[A guest blog post for Geeklist by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. Gayle is the founder / CEO of CareerCup, and the author of Cracking the Coding Interview (Amazon.com’s #1 best-selling interview book) and The Google Resume. Gayle has worked a software engineer for Microsoft, Apple and Google, and served on Google’s hiring committee. You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Quora, or her blog.]

I talk everyday to candidates who are confused, overwhelmed, and frustrated by the technical interview process. I won’t lie; some of this is the candidate’s fault. They should be prepared and a lot of their questions could be answered from their recruiters (or from their friends).

That said, recruiters and companies can do a lot more help their candidates than they do. What’s in it for them? Better prepared candidates. Happier candidates. Candidates who will refer their friends. Less work on the recruiter’s end answering silly questions. All of this means one thing ultimately: the company will have an easier time hiring. Isn’t this what you want?

Here are six ways you can improve the process for your candidates, and in turn for yourself.

#1 Tell Candidates What Types of Questions Will Be Asked

Many candidates have no idea what to expect in an interview (especially technical interviews), so they waste their time in preparing unnecessary topics. The better prepared the candidate is, the better you can assess them. If you’re going to be asking technical questions, tell them – and tell them what sorts of topics will be involved.

Even better – give them some direction on how they can prepare.

#2 Explain How They Will Be Evaluated

For technical roles, many candidates think that they will be evaluated on some absolute basis or that they think they must get every question correct. Then, when they make some mistakes in the interview, they panic and think they’ve suddenly failed.

Tell the candidates that perfection isn’t required for an offer, and that their performance will be judged relative to other candidates on the same question. Let the candidates know that even the best candidates make mistakes, in part because technical question are supposed to push them to think.

Do you really want candidates panicking because they made a single mistake? This doesn’t help anyone.

#3 Tell Candidates When They’ll Hear From You (And Do It!)

Don’t leave candidates hanging. Before going in for an interview, the candidate should know the recruiting timeline. When will they hear back from you? Who do they contact if they haven’t gotten a response? Ideally, give your candidates at least two contacts they can follow-up with.

Many candidates, for some reason, think that if a company doesn’t respond to them within X days, then it’s means a rejection. (“My friend heard back from this company next day, and it’s been three days for me. I guess I’m rejected.”) Yes, I know that’s not true, and you know that’s not true, but the candidate doesn’t. So tell them.

#4 Give Feedback

If you’re doing first three things (and are you? Are you really?), here’s one you’re probably not doing: giving candidates feedback. Rejecting them? Tell them why. What did they struggle with? This is an excellent way to set yourself apart as a company. Candidates will appreciate this and be better prepared if they re-interview in another year – and they may even tell their friends to apply to you.

And, if you do this between phone screens and onsite interviews, you’ll wind up with better prepared candidates. All the better for you!

#5 Tell Them and How They Can Reapply

Just because you reject a candidate once doesn’t mean you’ll never want to hire them. Maybe they had a bad day. Maybe they were just too inexperienced. Maybe your interviewers made a bad call. Who knows? A not-ideal candidate could easily turn into a great one within a year or so.

If you reject a candidate (or if they decline your offer), let them know when and how they can reapply. How long do they have to wait? In what cases might you consider them earlier than this? Do they re-apply online, or do they reach out to their recruiter? What happens if their recruiter has left the company by then?

Let the candidate know the answers to all of these questions. More clarity here = more candidates.

#6 Ask the Candidate for Feedback

What else are you struggling with? Are some of your interviewers turning off candidates? (Let’s be honest: if you have developers doing interviews, they may not all be the most, uh, “social” bunch. That dev lead of yours might be a “really nice guy once you get to know him,” but he might also be coming off negatively in an interview. You need to know this information.)

You’ll never know what is going wrong until you ask. Give your candidates a way to provide (anonymous and non-anonymous) feedback on your interview process and on their interviewers.

When you improve your recruiting process for candidates, you improve your ability to get the right candidates. No one – not even the hottest companies – can afford to be turning off candidates.

The best part? It’s really easy to do this. Create a document – I’ve helped companies do this in the past (please contact me if interested) – that you send to all your candidates about how to prepare, what to expect, and answers to other common questions. This is perhaps the best bang-for-your-buck change you can make to your interview process. 

- Gayle Laakmann McDowell

Imagine you’re a startup co-founder. You are running a killer stack in node.js on the front and back-end with Mongoose, Redis, Hadoop, jQuery, Express, and your team is running so fast they test on their local machines and push straight to production. You’re migrating from Heroku to Joyent and you’re split between the two, new releases are pushing out weekly and the site is screaming. Then it happens. Investors freeze pre-christmas and 2012 is coming to a screeching halt, so the core team finds side work…which becomes full-time work. No problem, your co-founder is a bad-ass coding cowboy with a golden hat, but wait… he’s found a passion, a big passion and opportunity for something he just can’t pass up and it’s not your company. So as a lifelong friend who believes in doing what you love, you tell him the only rational thing you can say: “it’s ok do what you love… I got this”. But wait. The last time you had to code anything was in 1999, meaning having to find and hire an entire tech team from the ground up…immediately.

This is my story over the past 3 months. It’s not a sob story. On the contrary, it’s a story of excitement, passion and personal growth. I saw it as a huge opportunity to utilize the system we built in Geeklist and become my own case study. Here’s what I did.

Step one was to identify all of the skills needed to keep the site running smooth so that no user ever felt the changes. 

