This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Rufat Khaslarov
Tune up Interviewing Skills with Spices
Not long ago, I’ve presented the webinar for the local technical interviewers' community on the “Typical technical interview session with spices” topic. The motivation for it was the results of the survey. There was a load of questions such as “How to make a candidate feel comfortable?”, “How efficiently conduct an interview and make things reactively faster?”, there was also a high demand for tips & tricks, and “How to make a session smooth and easy-going?”. Therefore, I’ve decided to break down the interview phases by function and collected spices for them.
What are spices?
In the real world, it’s a product or substance primarily used for making your food more colorful, or for giving it a fantastic flavor. But in the context of the article, spices are advice, tips & tricks that might be valuable for interviewers and help them to avoid common mistakes, especially, in the beginning. I’ve gathered them from various sources: from my own experience, from the experience of other interviewers, escalations, and problems we’ve faced together with the community.
For a better understanding of the typical interview structure, please see my previous post.
Preparation (time-saving)
- Preparation is mandatory. Sometimes we want to improvise and think that’s ok not to get ready for an interview. But in the outcome, it might lead to misleading questions and behavior, wasting time on redundant things, and missing requirements. At the same time, preparation should not be time-consuming, just take a piece of paper and write down questions or topics you want to dive into, and off you go.
- Keep your knowledge up-to-date. As interviewers, we’re not always checking the same list of technologies/skills/tools, that’s why check the latest updates, refresh your mind on matters, learn new stuff all the time and never stop improving yourself.
- Check CV first. CV is the first document, the first piece of information about a candidate. Therefore, check it wisely, sometimes, an interview can be called off after that or another one should be scheduled because of a candidate’s skill set.
- Check previous interviews. From time to time, I participate in pre-screening interviews, those sessions took 30 minutes, and after that candidate is guided to the real interview session. Check if there are results of the previous interviews/pre-screening sessions, it might save a lot of your time and force you to revise the questions or remove duplicated topics, and so on.
- Take requirements into account. Use requirements as an entry point. Sort all the topics you want to ask by priority from highest to lowest to exclude less prioritized topics in case of running out of time.
- Topics/questions. There’re two groups of interviewers, one of them prepares questions, another one just topics. The second technique is better for experienced interviewers, who have a kind of database of questions in their mind ordered by topics.
- Theory or practice. Attention! Holy war detected. But there’s the golden mean here, just combine both of them. Prepare code snippets, practical scenarios, and through that, you can ask clarifying questions and that’s definitely will save your time (it’s better off using a lot of short snippets than a big one).
Introduction (comfort)
As I mentioned earlier, one of the popular questions was “How to make a candidate feel comfortable?”. For this purpose, the introduction comes to the scene. It’s a short phase, don’t spend too much time on that, but the whole comfort depends on the first 10–15 minutes.
- Be positive, smile, and shine. Clear up your mind, forget about the problems, crazy management, or conflict with a customer and be nice with a non-guilty candidate.
- Don’t be late. That the most unpleasant thing I’ve faced when I was a candidate. Never ever do that. At that very moment, a candidate thinks about awful things. For instance, “Maybe an interview was canceled?” or “The clock is ticking, I got to go, where is an interviewer?”. Never be late, and watch your manners.
- Introduce yourself. The main thing you need to do here is to introduce yourself. Tell a candidate about your position/role and your role in an interview.
- Start with small talk for breaking the ice. For the first couple of minutes, a candidate is under huge stress, try to talk with him about something else. For instance, about the weather out of the windows, headphones brand etc.
- Present an agenda. That’s definitely will calm down candidates since they’ll know a plan, set expectations, and be ready for each stage.
- Warn about the schedule. Warn candidates about the interview timeline and ask them if you can exceed the limits (some candidates have a tight schedule and don’t have such an opportunity).
- Dive into the conversation with experience-related questions. Ask about roles played on projects, team size, technical stack, achievements, and the most complex tasks they’ve faced before. It might open up the soft skills of a candidate (for more details, check out the previous post How to assess soft skills effectively?).
Interaction (efficiency)
Interaction is the essential part of the interview, the whole action took place here. Examination of the candidate, solving practical tasks, checking the depth of the knowledge, and so forth. Therefore:
- Exchange information. Try to stick with dialogue, start from a common topic, then move on to smaller pieces of it. Listen to a candidate, gather the terms and ask the questions.
- Avoid common questions. The most inefficient questions are common questions. A Million times, I observed them in the practice. “Did you use React?” or whatever, such questions do not give any meaningful information. Try to use “why/how” questions most of the time.
