see their slots.

Learn about how to build your team on meetcolab and share various functionalities among team members.

Calendar Integration

Calendar integration enables us to show only those slots to candidates which you've marked and also available on your calendar so you don't have to worry about any clash in your meetings.

Tip of the day 💡

" Learning to adapt is the key to success "

Each one of us have been conducting interviews in a traditional manner and somehow we've been used to it. But considering the new normal, it is the need of the hour to adapt to better technologies.

Our very talented user Akash, just upgraded himself from taking interviews on Google docs to Meetcolab and his feedback is just what motivates us to improve ourselves everyday. Read about how meetcolab has made his interviewing experience better than ever before.

In this post, I wanted to go over how to write the interview feedback and use meetcolab to make sure we are making the right decision as an interviewer.

Why is interview feedback important?

Make the right decision

As human interviewers, we suffer from a lot of inherent biases.

To fix these biases, we first need to acknowledge them and not deny them:

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”

Writing detailed interview feedback helps us organize our thoughts, reason on facts rather than impressions, and avoid common interviewer biases.

Build and Improve Calibration

Written interview feedback helps interviewers understand each other’s way of evaluation, calibrate and improve as an interviewer with time. Reading feedback written by other interviewers has often taught me how to extract signals I was missing earlier or interesting questions I could have asked. This ends up being crucial in building a calibrated pool of interviewers in a company.

Enhanced insights for Leadership

One of the key responsibilities of hiring managers and executives is to build a great team and for this, they need to understand the hiring decisions made within the company over time. Well-written interview feedbacks lays down the fundamental blocks for building a great team.

Now I would walk you through how you can use meetcolab to take meeting notes and unlock your true potentials as an interviewer 😎

Comprehensive Note Taking Module

Why is a handy note taking module, like meetcolab, important while taking remote interviews?

• You can easily maintain your interview timeline which can later provide valuable insights about the interview.

• Quickly jot down plus and minus points, and interesting tidbits during the interview with appropriate signs.

• Any time a note is added, a time-stamp is also attached creating an easy to follow timeline. Later this timeline can be reviewed to figure out where a candidate was stuck.

• Review the timeline later for positive and negative signals during the interview, and then make an informed decision

View one of our sample feedback to get better insights into how to write a comprehensive feedback.

💡 Fun Story : Our interviewers were fed up of taking notes on paper or google docs, while conducting technical interviews. So we came up with the in-built feature of taking notes

Super Easy Keyboard Shortcuts

A demo of taking notes using keyboard shortcuts on meetcolab

We all can agree that keyboard shortcuts are super awesome 😎. They are easy and gets our job done faster. It becomes even more important while taking notes during a technical interview considering the time constraints and limited accessibility to other modes for taking notes. These shortcuts can improve your efficiency and you can take better notes in less amount of time.

- ctrl + shift + ↑ : Positive signal

- ctrl + shift + ↓ : Negative Signal

- ctrl + shift + / : Neutral Signal

- enter : Create a new row

- backspace : Delete a row

- tab : Jump to next row

- shift + tab : Jump to previous row

Tips on taking notes during a meeting

• Take signals during the interview : Writing short notes about signals gathered during the interview helps you evaluate positive and negative signals later.

• Keep record of time : At the end this will help you in evaluating how much time the candidate took in each question

• Take as much notes as possible : The more information you have about the interview, the easier it gets for you to evaluate.

• Be concise and write in your own voice : It's okay to mention areas where you were not able to extract relevant signals

"Interviewing a candidate is as much an art as it is a skill"

Read my previous blog on "Art of conducting technical interviews " to get deeper insights.

Thank you for reading. Let me know in the comments if you have any feedback and suggestions on writing a great interview feedback.

I remember the first time I took an interview for one of my juniors in college for the robotics project I was working on at that time. I asked him a few brainteaser questions similar to what was asked of me when I joined the project. Looking back, the interview was more about me trying to appear smart and less about evaluating the candidate.

