Interviewing

Interviewing is hard work. Its hard to be the interviewee and its hard to be the interviewer. Fortunately I haven't had to be on the interviewer side of the table in quite some time. I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky who writes a fantastic tech blog, his suggestion is that you should look for people who are smart and get things done. That is it. Simple. When I'm on a interview committee that is my Mantra. The problem I have seen lately is that others on the committee have very defined set of things they are looking for that blurs their judgment of the canidate at hand. I believe that at the end of the day you can teach someone to use a tool or set of tools but you can not teach them to think in a different way. Personality traits are hard if not impossible to change and further more we should not want to change a person to fit our job and environment.

Today we did a phone screen for two candidates. Both were technical savvy however one had a lot more programming experience then the other. The one with programming experience certainly could do the technical aspect of the job however the canidate had a hard time communicate at a level that would engage a functional user. This to me is a red flag. We are not going to be able to change this candidates communication style, they have operated this why for years. Trying to shape away years of learned behavior is almost impossible. The other canidate was an effective communicate that understood process and methodology. This canidate was not a strong programmer. In my opinion we can teach programming and we can teach the tool. The good news is we are starting with a clean slate!

My goal when looking at some one to hire is to find someone smart that gets things done. This is the corner stone! After we narrow down the candidates I'm looking for some one that fits the job, the organization and has the innate skills that can't be trained.