The Interview “Check List”

My company, as with most provide interviewers with a basic questionnaire to which they can use to interview candidates. The more I interview, the more that I only reference this questionnaire when I actually run out of things to ask or talk about — this is extremely rare. I do not feel that this is unique to me either, I would suspect that if one is to make interviewing a candidate a success, they would have to verge away from questionnaires and turning interviews into a conversation.

I do not feel questionnaires are bad, but I feel that if you give interviewer a questionnaire, they sometimes feel obligated to run through it, without diving deep with a candidate.

As an Engineering Manager, I typically get assigned to do the Behavioral, Process, or Passion interviews — this lends better to open ended questions as opposed to coding interviews.

I understand the reasoning for questionnaires is mainly to hit certain criteria and find out different attributes of a candidate. However, if I were a candidate, after being asked question after question, I wouldn’t get a good sense of whether I wanted to join the company or not. In terms of retention, for the candidate and for us as the employer, as cliche as it sounds, it’s critical to spend time and get to know each other during these interviews.

And why wouldn’t you? As an Engineering Manager, when I interview ICs, I really am looking for someone who hits all the qualities of those that I want for my team (that is another blog). As an Engineering Manager, when I interview other Engineering Managers, I am looking for great peers. I feel that one of the best ways to get answers to what I am looking for is to ask deep questions — which is how I ran many of my interviews now. For the most part, I feel like I’ve had large success using this strategy.

I’m positive I can still improve in different ways, but this is my general strategy.

1. Review the Resume! I feel like this is often taken for granted. I would spend a good 20-30 minutes reviewing the resume, and generating open-ended questions based on my understanding of their resume. I’d try to avoid common questions such as “You had a 1-year gap here, what is the reason for that?” and lead into more questions that would help me gauge attributes that I am looking for in someone joining my team. Question such as “I see that in your recent job, you worked on embedded systems, however, in the job previous to that, you worked on front-end Web UI. Can you speak about what it was like to switch?”
2. Actively Listen. When conducting the interview, I actively listen to the candidate (so much that I put my phone outside of my room office). When I ask questions and I get answers from the individual, I always try to ask one follow-up question. I found out that asking additional questions based on what they respond with gives me a deeper understanding of the individual. For instance, one in the past was:
   • Me: Can you tell me a bit about your role in interviewing candidates at your current company?
   • Candidate: For sure, we get partitioned up into doing different roles, which I can see pros and cons to, and I typically do the passion and interest type interviews.
   • Me: So, you just said that you can see pros and cons in how your company does interviewing, can you name them?
3. Be Engaged. I have been part of many interviews to which I felt the interviewer was just not “into it” — I’m not exactly sure why, maybe they feel that interviewing is a chore (to me, it’s exhilarating). I found out that if I am eyes opened, leaned forward, and ready to be engaged with the interviewee, the chances of the interviewee reciprocating that is much higher.
4. Have back up questions of your own. I have a set up off the wall backup questions that I have (not specific to their resume) that I typically ask if I ran out of things to talk about. Questions are always open ended and always have a follow up question. One of my favorites is, “Rate your programming skill from 1-10.” and then following that up with “What metric did you use to determine that?”

To me, interviewing is extremely fun. It is worth spending the time doing, preparing, and building up good interviewing skills. Sure, it’s time consuming, and the time is worth the effort. After all, we’re looking for great peers, great individual contributors, and eventually, great relationships.