Technical interviews are a hot topic in today’s competitive job market. However, more articles are analyzed from the perspective of the interviewer, telling you how to prepare the key basic knowledge, how to adjust the mentality, and even collect common interview questions to carry out the tactics of questions. The ultimate purpose is to help us pass the interview assessment and obtain the expected job position. In my opinion, interview preparation, communication and evaluation are equally important. How to identify excellent candidates, how to help the team find more suitable work partners, the technical ability of the interviewer, personal quality requirements are higher. At the same time, in the long run, talent accumulation is the most cost-effective investment. Recruiting the most suitable talents under the current conditions will bring better value to the company and the team as a whole.

The prototype of this article was originally a few months ago, according to my experience of interviewing interviewers in different companies and teams in recent years, I sorted out some summaries and insights. Recently, I happened to have a conversation with some friends about related topics by chance. I felt deeply moved, so I rearranged the content (mainly removing some sensitive information about companies and businesses), hoping to have more in-depth discussion space.

This article is more suitable for students who have an interviewer background or will be an interviewer, especially those who are new to the role of interviewer and do not know how to conduct technical interviews.

First, the interview process of the interviewer

For an interviewer, a complete interview process probably goes through three stages:

  • Prepare before
  • In the face communication
  • Surface after evaluation

We will talk about the operation details from these three aspects.

Two, the preparation before

Both candidates and interviewers need to prepare for the interview. Based on personal experience, the interviewer’s preparation can mainly focus on the following aspects:

  • Team position expectation
  • Basic Information of Candidates
  • The interview process
  • Interview questions

2.1 Clear team position expectations

First, we need to know what the current team’s position expectations are. To avoid the waste of energy and resources due to the large deviation from the candidate’s goal, it is necessary to know that the interview is also a cost, but also to consider efficiency and output.

Job expectation can be understood as: if the candidate comes to the team, what we expect the candidate to do, how much responsibility he or she can take on, and how much value he or she can create for the team. We all like students with strong practical ability, great development potential, technical ability and good personal quality. However, we seldom meet such perfect candidates in the actual interview. We usually judge whether the candidates can bring more benefits to the team within the expected range.

In addition, some teams have special requirements for candidates’ educational background, management experience, technical ability, and current rank. At this time, special attention should be paid. If unqualified, the interview process should be terminated in advance as soon as possible to reduce subsequent consumption.

2.2 Get to know the candidates’ basic information

As an interviewer, we get to know the basic information of the candidate through the resume, such as years of work, education background, technology stack, etc., which is very helpful for us to judge the candidate’s ability and prepare follow-up interview questions.

In many cases, the interviewer will infer his or her initial judgment from the resume, and the subsequent interview process is only a step by step verification of their conclusions and correction of errors. Therefore, the information in a resume is important to both the candidate and the interviewer.

Sometimes we will also encounter some unusual information in the resume, such as graduation date, working date, etc., so we can communicate with HR or candidates in advance to ensure that both parties have the same cognition. After all, under the current social background, the cost of counterfeiting is relatively low. In order to reduce subsequent troubles, these unexpected factors need to be eliminated in advance.

2.3 Communicate the interview process

Be sure to talk to the HR or candidate in advance about when, how, and how you will conduct the interview, and take some time to prepare for questions that may arise during the interview. Also, plan your schedule ahead of time to avoid scheduling conflicts.

The form of the interview will have a certain impact on our interview effect. Many companies now conduct a phone interview before a formal interview. Everyone knows that the phone interview is not a good test of programming skills, so you can focus more on the breadth and depth of certain knowledge points. However, both sides should be well aware that the phone interview is more for the purpose of assessing whether candidates have a certain basic knowledge, and filtering candidates in advance to reduce the time and labor cost of a large number of candidates.

If you need a specific venue to join the interview process, make sure you book it in advance to avoid the awkward situation where you can’t make a last-minute appointment and the interview can’t take place. (I once worked for a company where meeting rooms were an extremely scarce resource.)

2.4 Prepare interview questions

To ensure a smooth interview process, we need to know the candidate’s background and prepare interview questions in advance.

The design of interview questions has great skills, although a lot of valuable information is extended from temporary questions in the interview, but the interview questions prepared in advance still has strong guidance, convenient for us to determine the specific “outline” of in-depth communication between the two sides, so that the interview process has some chat, not awkward.

How should we formulate the topic? Personally, it can be considered from the following aspects:

Background of candidate project

It is mainly used to understand the depth of the candidate’s understanding of the relevant business, whether he has enough experience in dealing with business scenarios, and whether he has gained personal growth in the long-term business support process.

Let’s take a few examples:

  • What is the business context in which Project A arose (looking at the level of knowledge of project A)?
  • What features did you lead in project A (looking at the candidate’s involvement, contribution to the project, etc.)?
  • How did you solve the problem B in the project (the preliminary research, methods, means, etc.)?
  • Why do you choose plan C over Plan D to solve the problem?

Candidate technology Stack

It is mainly used to understand the basic knowledge level of candidates and judge whether they have the ability to meet the requirements of business development and technical exploration in the current team.

Let’s take a few examples:

  • How does Vue implement bidirectional data binding (considering your understanding of the framework’s underlying principles)?
  • If you were developing a simple MVVM framework, what issues would you tackle first (looking at the perception of the nature of the framework)?
  • How have you used VUex in business development (looking at basic usage, best practices, etc.)?

Working Years of the candidate

It is mainly used to understand the level of the candidate within the range of ability in the expected number of years, and to judge the subsequent development potential. The form of the question may be more diversified.

Let’s take a few examples:

  • What is the overall structure of project A (assess the candidate’s level of awareness)?
  • What is the process of rendering a page in a browser (test candidates’ knowledge of relevant technical principles)?
  • How to realize the function of finding duplicate data in multiple integer data, and how to calculate time and space complexity (check basic programming ability)?

