My Interviewing Experiences

Date : Some day in October'03.
Time : Some time early evening (around 5)
Venue: My cubicle at my first company.

Tring .. Tring... (mobiles dont sound "tring", so had to be my seat landline...)

Myself : Hello
Other side : Hi Aditya, This is Punam (HR exec).. how are you
me : hey, hi... call from HR... Must be some bad news... dont tell me that i dont fit in company's scheme of things anymore..
her : ha ha... dont worry.. its just the opposite..actually a candidate has come for interview for your team and the manager is not in office, but he has told me you can handle this. He is waiting in conferenece room3.
me : are you serious, i have not taken any interviews before.. (my heart beats had actually started beating... me taking an interview..!!!!)
her : arre i know you can handle this easily... its easier than writing software .. so dont worry... !!!!BANG!!!!!

For next one minute i was just dumbstuck... I had attended attended a few interviewing sessions earlier .. My manager used to take me along.. but i used to be a mute spectator.. trying to solve the questions in my mind.. admiring my manager along with... And now here i was... It was just hard to swallow the fact that I was about to decide the future of a person.. who had more experience than me... (ok!! not the whole future.. but atleast one job prospect). I went inside, and fortunately the candidate was not so good, beleive me.. rejecting is much much easier than selecting...

In the next 6 months i took around 40 odd interviews... selected only around 6(out of which 2 got rejected by the cto), and the biggest dissapointment was .. Got a chance to interview very very few females...!!!.. Why cant india produce more female software engineers....

I am absolutely no one to explain the art of interviewing... Still a beginner in my career... But i thought i should share what i felt taking all the interviews.

The first 5... Unfortunate candidates..
I have to say... the first 5-6 candidates i interviewed were unfortunate... I just didnt have the confidence to select anyone at that time... What if the candidate is not good enough.. what if he is not able to perform later... what if.. what if...
I was asking the same set of technical questions to everyone.. most of which were taken from my managers interviews... Gave them the toughest puzzles i had encountered (and was not able to solve myself..).. In short I WAS TERRIBLE

The Next 10.. Learning experience.. Candidates still unfortunate...
With each rejection(fortunately not mine) i was learning.... and learning fast... My question bank was growing.. and so was my confidence.. I was learning to take interviews based on candidates resume... The best part was.. i was reading a lot... I didnt want to be in a situation where candidate is explaining something i had no idea about. Was trying to find new puzzles. I had started to enjoy the whole thing...but somehow the candidates were still unfortunate...

And the rest... I was a seasoned interviewer..
Soon came my first selection... And i must say it was an easy one.. The candidate was brilliant.. had a descent enough answer for everything.... I think even if he had come in my first 5 interviews, i would have selected him. But that selection gave me great great confidence.. I also came to know that good candidates are indeed rare... I was now rejecting candidates with more confidence... and ofcourse selected a few as well.. :)

So what did i learn..
I am not explaining what kind of questions one should ask.. I still dont know.. its every's interviewer's personal judgement. What i am putting here is something which i felt/learnt while taking the interviews

Interview is a selection process and not rejection (though the selection ratios dont suggest that). So as an interviewer you need to find out what are the strengths of the candidates before judging his weaknesses. Making the candidate confortable is of utmost importance, that brings out the best in him. And beleive me you dont need to know the answers to everything you are asking. The candidates body language is a good enough indicator if he is fudging. So you can ask him to explain a previous project of his, of which you have no idea about(of course dont let the candidate know that).

And what about the interviewee... One thing I would like to share... In most interviews.. the interviewer forms a perception about the candidate in first 5-7 minutes(my manager agrees with me on this). Unfortunately, Its very easy to ruin that later but very very difficult to improve. And that perception is mostly not because of the technical answers you give, but more for how you approach the problems(even the way you say you dont know), and your body language. So be very careful about what you say or how you behave initially. Attitude is an absolutely no no.

Well enough of this trash... If you are good... you are good at both interviewing and being an interviewee.... So if you have taken the pain of reading upto this far... forget everything written above... I just had to pen down my thoughts.... :)