Lately I’ve been doing a lot of interviews, so I’ve been reflecting on the effectiveness of my questions and my methodology. I generally take a relaxed, conversational approach to interviewing. I consider myself to be a strong judge of character and a well-rounded conversationalist, so I like to get the interviewee talking and see where things go. My goal is to let the interviewee do most of the talking, prompted by me to guide the topic or curtail the time.
One of the biggest challenges in an interview is calming the applicant down so that they behave normally. I know interviews can be overwhelming — especially for technologists who sometimes are a bit weak on social skills. After a general chat about my company and their background, I used to ask an extremely simple programming question. For example, I might ask them to write a function to print out a multiplication table.
A surprising number of people stumble on this initial question. Often times I think it’s due to nerves. So now I’ve started to ask the following question:
To start us off drilling down into your skills, I’d like to start with a topic that you’re extremely comfortable with. Please think of a question, and then answer your own question. I’d like you to first clearly define what the question is. Then walk me through the answer. Try to keep it brief.
I think this is a great question for several reasons:
- It keeps them talking.
- I stay interested because I often learn something new. Even bad interviews become a better use of my time.
- What they choose as the question is a unique indicator of their interests and talents.
- Do they follow instructions? A surprising number of candidates fail to define a question. Instead he or she simply launches into a monologue.
- Can she answer her own question? A surprising number of candidates get tripped up answering their own question. That’s bad.
- Does he have a sense of humor? It’s a great opening for the candidate to make some sort of joke because this is a fairly bizarre question. One candidate quipped, “you want me to interview myself?”
Many times I will have to cut a candidate off during their answer, but that’s okay. I typically use it as a nice springboard into a question of my choosing with a segue such as “You mentioned randomization. Could you write me a function that accepts a list of integers and returns a new list with the integers shuffled?”
