My opinion: applying one-size-fits-all formulaic interviewing to your candidates excludes unconventional talent. Asking personal questions and following through

My opinion: applying one-size-fits-all formulaic interviewing to your candidates excludes unconventional talent. Asking personal questions and following through on them unearths the smart and self-motivated talent. As an unconventional CS talent myself, I've had the most success with this approach on both sides of the interview process. What do I mean by personal questions? My favorite interview so far left all the academic quizzing aside and asked me to talk in-depth about a particular real-world project I worked on. What patterns did I use? How did it interact with the database? How did I model the problem? This was not something that would be easily googled and it let me convey how I think about software on my own terms. Then it was up to the interviewer if my approach to software would be useful to them.