Candidate management Status

It is mainly used to understand the candidate’s ability in technical management. If the candidate has no relevant management experience, the relevant topic can not be set.

Let’s take a few examples:

  • In the current team, how many students are you responsible for the daily development work?
  • How to maximize the benefits between personal growth, business development and team benefits?
  • How to help the new students in the team grow up quickly?

3. Face-to-face communication

Before you start the interview, print out a copy of the candidate’s resume, check the candidate’s information during the interview (as a sign of respect), and have a piece of paper or two and a pen handy to take notes on (for subsequent evaluation).

Be sure to contact the candidate on time, be sure not to be late, and communicate with the candidate in advance for special reasons. Remote video interviews are common during the pandemic, so we need to adjust local equipment in advance to start the interview process.

The specific interview process varies from person to person, but some aspects are essential:

  • Introduction of the interviewer: if the company does not have mandatory requirements, you can not specify the personal information of the interviewer, can be directly described as XX company XX team technical interviewer.
  • Introduction to the interview process: Briefly explain the information about the interview, such as the duration (20-45 minutes is recommended), and how to deal with the questions (if you are not clear about the questions, you can skip them to relieve the pressure of the candidate).
  • Formal interview process: generally according to the prepared topic to carry out the interview process, you can temporarily supplement some questions according to the situation, can achieve their own understanding of the candidate’s overall situation.
  • Candidates’ rhetorical questions: at the end of the interview, candidates can be asked if there is anything they want to know, and they can describe some positive publicity content of the team appropriately. Remember to refrain from involving internal privacy of the company (such as product strategic planning, employee salary, etc.).
  • End: Try not to directly tell the result of the interview, just explain that the situation will be reported to HR, and HR students will communicate with each other about the follow-up interview process, so as to avoid some unnecessary embarrassment.

For the formal interview process, there are some stereotypes:

  1. Start by asking candidates to take a minute to briefly describe their work and projects. On the one hand, it can relieve the downforce of candidates, so that they can play better in the follow-up communication process. We, on the other hand, the interviewer can quickly determine the candidate to describe the situation with your resume matches (resume fraud, the information does not match the situation is very common, basic will not have the follow-up results, quick decisions to avoid subsequent a waste of time), whether to meet the requirements of the company/team “line” (fixed number of year of the degree of education, experience, etc., such as work for 5 years, We only had one year of front-end development experience and we wanted an advanced front-end development, which rarely met job expectations).

  2. If your resume is full of information and you don’t know where to start, ask the candidate to describe the most technically challenging projects. A candidate’s understanding and answers to technical challenges can quickly gauge how high the “ceiling” of competence is. Then, through the detailed description of the candidate and the communication between the two parties, the candidate’s business processing ability, practical ability and project planning ability can be basically determined.

  3. Based on the prepared questions, consider the “stress” questions in moderation. According to project specific areas of the problem, continuously ask some of the specific implementation, the underlying principle, business logic, etc., in order to make the candidate a more thorough to answer why, what, what to do, how to evaluate, how to optimize the problem, thus more comprehensive understanding of the candidate in the development process of enforcing the research breadth, depth, and height. Whether a candidate still performs as expected under “pressure” is an important criterion of potential development. Breadth and depth of knowledge as additional supplements, both of which are combined to infer a candidate’s technical rank.

  4. Let me write the algorithm. Algorithm is the most suitable way to inspect the ability to start, no matter what level of students are recommended to examine the algorithm code implementation. In order to avoid a large number of students to brush the part of luck, it is suggested to prepare some algorithm time/space complexity analysis, algorithm optimization and other higher degree of questions in advance, can give more real feedback results. In the past, candidates have felt that the interview process is not professional because there is no algorithm, so in order to improve the company’s “force”, it is best not to omit the algorithm part. Do not mention questions that are too difficult. Unless the candidate has relevant experience and background, it is difficult to achieve the expected assessment effect in limited time. We only need to do some slightly challenging or flexible questions to test the candidate’s problem-solving ideas and coding ability. It is not so important whether the candidate can actually write the code to achieve the expected results.

Iv. Post-interview evaluation

Compared with the previous two steps, the evaluation part is relatively standardized. Our general principle for evaluating candidates is: truthful description and objective evaluation.

True description means that the interview transcript in the evaluation must be the original transcript of the interviewer and the candidate, even if some questions or answers are wrong, they also need to be recorded.

Objective evaluation refers to the final determination of candidates’ interview results and rank estimation based on one’s own judgment in accordance with team expectations and rank standards without any external conditions.

Finally, if you feel that you are not suitable for the needs of the current team, but you have good ability, you can also consider recommending to other departments, and cherish the talent resources collected by the company.

A standard interview evaluation template might look something like this:

[Interview evaluation] XXX – Front-end engineer – Initial interview time: 2020-10-01 10:30 interview place: XXX conference room Interviewer: XX Interview conclusion: XXX meets the expected technical ability requirements of the current position and has passed the current round of interviews. Subsequent interview rounds can focus on the ability of XXX. Interview Transcript:

    1. Q: xxxx ? A: xxxx.
    1. Q: xxxx ? A: xxxx.
  • .

General interview comments: (You can describe in detail the candidate’s business, technical ability, development potential, their own strengths and weaknesses, whether it is suitable for the current team needs, which team types, etc.)

I believe that through the analysis of some interview links, you will make the interviewer of the interview work more skilled.

Five, the summary

The interview content mentioned in this article is based on their previous interview experience summarized and out of the interview experience, only for your reference. Different companies and teams have different business backgrounds and requirements. I hope you can develop a set of interview methodology for your team based on this article and combine your own demands, so as to become better technical interviewers and create better team values.