So I give interviews, so I know what I'm looking for - usually. :) 1. Are they a good team fit. Would they work well with everyone else?
2. Are they qualified for the position? Or can they ramp up fairly quickly. Do I see potential?
3. How well did they answer my questions? Did they touch on any areas that show depth and thought?
Now, honestly.. this doesn't really help you too much, probably. Giving an interview requires a lot of ambiguous soft skills, and each person is different.
Here are two of my interview questions:
1. You are about to release a product to the public, and in the last minutes, you find an issue that would require major refactoring, what do you do?
2. You are working on a project and your boss comes up to you and requests instead of one month, you now have two weeks to finish the milestone. How would you accomplish this? (At this point, I continue to reduce the time period down to 1 week, 3 days, 1 day, 4 hours..)
How would you answer? Honestly, I don't care.. but look for the underlying meanings. What is the 1st one about? It's basically about scoping and quantifying an issue. First you need to determine what's going on here, how 'big' is the issue, what does it affect, etc.. then you can get down to, 'how do we quanitfy this and justify the action we'd like to take'
If you do those 2 things, you get a gold star.
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I've got spurs that jingle jangle jingle.
As I go riding merrily along.
And they sing, "Oh, ain't you glad you're single?"
And that song ain't so very far from wrong.