Hiring
Interviewing
Interviewing is a difficult skill, and requires a lot of effort on all parties. An interview is a sharing of information, where the goal is for both parties to get more information about the other and then assess whether or not the information fits with each parties goals for the role.
At a previous emploeeyer we had a 3 main themes we looked for.
- Competence: this is programming skills, architecutre, hard skills. Can you make a script for scanning text files? Can you design an interface? Do you understand what a hash is?
- Creativity: How do you see solutions? How do you think about problems? Can you challenge yourself and your collegues? How do you match different domains together?
- Business Sense: Do you understand how companies make money? What is your purpose in a business? Can you make a value proposition and justify it? I think those three covers most of what you would like to assess in an interview.
The Get-to-Know
Usually a quick 15-20 minute interview, which is mostly to check the “vibe”. Is this person socially functional. Do you like the person?
There’s not a lot of information to begin from in the get-to-know (G2K) interview, which usually lasts a very short time. But one important finding that I think one should strive for is understanding the motivation of the candidate. What are their inspirations? Why do they want to work in the field? When it comes to having an interview the manager should strive to find out:
- Why this role
- Why this industry
- Why this company.
That should be the main goal of the get-to-know interview, trying to at least assess those three aspects. See The Job Closer for reference.
Technical Interview
Technical interiew is an opportunity to assess the hard-skills, or the technical capabilities of a candidate. However, this is also an opporutnity to see how a candidate will work with others. A technical interview to me is a chance to spar with a candidate and get a feeling of how a design meeting, or a peer programming session will be.
The goal for both parties is to make the technical interview successful. A succesful technical interview is one where the candidate shows their skill, the hiring manager shows the candidate the team culture and way of working, and both learn about the other party. In short; both parties reveal valueable and useful information to each other. In order to do this well, we must set up the interview to make sure that the candidate are able to show as much as possible. For junior candidates, this is more difficult as they are less experinced and might struggle to show what they know, so the hiring parties must try their best to help them show their skills. A failure in a technical interview is when the conversation stops and no information is shared.
3 things about technical interview
- Remember that this is an opportunity to really drill deep down on a technical level. It is important to see if the candidate understands the why just as much as the how. Try to have some questions for different core competencies in the candidates resume and drill down to assess the strength of each competency. And make sure that the basics are in place, a data engineer should understand SQL and version control, if not then what are we really doing here?
- For all candidates, look for an understanding of the system as a whole. Junior candidates should be proficient in code but also understand why they are making the code they are making. Senior candidates should be able to assess the system as a whole and explain it in laymans terms. A great rule of thumb from an interview is: Did I learn something intersting from this conversation?
- Is the candidate convincing? Do you feel like they are selling you with their arguments? If you are not convinced by them in an controlled setting where you would like to be convinced, how will they handle adversarial stakeholders? For lack of a better word, is the vibes still good? We are all sellers, can you as a candidate sell yourself as a co-worker/employee.
5 things about interviewing
- Filter for passion. You are building a team, you want people that care. Great teams will outperform and make your job easier, and having a team that makes the members want to go to work is awesome. You should strive towards having great teams.
- They are also assessing you. This is especially true for senior candidates. Think about your hiring process. Also, rejecting candidates in a bad way is such an easy way of creating bad PR. People talk, lets try to minimize the bad talk by having a good experience.
- An interview process is skewed towards risk-averseness, and while that leads to promising and great candidates being rejected for non-comformit. This is just a fact of life. As a hiring manager, make sure to understand this and try challenge yourself to not fall into the trap of risk-aversion.
- You will be required to act on limited information, and there will be a lot of risk involved. Your heuristics will probably play a large role here. Do you understand how your heuristics work. Maybe keep a notebook or log about things you noticed in the interviews. This will help you compare interviews and have a reference that makes sure you are consistent. It will also be interesting to look back at successful (or unsuccessful) interviews and assess if the information you had available to you at the time had some sort of predictive value? Hindsight is 20-
- Try to write down your own thoughts before discussing with others, take 20 mins after to assess your notes and what you felt. Having a framework for this might be smart. This ensures that you are not affected by other comments or biased by them.
Case Interview
For Interviewees
Case Overview
In this section, there’s supposed to be an overview of the industry, including its maturity and technical level. What types of industries are being discussed? Is it a big business, a small business, or something else?
I also want to include an interview to clarify what it’s like to go into a role in this case. The overview should provide good context, making the industry and the position clearer for the interviewer. This will help them better understand how to approach and succeed in this environment.
Architecture & Technical Context
- Current Setup:
[Brief description of existing infrastructure] - Data Sources:
[Available data] - Tech Stack:
[Relevant technologies] - Constraints:
[Key limitations]
The Challenge
Problem: Sentence-to-sentence description of what the client is trying to achieve here?
Your Task: [What the interviewee should deliver/design]
Success Looks Like: [Clear success criteria]
Think About
[Key consideration 1][Key consideration 2][Key consideration 3]
For Case Holders
Role: [Target Role - DE/DS/MLE]
Level: [Junior/Mid/Senior]
Case Objectives
Goal: [What this case is designed to assess]
Experience Level: [Target seniority and expected background]
Key Discussion Areas
Evaluation Criteria
What We’re Looking For
- Technical Depth:
[Specific technical skills to assess] - Problem-Solving:
[How they approach complex problems] - Communication:
[How they explain technical concepts] - Experience Indicators:
[Signs of relevant experience level]
Interviewer Notes
- Red Flags:
[Warning signs to watch for] - Follow-up Questions:
[Good probing questions] - Finishing up:
What are the next steps
Links
Thoughts
- Filter for passion.