3 ms·

Honestly, one of the safest and most powerful tools is just to continually ask "why" questions as a result of whatever they say in regards to technical details,

by csydas 5y ago

Honestly, one of the safest and most powerful tools is just to continually ask "why" questions as a result of whatever they say in regards to technical details, with a scattering of "how?" questions. Others in the comments have expressed some legal concerns about "discussions" instead of Interviews, but I feel this is a hyperbolized fear based off a laypersons interpretation of US hiring law. The law requires you ask the same set of questions of all candidates, yes, but it reasonably understands that questions on past projects/work of course will never be the same, and these are legal and valid areas to go off-script. So suppose in your situation you have a candidate and they talk about the project they worked on. To hear about their contribution, you ask (as you would all candidates): "Tell me about a problem you encountered on this project that was particularly challenging from a technical perspective" The candidate will tell you and likely their solution, and then you can start with the why's and how's. "Why did you choose this approach? What are the benefits?" "How did you arrive at this conclusion?" (you can further restate the question with "explain how you got to the idea that you needed to get here") Make it a hard rule for yourself that you must be able to build the entire timeline and understand the candidate's role in that timeline. I find that even if it turns out they mostly were receiving orders from a more senior resource but could reasonably explain in their own words now why they ended up doing what they did, this is still a good candidate for me as they used available resources and took away a good lesson. If there is ambiguity, you can even just ask "why do you think your senior colleague had the right idea here?" The idea of a discussion versus a checklist is you want to learn how a person thinks and how they approach issues. Even as a follow up to more factual check-list questions, "why" is very important as it helps you to understand the current state of the person. Just be honest with yourself that not everyone will have the same background and be honest on whether the "why" is relevant for the position. For example, some trivial linux kernel knowledge I would consider "nice to know", but it's by far not essential unless they're doing specific dev work on that field or claim to know it. The other big catch you need to train yourself for is accepting that people will do things far differently than you do, even things that you consider wrong, but they work. The important part to focus on isn't about how close their answer is to yours, but to make sure you understand how and why someone reached that conclusion. Why and how are very safe and legal questions as a follow up to a very straight-forward technical question.

Hermitian909 5y ago
> but I feel this is a hyperbolized fear based off a laypersons interpretation of US hiring law Making definitive statements about liability is not trivial. I can confirm that at some very large companies legal has banned this style of interview citing discrimination concerns. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on whether they're call is more or less correct but it certainly doesn't seem settled.
- csydas 5y ago
  I believe you can see in my quote I even wrote "I feel" ;) Also working for a "large" US company and discussing with peers from others, no such banning exists. There is very clear training and a heavy restriction on who can perform interviews, but this is not the same as outright banning it.
sokoloff 5y ago
> The law requires you ask the same set of questions of all candidates Does it? I have never heard of such a requirement in a law (though I’m not a lawyer). That might be an employer’s decision on policy they use to ensure compliance with the law, but I couldn’t quickly find any law requiring the questions to be uniform across candidates. (It’s also a difficult set of terms to quickly and confidently exclude the possibility that one exists.) I guess that’s a longer (and hopefully more polite) way of saying “citation, please.”
- csydas 5y ago
  Sure: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruiting-hiring-or-promoting-employees https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruitin... Screen applications consistently. Apply the same standards to everyone applying for the same position. Effectively, you should have the exact same criterion for all candidates for the same position and avoid "on the fly" questions/too heavily customizing it. The legal discussion on all of this has basically boiled down to that you must ensure you're going through the same process for each candidate with the expected variances based on their employment/personal history (as it's relevant to the position) I may overstate the situation slightly with that statement, but the idea is that if you ask about a networking stack for candidate A, you should ask the same probing questions for candidate B also. (Consider maybe you know that candidate B doesn't know this stack and will look "negative" on a review to the hiring managers, but you really like candidate B for other reasons) Ultimately the idea is less about the specific questions and more that Candidate A and B are both reasonably considered in the same fashion for all of the requirements of the position, and that you aren't adding/omitting elements that may influence the applicability of the candidate in any fashion. So let me restate: It's not required you ask verbatim the same words for each candidate (this is the lay-person over-read). But for a given position, it should be established in advance a series of competencies that are necessary for the position and that are to be asked of each candidate. How you go about investigating it may vary from candidate to candidate, but should two interviews be reviewed, it should be expected that both interviews cover the same topics to a reasonable degree. (e.g., it is reasonable that if you ask "have you ever worked with library X" and the candidate flat out says they cannot answer questions on library X, you have reasonably covered that topic with this candidate. If you ask another candidate and they do have experience with library X and you ask some additional questions, you have not violated the spirit or letter of the requirement in this case.)

by csydas 5y ago

Hermitian909 5y ago

> but I feel this is a hyperbolized fear based off a laypersons interpretation of US hiring law Making definitive statements about liability is not trivial. I can confirm that at some very large companies legal has banned this style of interview citing discrimination concerns. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't comment on whether they're call is more or less correct but it certainly doesn't seem settled.

csydas 5y ago
I believe you can see in my quote I even wrote "I feel" ;) Also working for a "large" US company and discussing with peers from others, no such banning exists. There is very clear training and a heavy restriction on who can perform interviews, but this is not the same as outright banning it.

sokoloff 5y ago

> The law requires you ask the same set of questions of all candidates Does it? I have never heard of such a requirement in a law (though I’m not a lawyer). That might be an employer’s decision on policy they use to ensure compliance with the law, but I couldn’t quickly find any law requiring the questions to be uniform across candidates. (It’s also a difficult set of terms to quickly and confidently exclude the possibility that one exists.) I guess that’s a longer (and hopefully more polite) way of saying “citation, please.”

csydas 5y ago
Sure: https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruiting-hiring-or-promoting-employees https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/small-business/3-im-recruitin... Screen applications consistently. Apply the same standards to everyone applying for the same position. Effectively, you should have the exact same criterion for all candidates for the same position and avoid "on the fly" questions/too heavily customizing it. The legal discussion on all of this has basically boiled down to that you must ensure you're going through the same process for each candidate with the expected variances based on their employment/personal history (as it's relevant to the position) I may overstate the situation slightly with that statement, but the idea is that if you ask about a networking stack for candidate A, you should ask the same probing questions for candidate B also. (Consider maybe you know that candidate B doesn't know this stack and will look "negative" on a review to the hiring managers, but you really like candidate B for other reasons) Ultimately the idea is less about the specific questions and more that Candidate A and B are both reasonably considered in the same fashion for all of the requirements of the position, and that you aren't adding/omitting elements that may influence the applicability of the candidate in any fashion. So let me restate: It's not required you ask verbatim the same words for each candidate (this is the lay-person over-read). But for a given position, it should be established in advance a series of competencies that are necessary for the position and that are to be asked of each candidate. How you go about investigating it may vary from candidate to candidate, but should two interviews be reviewed, it should be expected that both interviews cover the same topics to a reasonable degree. (e.g., it is reasonable that if you ask "have you ever worked with library X" and the candidate flat out says they cannot answer questions on library X, you have reasonably covered that topic with this candidate. If you ask another candidate and they do have experience with library X and you ask some additional questions, you have not violated the spirit or letter of the requirement in this case.)