How should I interview a candidate with domain experience in a different field?

Question

I have to interview a candidate for a developer position that will involve working mainly on a trading system written in C++ in a Wall Street company.

The candidate's most recent experience (3 years) is writing and maintaining components of a payment processing system for an ecommerce company.

Some of this experience could be relevant to the position we are trying to fill but I have no experience in that domain and am not sure what types of questions to ask about his experience with payment processing.

• What kinds of questions should I ask him about his prior job, since I am unfamiliar with many of the domain issues he faced?

• Would it be a good idea to get him to draw a diagram of the overall system architecture and, perhaps, a UML representation of the code that he worked on?**

Answer 1

Also ask about development practices. How was the code divided into pieces, were parts being reused, how was version control used, what did the documentation look like, how were testing and release management done, etc.

Answer 2

You should use your common sense. You can tell if he is BSing you by asking detailed questions. First have hime explai8n the big picture of the system, then ask for details on what he did in particular. Listed closely and tease out anything that sounds like BS.

You can also do some googling around to get an idea about what type of problems are particular to his domain. Also ask him how to do some tasks in your domain. if the experience matches he should be able to at least give you some good ideas on how to solve the problems.

Answer 3

I'd ask a question in your domain, encouraging the interviewee to ask questions to fill in gaps in their domain knowledge. If he or she starts to answer and asks questions along the way, great.

If not, you mark them down a notch and turn the problem into something more similar to a domain perhaps they are more comfortable in and see how they do.

In both cases, it is how they approach the problem and how they communicate that to me that I am observing.

Kindness,

Dan

Answer 4

Read Sarbanes-Oxley and just gruelingly lift verbatim whatever you can - prefacing all such work with "How would you ..."

E.G. "How would you" <-> improve quality and transparency in financial reporting and independent audits and accounting services for public companies?

Just keep grinding it out. Remember whatever the person says so you can note that as the response.

[edit: tag community wiki showed up when I posted - don't know what key I hit]