- Mind your time. Time is the most critical resource in an interview session. That’s why do not afraid to interrupt a candidate, If the interviewee answers not what you expected, just say: “Sorry, we’ll discuss this aspect later” / “Excuse me, I wanted to ask a bit different thing, let’s concentrate on it”. No need to listen to an exciting story about unicorns.
- Listen hard. There’s an 80/20 rule, in the perfect world you have to listen for 80 percent of the time. But as usual, it's the ideal case, in reality, it depends on a candidate.
- Cheer them up. Several times, I noticed that candidates lost the temper or were depressed after a couple of wrong answers. Try to cheer them up, find some positive points and present them.
- Be ready for the questions. Some candidates like to check interviewers, in such cases an interviewer has two options, first avoid it, just to say that we’re not revealing the secrets, the second way, just answer it.
- Keep interview flexible. All the sections can be in a different order. Some interviewers try to give coding tasks as early as possible (especially in the evenings). You’re allowed to change the sections and find your own path.
- Avoid unconscious bias. Big companies did almost everything, standardized the process, introduced courses, but anyway such things like confirmation bias (when we look for ways of making an initial judgment come true rather than accepting data objectively), effective heuristic (when an interviewer judges a person’s suitability based on superficial factors), expectation anchor (when for a reason an interviewer likes a certain candidate), similarity attraction effect (when you are being attracted by people with similar values to yourself), gender bias and so on, still might happen. There’s no silver bullet for getting rid of bias, analyze your sessions afterward and just recognize them.
- Take notes. Obvious, but efficient as unicorn’s milk. Notes can be considered as almost ready feedback.
Q&A (presentability)
- Be prepared for the questions about a company (benefits, education, work-life balance, relocation, and so on). You can answer briefly, in case if you do not know the answer, just parry it with phrases like: “Recruiter will answer that”.
- Don’t touch sensitive topics. Financial topics, corporate secrets, any kind of confidential information must not be discussed.
- Share suggestions. First off, a candidate might ask you about that, that’s why you have to be ready to explain some major suggestions shallowly.
- Ask about an interview. Get feedback from a person, what they liked most, what questions, what task, and so on. Criticism is useful.
Epilogue (politeness)
Such a lovely part.
- Regardless, explain the next steps. Share with a candidate further actions, for example, how long it will take to write feedback, who is going to contact them afterward, and so on.
- Say, thank you and wish them good luck. They’ve just spent approximately 2 hours of their lives with you. Who knows when your paths will cross again.
Feedback (evaluation)
- Leave feedback asap. According to the best practices, an interviewer has 48 hours to leave feedback, but it’s better to have it on the same day. But, of course, sometimes it’s better to sleep on it and leave it the next day.
- Feedback should be full-featured. Leave complete feedback, it should contain almost everything that happened on the interview, without the necessity of rewatching a recording.
- The summary should include almost everything. We analyzed the feedbacks and tried to find the key sections for decision-makers, and it appears that summary plays a really significant role for them. Try to put a brief explanation of why a candidate suits the positions, justify your decision, and if you’d like to work with them in the same team.
- Use words, not symbols. Have you ever seen the evaluation in pluses/minuses/stars? Please, never do that. Add more information in words. For decision-makers, it’s helpful to know if a candidate has an advanced level instead of simply + or ++.
- Take a lot of screenshots. One more common mistake is not to take screenshots at all. Take them as much as possible, they can be revised and removed after an interview.
- Describe a practical task in detail. Detailed information’s better than just “done”. Try to describe how it was done, if a deadline was met, what was the complexity of an algorithm, what screenshot contains that, and so forth.
- Share links for suggestions. Suggestions are optional, and if you come up with the idea to fill it out, then add links, not only gaps. Help a candidate to grow faster and become a better engineer!
I certainly hope that you find the article useful and beneficial, share your opinion in the comments, and do not hesitate to contact me in case of any questions. Thank you for reading!
Unlock 10x development with independent components
Building monolithic apps means all your code is internal and is not useful anywhere else. It just serves this one project. And as you scale to more code and people, development becomes slow and painful as everyone works in one codebase and on the same version.
But what if you build independent components first, and then use them to build any number of projects? You could accelerate and scale modern development 10x.
OSS Tools like Bit offer a powerful developer experience for building independent components and composing modular applications. Many teams start by building their Design Systems or Micro Frontends, through independent components. Give it a try →
Learn more
Fantastic interviews and how to get ready for them. Tune up interviewing skills with spices. was originally published in Bits and Pieces on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Rufat Khaslarov
Rufat Khaslarov | Sciencx (2022-02-20T16:29:45+00:00) Fantastic interviews and how to get ready for them. Tune up interviewing skills with spices.. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/02/20/fantastic-interviews-and-how-to-get-ready-for-them-tune-up-interviewing-skills-with-spices/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.