Being a good interviewer - How to perform on the other side of interview table
Published: 2021-05-20 01:52:49

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title: Being a good interviewer - How to perform on the other side of interview table
published: true
description: How to perform on the other side of interview table
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There have been plenty of resources discussing about giving interviews. It's time to discuss about conducting them.

Interview is a perfect opportunity for you/your company to make an impression with a potential hire. It serves as a sneak peek into the company's culture. 

Here are a few things an interviewer should keep in mind before going for their next interview

## Put efforts into the interview

Do you remember how nervous you were when you were interviewing for your current job ? 

That's exactly what the current interviewee will be going through and even more. 

Before everything else, if you are conducting a remote interview - SWITCH ON THE VIDEO. Have an eye contact at the candidate. It eases their nerves. Never switch off the video, candidate will never know if you are paying attention or fixing that production issue.

So, be empathetic and put efforts into making the candidate comfortable. Take a few minutes explaining about your company, your org, and your team.

## Show interest in the candidate

Ask about the candidate, about his current roles and responsibilities. Show interest into what they do and take notes on how that can help the role they are interviewing for. This is also always mandatory, but a bonus.

Make some small talk, crack a joke or two.

## Prepare for the interview

Prepare to conduct the interview as if you are the candidate. Have a list of questions ready, make sure you know the answer to all of them in depth. If those questions are open ended, you should be aware of all various solutions and their trade-offs. 

Make sure your questions are following universal terminology and ensure the candidate is understanding the question perfectly.

Always, start the technical discussion stating your current tech stack. Candidate should know that you are technically qualified enough to conduct this interview, not just by the virtue of working for the company.

## It's not a competition of wits

This is not a contest to decide who knows more tech stuff. If the roles are swapped, I am pretty sure the candidate can ask some pretty challenging questions as well. 

Respect the experience and knowledge of the candidate. Your company needs good engineers more than they need a job. A tech interview should almost always be a discussion. Simulate the real life working scenario. 

When was the last time you were assigned a task without any details and help offered ?

Ease into the technical discussion and drop hints at regular intervals whenever you see candidate stuck. Ask them to think aloud and assert them whenever they make good choices. 

Every question you ask is a common task for both of you. There is no fun in asking a very tough question that requires a special insight. Like finding median in an infinite stream of integers. One doesn't come to optimal solution for such problems in a short time. If you are asking such questions, be prepared to nudge them to the right approach. 

Avoid asking tricky questions or outputs of a code snippet. It shows absolute lack of preparation on part of the interviewer and is very detached from real world engineering. Be cognisant of the fact that we all use Google and Stack overflow in our every day job for simplest of the things. I have a friend who actually asks candidate to google and observes if they are good with finding solutions.

A good question is a small technical task which requires candidate to ponder over approach, decide a data structure and design an algorithm for it. 

One of the brilliant questions I was asked a few years ago is " A Television manufacture firm want to calculate the number of black spots on their defective screens. Compute a solution to do this". This has no mention of a data structure or an algorithm. This will let candidate think over the problem agnostically. It's not nearly as much fun when you frame the same question as "Calculate the number of connected components in a forest".

## Create an experience

It's the interviewer's responsibility to create a great experience to the interviewee. Even if you feel the candidate is not correct for the role, go ahead and make their time worthwhile. You never know who is going to be referred by the candidate next. 

Make sure you discuss solutions with the candidate. They should leave the interview in a content state that they have actually learnt something in the last hour. This also helps as a proof that you know the answers, it's important you sell yourself as a qualified interviewer. A good interviewing experience is a very good indicator for a potential hire.

My current company, Fanatics, has an amazing interviewing culture and I so often listen from the new joinees that a major factor of their decision to join is the interview experience. Even I joined this company because I had a great interview with my current manager. The interview felt like I am part of the team already and we are brainstorming together.

I have seen plenty of times in my network where a candidate refused to join the company even after a good offer because they had bad interviewing experience. Do not be like this company.

It's as much learning opportunity for the interviewer as for the candidate, make sure you acknowledge if you have learnt anything. 

This is all I had in mind, will make sure to expand this with further ideas. Do let me know what you think of these points. Happy to discuss.