There may be alternative methods to determining a candidate's skill without starting off with extremely low-ball questions. I'm thinking you might get better e

There may be alternative methods to determining a candidate's skill without starting off with extremely low-ball questions. I'm thinking you might get better engagement with a binary-search algorithm. Let's say that a candidate's skill is on a spectrum from 0 to 100. You might start by asking a level 50 question, which if the candidate can't answer then you'll assume they're 0-50. Then you can ask a level 25 question and see how they do there before deciding if their skill level is 0-25 or 25-50. Obviously this is overly simplistic: knowledge/skill can be over several domains and dimensions, one question might not give sufficient signal to determine whether to raise or lower the difficulty of the next question, etc. But I think the principle may be sound. Also, if you're searching for top tier candidates, you might aim for a nerd-sniping [0] approach where you ask about a genuinely interesting problem. The good candidates will be fine musing over the interesting problem and discussing possible solutions. The lower tier candidates will either be completely stumped, give only one solution, or give poor solutions. [0]: https://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/