views:

79

answers:

1

Usually we run interviews in office. We have a room with a table, the interviewee and one or two interviewers sit at the table, interviewers ask questions, often accompanied with code snippets on paper, the interviewee (hopefully) answers them, writes code snippets to illustrate his point. Usually it's something like an interviewer writes about five lines of C++ code and asks some specific question - quite a little code.

Now we need to do the same remotely. We will be in our office and the interviewee will be far away - we are asked to help hire a person for another office located abroad. Of course we can use some technology for voice calls, but I'm afraid it's the most we can count on. I see a whole set of obstacles here:

  • how to write illustration code snippets and exchange them efficiently?
  • what to do to compensate for the fact that we're not native English speakers and the interviewees might or might be not native English speakers (I'm afraid this can make conversation significantly harder)?

Are there any best practices for this situation? How could we address the obstacles listed? What other things should we consider to run the interview most efficiently?

A: 

For a start, I would Gogole-chat, or similar for swapping code snippets (or find a free online collaboration site). IM seems to KISS.

The language barrier is a problem, but maybe you can use voice for quickness and fall back to IM when there are problems? I presume the candidates will be required to read/write English language documentation (?). If so, using IM will verify their ability to do so.

You could consider making the whole thing written, but it loses the to and fro, plus there might be a risk of them cheating if you give them a while to complete the written interview.

If you have budget, it might be best to send just one of your guys to a major city overseas and ask the candidates to interview there...

Mawg