How to get the best out of a technical interview

A lot of good companies strive to provide a good candidate-experience during the entire interview process. Once shortlisted, the recruitment team and the hiring manager go the extra mile to ensure that candidate is kept warm and provided all the assistance that is needed, so that the experience is hassle-free and pleasant. For example, they try to setup the candidate for success during the interview by providing relevant training material and giving them time to prepare, book air tickets and hotel, and arrange a call with the hiring manager if needed. While all these are good, there are other subtle things that if overlooked, may have a more long lasting impact on the candidate experience and her image of the company.

One such thing is interaction with the interviewers on the actual interview when solving technical tasks. While interviewers make all the effort to make the candidate feel comfortable and want to hire the best candidate, sometimes they don't realize that they may be inadvertently causing the candidate to feel rushed and nervous, which may cause her to not be able to give her 100%. Let me point out a few instances where this might be happening:

• Subconsciously expecting the candidate to read the interviewer's mind. She should not need to deal with vague instructions, unclear expectations, or the mind-games of trying to guess "what does the interviewer actually want". Interviewer is not doing this intentionally, it just starts happening naturally where he thinks certain things should happen without asking. But this can put a lot of undue pressure on her mind and valuable time is wasted away which could have been better spent working on the solution of the problem.
• Not allowing the candidate to continue on her path to her solution. Onus is on the interviewer to let creativity flow and genuinely make an effort to understand her thought process and challenge her on her approach - if what she is saying seems reasonable to you and she is able to defend the darts thrown at her, let her continue on her path to her solution, and not your solution in the cheat-sheet. This creates a congenial and intellectual atmosphere and the interviewer is not constantly trying to interrupt and cut short her thought process to steer her to his solution, which can be jarring for both the parties and make the candidate more nervous than she already is.
• Nitpicking: Are we fretting over minor details when there is less than 30 - 45 minutes on a task she has never seen before, and there is high pressure on her to get the core logic of the problem solved? An example of this could be nulls have not been handled or these edge cases have been missed. We definitely should expect her to do this if there is enough time remaining and she actually missed them even after we had set that expectation (remember, no mind reading please :-)).

In a real work setting, she may have days to design and code the same task with all edge cases covered. Nitpicking about this may make her feel rushed and nervous while leaving a long lasting bad impression on her

• Last but not the least, asking super hard questions which cannot be meaningfully completed in 30 - 45 minutes. I was reading this article about why Google stopped asking crazy hard interview questions and it highlights how easy it is for the interviewer to fall into the trap of making him feel smart in front of the candidate, his peer interviewers or boss while she is feeling miserable.

If she feels she was grilled, what are the chances she or her friends will re-apply in future?

This can be addressed by training the interviewers appropriately and making them aware of the above issues that can inadvertently happen despite best intentions. For many years I have been coaching interviewers, especially junior ones, to be on top of this aspect. The Hiring Manager should ensure that his team of interviewers are focused on the goals of a technical interview, which are:

1. Will the candidate be able to do design, and write modular and working code if they join the team? Are we giving the candidate a preview of the culture around how the team does design and code reviews?
2. Can the candidate discuss design, code and problems with the people they'll be working with?
3. Can the candidate reason about arbitrary problems and constraints?

The interviewers should go through Are the interview programming questions appropriately selected? and How to do well measured programming interviews and importance of interviewer humility to achieve these goals. Hiring Manager should also ensure that his team of interviewers are all in aligment with the Job Description (JD) as mentioned in 5 well-balanced tips Hiring Manager should follow to hire top engineers.

It is important that the interviewers are setting up the candidate for success during the interview and an environment is created to help the candidate succeed.

There is a very fine line between discussing multiple approaches to solving a programming question and grilling the candidate, and interviewers should make sure that they are within the Lakshman Rekha or the proverbial limit. Even if you are not hiring the candidate, she should go back with pleasant memories of her interviews and say good things about the experience. Word spreads, and we definitely want she and her friends to come back and re-apply in the future.

What do you think? Please share your valuable thoughts in the comments section below.

Disclaimer: All the postings and views on this site are my own and has no bearing whatsoever on my employer's position.

Keywords: #hiring, #interview, #interviewing, #ProgrammingInterview, #skills, #HiringManager