"Producing a great interview requires you to acknowledge the fact that, or to pretend as if, the person you are interviewing is more knowledgeable or interesting than you" - Mokokoma Mokhonoana

As an interviewer, our goals during technical interviews are: A standard guideline I usually find quite useful to be a better interviewer is as follows:

Pre-Interview Preparation

Try to follow a structured approach for interviewing. Having clarity on which attributes to evaluate the candidate for helps us come up with the right set of questions. Be well prepared with the questions and read the resume of the candidate thoroughly before the interview. An example for such an exercise for system design interview will be:

Conducting the Interview

• Arrive on time — interviews are almost the first meaningful interaction of a candidate with the company employees. We should strive to create a great first impression.

• Get rid of all distractions like phone, messaging tabs on your browser and give your full attention during the course of the interview.

• Introduce yourself — give a brief introduction about yourself. Make the candidate feel comfortable by checking if they need some water or coffee. Also mention that you will be taking notes during the interview.

• Explain the format of the interview to set the right expectations. For example, a good introduction will be:

“This will be an hour long interview in which we will design an end-to-end system and discuss the tradeoffs around our design choices. We don’t expect to finish the design in 1 hour, but we will try to explore as much as we can. I will leave 5 minutes towards the end of the interview to answer any questions that you might have."

• Always present the question in written format to the candidate. This saves so much time in repeated explanations and avoids misunderstanding. Also, ask if the question is clear to the candidate once they have gone through it.

• Avoid early interruptions — Try to avoid giving hints too early or asking for explanations early on while the candidate is coming up with a solution. This disrupts the thought process of a lot of candidates and also biases them to think in the direction of the solution the interviewer is thinking. Be very judicious in giving hints since giving every hint is losing a chance to get an extra signal. The tradeoff lies in giving hints now to save time in the hope of collecting more hints later. With time and after calibration on a few interviews, you will learn to develop the right tradeoff balance.

• Guide if the candidate is going wrong or is stuck — If the candidate is going in the wrong direction, give hints to bring them back to the right track in the interest of saving time. The same rule applies if the candidate is stuck for more than 2 minutes on a problem and is unable to move ahead. A good hint that usually helps the candidates make progress is to ask them to come up with a working solution, even if it's suboptimal.

• Look for major red flags: A very wrong approach or confusion in the basic concept shows a lack of understanding of the domain and should be specially noted.

• End the interview on time: It's a good interviewing skill to end the interview on time. If you think you can extract more signals by extending for 5–10 mins, then it's fine to do so. In such cases, please ask the candidate if it's okay to extend the interview.

• Deliver a stellar candidate experience: Candidate experience is determined by how the candidate feels after the interview. The candidate shouldn’t feel dejected after the interview, instead, the interview should feel more like an experience of working with a colleague and learning something from it. Some key tips to deliver a great candidate experience are:

  1. Be humble and respectful to the candidate.

  2. Be patient and listen — Let the candidate complete their answer without jumping in and trying to appear smart. If you do not understand what the candidate is talking about, clarify by asking questions. If you are finding it really hard to understand the candidate thought process, it points to an inability of the candidate to communicate effectively.

  3. Treat every candidate as if they were a stellar candidate.

  4. Choose questions wisely and navigate the interview according to how the candidate is responding.

• Leave some time for the candidate to ask questions at the end.

Post-Interview Evaluation

Follow a scale for rating the candidate. Don’t just give an overall rating but rather rate along all the attributes mentioned earlier. Even if the candidate was an overall no-hire, the attribute-wise ratings are useful in the future for considering the candidate for other similar roles. Always give your final rating only after you have written down the detailed feedback of the candidate. It has often happened that my pre-thought ratings evolved after I penned down the detailed feedback. As with a lot of engineers, I hate to invest time in writing the feedback — however, over the years, I have figured out a way to write detailed interview feedback quite fast. Will write about that in my next post!

Thanks for reading! Let me know your thoughts in the comments. If there is anything else you will recommend for being a great interviewer I would love to learn about it!