In my previous "day" job, I probably interviewed more than 100 candidates and hired about 15-20. Here's what worked for me: 1. Phone screen (~45-60 mins). I'd

In my previous "day" job, I probably interviewed more than 100 candidates and hired about 15-20. Here's what worked for me: 1. Phone screen (~45-60 mins). I'd spent ~15 mins going over what the company does, what the work environment is like, the team structure, the personalities, the technologies, etc... I'd try to "sell" our opportunity to jazz up the candidate and get them at least curious and hopefully very interested. I'd weave in a little of why-are-you-changing-job, what-was-your-experience-like, or what-would-you-prefer, and then ultimately we spent the majority of time on a recent project that he/she can talk about in depth. I pushed on a few related technical aspects to those projects to see if the candidate could clearly explain himself/herself technically. 2. First round (1.5-2 hrs). If I liked the candidate's potential after the phone screen, I'd invite him/her to our office to meet me and another engineer. We'd go into more depth about their recent project(s), and then go through a design/code exercise for a web application (the company builds web apps). The exercise was very open-ended (there's really no one correct way to do it). The design/coding choice depended on many factors, and we helped steer the conversations so the candidate could talk about those factors and what he/she would do to handle each of them (including when not to handle certain situations). Along the way, we also probed into how he/she would work with other team members, how/whether to "challenge" another colleague, what/if any development process he/she would follow. There was no trickery, no reversing a string, no linked lists. But I might ask how one would deal with concurrency conditions (two users trying to claim a single resource), how to scale with traffic, etc... The candidate was encouraged to ask questions throughout the interview. It was a two-way street after all. 3. Second round (another 1.5-2 hrs). If first round went well, I'd invite the candidate back to meet a few other employees (e.g., another engineer, a Product Manager, a designer for example). I asked these other employees to ask anything they'd like, but at the end be able to tell me if this candidate would a) be smart, b) get things done, and c) have right cultural fit. If anyone had strong objection from this round, it almost always resulted in no-hire. Equally important to hiring well is to let employees go quickly if they don't fit. That's a separate subject worth its own post.