Speaking as an interviewer at a corporation, referrals put your name higher on a list of people to interview, and they get you absolutely nothing else.
Internal recruiters/HR are also terrible. I've lost count of how many times we'll receive a CV from someone that applied online and then when we call them they tell us they applied months ago and aren't interested anymore. So don't feel too disheartened.
I can't get my head around coding challenges. When I was looking for a job when I wanted to leave my graduate position I encountered a few of these. Either it was homework that they reviewed (and printed out the wrong source code when interviewing me) or it was a C# written test when I'd never done any C# in my life. I'm not really a fan of super technical show-me-you-know-angulars-implementation-detail interviews, I think it's just an opprtubity for the interviewer to act like they're shit hot. If they've got (even a tiny amount of) programming experience, show they're interested, can work through simple problems and describe what they're doing they can probably pick up whatever the fashionable programmibg language/library is now.
On the topic of tailoring an interview, I think its nice to keep some common questions across candidates so there's some useful reference point and bechmark.
It's nothing to so with sex. If they were implementing rules for the TV game show Countdown would there be an issue there? I doubt it. You shouldn't have to be scared of checking if someone is familiar and briefed on the subject matter.
Internal recruiters/HR are also terrible. I've lost count of how many times we'll receive a CV from someone that applied online and then when we call them they tell us they applied months ago and aren't interested anymore. So don't feel too disheartened.
I can't get my head around coding challenges. When I was looking for a job when I wanted to leave my graduate position I encountered a few of these. Either it was homework that they reviewed (and printed out the wrong source code when interviewing me) or it was a C# written test when I'd never done any C# in my life. I'm not really a fan of super technical show-me-you-know-angulars-implementation-detail interviews, I think it's just an opprtubity for the interviewer to act like they're shit hot. If they've got (even a tiny amount of) programming experience, show they're interested, can work through simple problems and describe what they're doing they can probably pick up whatever the fashionable programmibg language/library is now.
On the topic of tailoring an interview, I think its nice to keep some common questions across candidates so there's some useful reference point and bechmark.