Interviewing Techniques¶
You must reach a yes or no decision about the candidate during your session (on the area you’re covering). Do everything you can to avoid exiting with a “maybe”—we can’t hire “maybes.”
If you’re unsure on something, immediately ask follow-up questions that will help confirm or refute your initial impressions.
Test the limits of their knowledge—dig until you can’t get any further. For technical areas, you can use “what if” questions and on-the-fly requirements changes to probe beyond what you’ve already heard. (“How would your design have been different if you had to...?”)
Don’t be afraid to wait for an answer. You’re asking tough questions—hopefully ones they haven’t heard and memorized before—and they’ll need time to think about their answers. Long pauses are OK.
If you’re getting snap answers that are poorly thought-out, it may just be interviewing jitters. Gently prompt the candidate that pausing to think is OK: start your next question with something like, “Take a moment to think about how you (rest of question).”
Always start with what they actually did, not what they would or should do. (“How should an agile development process be implemented” will get you a textbook answer. “How did your agile process work” will get you real information.) Once you have this baseline, you can start to explore hypotheticals like, “what would you want to change?”
Don’t accept stock answers, and don’t be afraid to cut off memorized speeches—especially ones that don’t answer the question you asked.
Watch for “we.” If all of a candidate’s answers use “we,” it may be modesty or a sense of team ownership, but it could also be that the candidate wasn’t personally involved. Ask follow-up questions until it’s clear.
Be conscious of “echoing.” Clever interviewees will pick up on the issues facing our team from their early interviews, and then tailor their answers in later sessions to respond to (echo) these issues.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (it shows a certain ability to think on the fly), but don’t mistake this technique for deep and spontaneous insight into our needs.
Ask open-ended questions, not yes-or-no ones.
Don’t guess or assume. Ask!
Just because something is on their resume, or their name is in the product credits, or they allude to something, that doesn’t make it so. Ask them to be sure.
Many of these techniques are part of an approach called “behavioral interviewing,” which can help you arrive at a firm decision on whether or not we should hire the candidate.
Things You Can’t Ask
There are a bunch of questions you must not ask candidates, because they violate our own policies, or for legal reasons (which can vary by location).
HR provides this information as part of interview training; we don’t try to duplicate their information here.