Interview Hire Process Cheat Sheet

Interview Process by Joel
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 software teams want to hire people with aptitude, not a particular skill set.Any skill set that people can bring to the job will be technologically obsolete in a couple of years, anyway, so it’s better to hire people that are going to be able to learn any new technology rather than people who happen to know how to make JDBC talk to a MySQL database right this minute.

How do you know whether to hire someone?

In principle, it’s simple. You’re looking for people who are

1. Smart, and
2. Get things done.

At the end of the interview, you must be prepared to make a sharp decision about the candidate. There are only two possible outcomes to this decision: Hire or No Hire.

You should always try to have at least six people interview each candidate that gets hired, including at least five who would be peers of that candidate (that is, other programmers, not managers).

How do you detect smart in an interview? The first good sign is that you don’t have to explain things over and over again. The conversation just flows.

I am very, very careful to avoid anything that might give me some preconceived notions about the candidate. If you think that someone is smart before they even walk into the room, just because they have a Ph.D. from MIT, then nothing they can say in one hour is going to overcome that initial prejudice. If you think they are a bozo because they went to community college, nothing they can say will overcome that initial impression.

Before the interview, I read over the candidates resume and jot down an interview plan on a scrap of paper. That’s just a list of questions that I want to ask. Here’s a typical plan for interviewing a programmer:

1. Introduction
2. Question about recent project candidate worked on
3. Easy Programming Question
4. Pointer/Recursion Question
5. Are you satisfied?
6. Do you have any questions?

The introduction phase of the interview is intended to put the candidate at ease. I ask them if they had a nice flight. I spend about 30 seconds telling the person who I am and how the interview will work. I always reassure candidates that we are interested in how they go about solving problems, not the actual answer.

One: Look for passion. Smart people are passionate about the projects they work on. They get very excited talking about the subject.

Two: Good candidates are careful to explain things well, at whatever level. I have rejected candidates because when they talked about their previous project, they couldn’t explain it in terms that a normal person could understand. You don’t want to hire them, basically, because they are not smart enough to comprehend what it takes to make other people understand their ideas.

Three: If the project was a team project, look for signs that they took a leadership role. Remember, Smart and Gets Things Done. The only way you’re going to be able to tell if somebody Gets Things Done is to see if historically they have tended to get things done in the past.

Ask simple programming questions & see how quickly it's solved.From this exercie you may know that how fast enough they are to get the big picture.

As the last step in an interview, ask the candidate if they have any questions. Remember, even though you’re interviewing them, the good candidates have lots of choices about where to work and they’re using this day to figure out if they want to work for you.