Controlled set of technical interview questions

Question

When answering this question about interview questions I answered with the following:

As a suggeston, make up a developer interview document that contains your set of questions. For each question allow:

• a section to write their responses,
• a section containing crib notes to remind you of the answer, or points that should be covered in their answer, and
• a section to score their answer.

By building up such a document you will:

• have a permanent record of the questions you want to ask which will be refined over time.
• be comparing different interviewees(?) on a like for like basis,
• have a record of the interview should the interviewee question any decision on your part.

Edit: I forgot to add that we duplicate, on separate sheets, any questions that the applicant needs to read, e.g. "what does this code do?", or "what's the difference between these two versions of the command.

Then we can tear these off and hand them to the applicant.

This suggestion has been voted down and I don't understand that as I can only see advantages to having this technique.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I don't know why they negged you it seems sensible to me. There is a legal requirement that an interviews must be fair and one way of proving this is to make sure that each candidate is asked the same questions.

Certainly in my last interview (I got the job!) each question was read from a sheet as you describe, they made notes in the little box, and I more or less judged when I had finished the question by when the box was nearly full :)

It is possible that UK academia is different to most other environments ;)

Answer 2

The only downside to your method is that it makes asking questions bigger than your headspace too difficult. That is, you would need a separate sheet containing code samples etc - anything too big for someone to fit in their head in one go.

Also, it makes letting the applicant write things down very difficult.

These problems are quite easily resolved, however. Give the applicant a whiteboard or a separate answer sheet and you're good to go!

Otherwise, this process is quite similar to how we interview new developers.