Interviewing Technical Candidates for Keeps

As an IT recruiter, I am incapable of qualifying candidates' technical abilities. It is an odd reality, but true nonetheless. The good news is there is no other service available to qualify candidates for your specific role. It's crucial for your team to conduct their own technical assessment in order to understand if candidates are capable of working in your particular environment.

BrainBench and other firms who specialize in testing technical proficiency only deliver snapshots of the candidate's true abilities because they test on the whole spectrum of a given technology, where your group likely focuses on particular functions. For instance, Java is a great big world unto itself and programmers have strengths in different areas of it. Some excel in integration work and others in developing code from scratch. Experience in various industries and the size of the companies worked for also dictate what type of experience developers have because in a small shop they are likely to have done a little bit of everything whereas in a large environment, they will likely be focused on one particular role.

For your interviewing process, identify the areas of technology that are most important to your projects as a general rule, and come up with questions specific to your applications in order to get relevant answers from each candidate. Create a form and rank the candidates' answers on a scale of 1 to 5 so that in review, you'll have a snapshot of their technical strengths and weaknesses. One question I do ask candidates is to rank their level of expertise in a given technology. Over the years I have found that few candidates will misrepresent themselves when asked to do this. In fact, many will rank themselves lower than their true level to be on the safe side. A good follow up question for a technical interviewer is to ask what areas of the technology is the candidate most proficient in. You will no doubt be surprised by the answers you receive.

Where most candidates fail in jobs is on the business/professional side as opposed to their technical aptitude. It's usually more about their attitude, communication style, documentation practices and general interpersonal skills. In all cases, I highly recommend preparing an assessment/test for the candidates to complete. In this assessment, present a business scenario that is based on your company/department. The one assessment that comes to my mind was for a UNIX Systems Administrator and looked like this:
-Here's a snapshot of our systems (very basic)
-Here's a list of people who interface with the Sys Admin, their titles and names
-Something goes wrong and a server is down
-Describe the process by which you will determine the cause of the problem
-Compose an email to each of the people listed above to inform them of the issue

An assessment such as the one above will tell you more about a candidate than you've ever discovered before in an interview. Left on their own to complete the assessment, you will learn how well they communicate in writing, how well they understand interdepartmental communications, how long it takes them to complete a task, how quickly they can grasp your environment and more.

You will determine what is most important to you and your team. Requiring candidates to own their side of an interview will guarantee you better interviewing results, will save a lot of time normally spent evaluating interview performance and will help your team stay focused on which skills are of most value.

The benefits are really too numerous to mention, but ultimately these techniques work toward conducting meaningful, informative interviews that will help you hire employees you will want to keep for the long haul.

I will leave it at that and wish you all the best in your interviews, as always.