Hiring Process

Recently, I got involved in the hiring process at the company I work for, mainly having to interview candidates. While preparing, I also went through some online resources.

• The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing had some interesting points. Smart and gets things done is definitely a critical criteria to keep in mind. Joel's overly self-conscious writing style can be a bit tiring after a while, though. His Growing a Team section has more interesting articles on this topic, i.e. the article on a Programmer's Perspective.
  

• The TSS article Hiring the Phantom Java Architect is worth reading before actually posting a vacant Java developer/architect job description. I don't really agree with the author on the architect/developer distinction he makes, but knowing what exactly you are seeking for is surely crucial.
  

• I don't think I would ask such kind of questions myself, but the Technical Interview Questions are quite fun to solve (or at least to try to solve). Find some the solutions in Joel's Forum.
  

Some of the experiences that I have gained so far from interviewing applicants are

• make them feel comfortable by letting them talk about their favourite project of the past
  

• ask some questions specific to their resume to get a feeling of how well what is written in the resume matches the truth (I'm really disappointed when people put some cool technology in their resume and then you find out that they only used it once for exercise 1.b of their CS course)
  

• let them explain how the team setup and the interactions were at the former job and what their role was
  

• make them write some code that must actually work (which is a big difference to writing some fuzzy diagrams with arrows, place holders, etc.)

• ask a technical question that they probably don't have the answer for and see how they approach this situation
  

• observe whether they can give precise answers to precise questions
  

• I still have a lot more to learn about interviewing efficiently