Thoughts on Interviewing

I've been privileged enough to have conducted quite a few interviews throughout my career. Of late I've been doing quite a few shadow interviews to help coach new interviewers, and there have been three common pieces of advice that come up. Before you read further, these are meant to make you self-reflect on your interview style, and on interviews that you have done recently. They are suggestions, and you have to find what works for you, your personal style and the company you work for.

An interview is a perfect time to practice active listening. My TL;DR on active listening is that you should try to listen without jumping to a conclusion, formulating a retort or thinking about why you disagree. Instead, you should listen to understand what they are trying to tell you. If things aren't clear try not to interrupt, ask clarifying questions or repeat back your understanding to them. It's likely there will be a gap in understanding that they will fix rather than you filling it in with an assumption. There is a lot on the internet on this topic, and I am very far from being an expert on the topic so if this is a new topic for you please talk to others near you, or read articles like this one.

Know why you're asking the question. You should know why you're asking each question and you should know what you want to learn. As an example, think about the following two questions:

1. Tell me about your last project.
2. On your last significant project, what was the most challenging part of that project?

The first question is very open-ended. Yes, we may get other questions off the back of it, but we could have spent 5 minutes out of the hour on that question. Assuming you give the candidate 10 minutes to ask you questions, Was it worth 10% of the interview? What we learn will be down to how well prepared the candidate is for such a question, and how forthcoming they are. The second question is more specific. We should discover something that the candidate finds challenging. How they overcame it? What support did they require? Did they have to collaborate with others? Did they have to skill up? Did they make mistakes? What did they learn from it?

Don't force your solution onto the candidate. This one is very specific to software engineer interviews where we ask the candidate to solve a problem. While you may have an ideal solution in mind, don't force the candidate to solve it your way. The reason for this comes back to what you want to learn. If you want to learn that they can take cues from you about what to do, then you should nudge them to your solution and see how far they get. If you want to learn whether they can solve problems autonomously then you should let them solve it themselves and ask them clarifying questions when they get stuck. I'm hoping you're landing on option 2 where you have an autonomous individual. It's okay if they don't solve it the perfect/best/correct way. You will learn how they solve problems, how do they respond to challenges, can they explain complex ideas, what's in their toolkit, can they identify knowledge gaps and ask for help? All of these things are worth learning, as the candidate may just require a bit more experience or some coaching. If they get to solve the problem their way then they should leave the interview feeling good about their solution. 

Having written this I realise I assumed we all agree the interview should be a positive experience - poor form on my side. We should always bias towards a good candidate experience. Interviewing is a two-way street, the candidate is also assessing whether they want to work for your company. If they have a horrible experience then they're likely to put others off on applying. If they have a good experience then it's going to help them consider an offer if they get one.

I hope this post sparks some self-reflection after the next interview you conduct. As I said at the start, these are suggestions and you should evaluate what works best for yourself and your situation.