I needed a stable front end engineers, a solid back end hacker and some full-stack node.js rock-stars sprinkled on top. Easy enough, right? Well if you’re in tech and you’re hiring anyone you know it’s hard. If you’re hiring on the node.js stack the qualified candidates dwindle even more… or do they? I immediately posted this job post on Geeklist:

In less than a day I had over 30 replies by amazing engineers from around the world. What amazed me most was that most of them have been Geeklist users for over a year and some were even our very own ambassadors. Right under our nose.

Step two was to consider the value beyond financial for developers to want to work with Geeklist. Even though we did have a few new investors and revenues began to kick in, It wasn’t not enough to pay for everything or everyone we needed. There had to be another incentive.

Here is where building in a new technology helps. Turns out It wasn’t cash incentives most of the applicants expected. They wanted the chance to contribute to Geeklist, to improve their skills in node.js, gain some street cred and be a part of an amazing and international team.

This is where the personal growth came in. I learned in under two weeks the value of a strong brand. I learned just how much our users believe in Geeklist as a global community. There has been much written about Founders stress, anxiety and the damage being a founding ceo can have on a person…it can take a toll. This is a story of the opposite. I’ve never felt more joy in my career than when people I have never met before offer to help for some options and the opportunity to work together with me and Geeklist. It’s a great feeling and one that makes being a founder awesome.

Step three was to get down to business… armed with Geeklist Convos, and a bunch of amazing engineers wanting to help, I set out to talk to as many as possible. I met with some in SF and many via skype. One by one they offered to help, to take on pieces of the project and to become part of the team. Then Sam called me out of the blue. He wanted to take on the challenge of becoming the Geeklist CTO. The best part? I met him on Geeklist about a year ago when he added this impressive card and I reached out to grab coffee. (Those of you who think grabbing coffee/tea with someone new is a waste of time are dead wrong.)

Step four is to pull the trigger on every one with the passion, skills and availability. Immediately. Don’t wait. Give them a chance and a challenge and watch them deliver! 

Lessons learned?

1. Your best resources are within your own network, the trick is to surface them. Geeklist did this for me, not because it’s my network, but because it surfaced up my network. That can work for anyone.
2. Don’t worry about your budget constraints if you believe in your brand. Find others who are passionate about your product and reach out to them. You may be surprised at how far your core believers are willing to go for your startup or cause. 
3. Don’t be afraid to go outside of your region or even country to find people passionate about your product. There are no boundaries or borders in the interwebs. When it comes to great coders, they are everywhere around the world and excited to help. Hire based on passion and skill, not location.
4. If you see someone interesting on Geeklist. Invite them for coffee, a skype chat or a Convo inside Geeklist. You never know what that may become in the future.
5. Passion, achievements and an active profile is more important than resumes, answers to questions, challenges, tests or raw data scrubbed from every possible source on the web. If you want a team that pours love into your product, hire based on their love of your product more than anything else. 

Meet the New Geeklist Family. Found and contacted using only Geeklist. We will be adding more passionate and talented members all month long, until every task in Asana has an awesome developer willing to help us complete it. We are drinking our own punch and it tastes pretty darn good. If you’d like to try it too just contact us at info@geekli.st - Reuben Katz, Co-founder and CEO of Geeklist - grateful to have a passionate community.

It’s true that you can learn almost anything for free online these days. The trick is knowing where to find the information you need, though. These ten sites will help you get your geek on and learn something new.

1. 5min Tech

From tech news and product reviews to quick tips and tutorials, 5min Tech is the perfect place to get your geek fill in just a few minutes. There’s also a specific DIY section listed in the tech category including simple how-tos and more in-depth hacks.

2. Codecademy

Codecademy offers coding lessons that are not only free, but fun and challenging as well. With new languages being added all the time, the site currently offers lessons in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Python.

3. Google Code University

For more variety in coding lessons, Google Code University is a great place to look. Available lessons include Android app development, C++, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python and Go.

4. Radio Lingua

There are plenty of places to learn a foreign language online, but the tools you can take with you anywhere are often the ones that really make a difference - at least when it comes to regular practice. Radio Lingua’s one-minute language podcast series offers standards like French and German, as well as others like Flemish, Arabic and Zulu. If you have an iPhone, Mindsnacks’ language games are a great addition to any language-learning program.

5. Khan Academy

If math and science are your thing, Khan Academy is where you want to be. This free collection of videos cover topics such as algebra, calculus, biology and chemistry, as well as offering finance, economics and history lessons.

6. Academic Earth

Similar in vein to Khan Academy, Academic Earth offers a wider variety of topics, including computer science, business and design.

7. Let’s Make Robots

Let’s Make Robots is full of advice, discussions, challenges and tutorials for building arguably one of the coolest things in the world. There’s even a beginner’s guide to help you build your very first robot in just two hours.

8. Stack Overflow

One of the best resources available for programmers is Q&A site Stack Overflow. Pretty much any question you have about coding can be answered here.

9. Hack This Site

If you’re an aspiring hacker, Hack This Sitewill help you hone your skills with articles, discussions and challenges.

10. Geekli.st

With the addition of a voting system for shared links on Geekli.st, you can now enjoy and curate the content, Reddit-style. The code-specific communities include Javascript, MySQL, Python, PHP and Ruby on Rails, giving you access to plenty of resources and in-the-know geeks to help you out.

This is a guest post by Corina Mackay

Corina is an inbound marketer and social media maven for Attendly, a white label ticketing and event registration startup. Attendly allows web developers to re-brand the product as their own and mark up the booking fees for ongoing profit sharing. You can follow Attendly on Twitter at @attendly.