Interviewing skills?

[LesleyW]

For the first time in my life, I will be involved in doing the "technical probing" for interviews. We are looking for about 4 contractors for 18 months, mainly VB6 and SQL Server2000.

My boss will be running the interviews and investigating people/team-working skills. I am there purely to "ask technical questions". Thing is I've never done anything like this before so am a bit nervous.

As an ex-author of multimedia training materials, I should in theory be able to write technical questions - well it might be a bit tricky on SQL Server as all I have really done here is to go on the training course. I'll feel a bit of prat posing questions on that to someone with 2yrs + real life experience.

What I am asking for here is if anyone has some practical advice, or even ideas for the questions/sort of questions I should be asking.

Many thanks

 

[rtrek]

A little tip I would give you, from my own experiences, is not to get too detailed or technical. I was in an interview once and one of the persons interviewing me started asking these little detailed picky little questions, quite a few of which I didn't know. They of course were just about the only few things I didn't know about the subject. Someone else just happened to know them, but little else, and ended up getting the job. Stick more to concepts and broader topics, perhaps letting them elaborate from their own knowledge and skills. You'll get a better picture of them that way.

Good Luck!

 

[CajunCenturion]

The first thing that I would do is to isolate the specific skills and/or knowledge that you're interested in. I would suspect, that you're trying to get a feel for how much learning curve may be required if the person being interview were to get the job.

I would not hesitate from asking the picky detailed questions if they are pertinent to the job because the person who knows the answers has been down that road. I also would also ask some broader based questions, again being slanted to the job in question, to guard against selecting an individual who knows a lot about something quite specific, but little else.

That being said, its hard to come up with some specific questions without a better understanding of the job.

Also, as a potential contractor, I might be interested in being interviewed as well, but don't know how to appropriately contact you in that regard.

Now if I can help you with the questions, and then be interviewed, well .... Good Luck
--------------
As a circle of light increases so does the circumference of darkness around it. - Albert Einstein

 

[palbano]

CajunCenturion is on the mark. Most importantly where he says that if you know technical details that you have requirements of you should ask.

Also though rtek's point about broader concepts is important to me always. Things like self evaluation and problem solving skills, I usually weight them more than specific knowledge. Of course you need to ask specific questions to guage the accuracy of their self evaluation.

Hope this helps... after re-reading it I don't really see how it could but I'll post it just in case.

-pete

 

[LesleyW]

Thanks to all for your advice. I know I need to sit down with my boss and work out more details of what we are looking for. He's kind of hard to get hold of though!

Cajun, the job is based in Bristol, England and we need someone to start early December. If you are still interested then please let me know asap - try AmazonW99@hotmail.com

Lesley

 

[BKtechie]

A good concept in interviewing is to start with a broad topic and gradually narrow down to the more technical questions, especially if the person accross the table doesn't answer the first question to your satisfaction. Keep track of how many of the more "technical" questions were answered by the first "broad topic" question, and go over some of the more technical questions that they didn't cover in their first answer. This will give you insight into how much the person knows about each topic and you can score them appropriately. Say
Interviewee #1 knew:
Question 1: 90%
Question 2: 75%

Good luck,
BKtechie

 

[cian]

I apologise if I am repeating any suggestions, I don't have much time to read today:

Highlight what you see are the most important aspects of the job, what do you want the candidate to know about the job? You (pl) should know already what duties you want these people to be responsible for, therefore what work will they be doing and what knowledge should they have in order to be able to carry out these tasks?
Base your questions on this, test the candidate on these subjects to guage if he/she as a sufficient knowledge of these subjects.
Don't aim to screw the cadidate or put them under pressure, leave that to your boss, just ask honest questions which a candidate is likely to face in the course of a job (Remember why you want to hire these people).
Also ask questions which can reasonably be answered in a matter of minutes.
Hope that sounds reasonable.


::

http://www.endamcg.com

 

[LesleyW]

All sounds very reasonable.

I like BKTechie's suggestion of narrowing it down like that - should be gentle enough to avoid embarrassment if the candidate really doesn't have a clue. E.G it's not the end of the world if they don't know SourceSafe (I mean how long's that going to take to learn) but if they do claim to have used it, it would be interesting to ask a few questions to see what they know.. and could they take on the administrator's role?

The more I think about it the more it all falls into place.

Cheers