Here are 21 tips I’ve used when interviewing/hiring hundreds of people over the past 5 years. I hope you find them useful.
- If you’re asking questions that can be Googled, you’re wasting everyone’s time or you’re lazy.
- If you’re not asking questions that indicate someone’s attitude, you’re missing about 80% of their ability to succeed.
- A small test of fundamentals is far more indicative of success than gotcha questions.
- Ask what they do for fun and outside of work, get them to talk about it.
- Have the interviewee pair-program with you for a simple problem or two using the answer from 4 above.
- Focus on communication, curiosity, and creativity when pairing vs. the right answers.
- Understand how they work. Headphones on and solo? Or are they happy chatting and talking at a large table of other developers?
- Challenge them beyond their level of expertise and see how they respond. How do they respond to failure?
- Do they smile or laugh at themselves? Not taking yourself too seriously is pivotal to team dynamics and flexibility as requirements and projects change focus.
- Do they work on their own stuff outside of work or do they play video games or engage in other passive activities?
- Do they share? Have a blog? Are they on GitHub?
- Don’t give a code test and ask interviewees to perform “test”. This is another waste of time and a lazy way of evaluating candidates.
- See tip #1, #12 and don’t give the impression you’re too busy to interview someone, you’ll only get desperate developers.
- Developers with computer science backgrounds do just as well as those without.
- Introverted developers are just as good as extroverted ones, don’t confuse personality with ability.
- The fit is more important than ability if you’re interviewing someone for a maintenance role that’s much different than a greenfield project.
- Your interviewee should interview you, it’s a two-way street if they don’t ask questions about the culture or project that’s a red flag.
- Why are they looking to change careers? This will give you insight into how they will fit into your company/culture.
- Read their resume and ask questions about the skills they say are their strongest, be to the point and if they say they are 8/10 on a skill, inquire on that, not on something they might know.
- Ask how they learn new things, some people are book learners, others are doers.
- Trust your gut, if you don’t have a good instinct for people, bring someone who does into the evaluation process.
As I said I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidate and learned a lot over the years when evaluating people for potential roles and these ones seem to work the best.