Do's and don'ts of the interview process p.1

I have conducted a lot of interviews in my career, maybe 400 in total. We screen and prepare people for interviews with companies like Microsoft and Google, so these are the toughest interviews out there. I wasn’t good at this in the beginning, made all kind of mistakes. I hope I got better over the years and have a better perspective now. You see, when I started many years ago, we had no formal training for interviewing skills in our company; it was considered that if you are a good developer – you can interview people. It is obviously not true; there are many great engineers who can’t, and, most importantly, shouldn’t conduct interviews. Well, at least without training.

To my surprise, a lot of companies still have no guidelines and no education process for their interviews. I mean, like interviewer often doesn’t even know what kind of people company looking for this specific position or in general! How can you find the right people if you don’t know who are you looking for? Do you need smart, fast learning junior who will grow fast with the company, or do you need a seasoned veteran that can be completely autonomous? Or maybe you need an architect/lead level person to guide your team in a certain area? Those are different people, different approaches to interview them.

I think there is nothing more important for the success of the company than hiring the right people, and interviewing is at the core of this process. Hence, it always baffles me when a respectable company has a chaotic and inconsistent interview process. But what saddens me the most is when a really good professional is declined because interviewers followed a rigid or blind approach or used his or her OWN criteria of a good candidate, with complete disregard of requirements of company or positions actual needs.

This is a vast topic, so I will share here only a couple of my observations and interviewing guidelines here that I use for all my interviews (assuming you KNOW whom are you looking for!):

1. The interview is not about YOU. Nobody is interested in what YOU know, don’t try to assert yourself at the expense of others. The interviewee may not know certain topics and that is ok.
2. A positive attitude is a must. The person you are interviewing is already in a lot of stress, don’t need to add to this. Positive intent is even better. I always try to tell people in advance that one of the major goals of the interview is to provide feedback to them so they can improve. So they can’t really fail – they would get a job offer or good feedback they can use to try later.
3. Listen. It is quite common nowadays when interviewer is half listening and trying to do his other tasks simultaneously. Many times I’ve seen the interviewer staring into his laptop through the entire interview. I am guilty of that as well, and when this happens, you get a half-baked interview as a result.
4. The main skills I look for are problem-solving and the ability to learn fast. If you think about it – a person with these skills will be able to pick up the rest pretty quickly and will require the least amount of maintenance. Also, unlike technical skills, these are not easy to acquire. Sounds obvious? No, it isn’t, at least it is not obvious to many interviewers and hiring managers. I regularly encounter numerous examples when a candidate is declined based on that he doesn’t know some specific technology. This is so dumb. Like, the candidate is a fast learner, has a deep understanding of frontend development but doesn’t have Typescript experience. I mean, so what? How long will it take for this person to learn it? Like 3 days maybe or even a week? But you can’t acquire problem-solving skills easily.
5. Another essential skill to look for is communication. I know some software engineers think this is not important. Sadly, it is quite challenging even in tech to become a senior professional without communication skills. And it is a paint to work with such a person. After all, we all work with people and build products for people.

I can go on for a long time, but I’ll wrap it up here for now. As you can, these are very generic rules, but I wish somebody told me that 10 years ago. Enjoy!