A few years ago I was listening to a podcast episode that shared an audio clip of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia speaking to a group of students at the American University Washington College of Law. A student asked him a longer version of the following question – what do students need to do to become successful in law? He responded with, “just work hard and be very good” and then shared a peculiar story about one of the best law clerks who had ever worked for him. (For those who are interested in hearing the actual exchange between the law student and Justice Scalia, here is the C-SPAN video clip that is three minutes long).
Justice Scalia ended up sharing that one of the best law clerks who ever worked for him wasn’t someone who graduated from an elite law school, which was where he typically hired his law clerks from. Rather, the law clerk came from a non-elite law school, but was really good at what they did.
I believe there are at least two recruiting takeaways from this. First, that organizations should look beyond the common talent pools for candidates, and second, to thoroughly vet candidates to determine if they would be really good for the job. Our focus for this article is the latter and we believe that one of the best ways to judge this is through technical interviewing.
Each job should have a few recruiting stages that a candidate progresses through ranging from application review through final interview. The more senior the role, the more stages. The following are different levels of technical interview questions you can ask:
Basic
Usually asked on the application or during the initial phone/web interview, these help to see if the candidate meets the general qualifications.
Some examples:
- Do you have three years of experience in managing a team of software engineers?
- Can you please share the steps you would take to debug a line of code?
Intermediate
These are deeper technical questions asked during a second and/or third stage interview to see how a candidate verbally articulates their experience and how their experience fits with the role you are hiring for.
Some examples:
- Describe a time when you found a weakness in the sales process. How did you identify it and how did you address it?
- What is the difference between a software engineer and a senior software engineer?
Advanced
These questions are asked during the recruiting stage right before the final interview or during the final interview. One type of question that can be used is a scenario-based question. This is a hypothetical work-related scenario where a candidate is asked how they would respond in a given situation.
Some examples:
- We are about to release a new product in three months. What are the steps you would take to build a marketing plan that would be ready by launch?
- You are a project manager running three projects simultaneously and one of the projects starts to fall behind. What would you do to make sure the project completes on time?
A Few Things to Consider
- Try to make these technical questions as realistic as possible based on the role the candidate is interviewing for.
- Make sure you ask the same questions to every candidate and capture their responses. This will allow for consistency and fairness.
- Assess each of the candidate’s responses – was it a great answer or just fair? Did they sound confident when they shared it or was it a struggle?
- Look critically at what technical questions the candidate asks the interviewer. Were they well thought out questions?
When in a hurry, there is a temptation to sometimes skip interview stages or conduct just a light technical interview of candidates because they appear to be qualified. Resist that temptation. Take the time to properly vet a candidate to determine if they would truly be good at the job.
