I'm trying to become a better interviewer, and it can be very hard. Here's a story of a badly wasted phone screen I did this week. I screened a guy with a gra

I'm trying to become a better interviewer, and it can be very hard. Here's a story of a badly wasted phone screen I did this week. I screened a guy with a graduate degree in math who worked in a network analysis group for a telco. We talked about the current project he was working on, and his previous project, and while it was really cool statistical modeling of network failure and recovery, he didn't actually do any of the modeling or mathematical work. As best as I could tell, he just wrote scripts to munge data into convenient formats for his teammates to import into the modeling software. He knew next to nothing about statistical software. I described what we did and asked him what kind of work he thought he could do for us, and he basically said he'd do network modeling and analysis for us -- exactly what he wasn't doing at his current job, it seemed. Afterwards I told my boss, "This guy is a total miss. He just writes Perl scripts to munge log files. Why did we even talk to him?" "Oh, he's a really sophisticated low-level network performance guy. He has a lot of hands-on knowledge of networking hardware and protocols." Well... shit. I guess munging log files can be more than just munging log files. I couldn't tell that from his resume, though, and he didn't give me any clue while he was talking to me. Was that my fault?