Recent slide I made - Based on Joel Spolsky's Guerilla's guide to Interviewing

1. Great Interviewing!
Based on Joel Spolsky’s Guerilla Guide
Sriram V Iyer

2. Objective of Interview
Identify people who are
1. Smart, AND
2. Get Things Done
Nothing MORE, Nothing LESS!

3. Interview Process
• Resume Filtering / Phone Screen (OPTIONAL, Not covered here)
• Face to Face Interviews
• 4-6 People interviewing
• 3 Rounds (Minimum)
• At the end of Interview, Complete the Assessment within 15 mins
of Interview, with Result: HIRE or NO HIRE
• More than two NO HIRE in a panel of 6 or more than one NO HIRE
in a panel of 4 means NO HIRE

4. Thumb Rules
• One Candidate, One to Three Interviewers
• Insist on solving it in Whiteboard (not paper)

5. Objective of Interview
Identify people who are
1. Smart, AND
2. Get Things Done
Nothing MORE, Nothing LESS!

6. Smart – But Cannot Get Things Done
• Typically high academic qualifications
• Overemphasis on theory instead of actual work
• Quite Eloquent
• But cannot ship
• NO HIRE

7. Not Smart, but Can get things done
• Ability to solve problems by brute force
• Usually can work only in a narrow domain
• Cannot adapt
• Useless beyond a certain domain
• We need to clean up the mess, later, at a MUCH higher cost
• NO HIRE

8. Detecting Smart
• Flow in conversation
• Candidate shows ingenuity, intellect
• Passionate (VERY important)
• Interviewers, Do NOT:
• Suppress the candidate! (Don’t talk more than what you should say)
• Ask Quiz questions: What is the third member of _FILE structure in stdio.h?

9. Hire or No Hire
• Only two possible outcomes of an Interview per interviewer:
• HIRE or NO HIRE
• No other Outcome – Hold, May be later, Not for my team 
• No Ability to Adapt => No Hire
• When in doubt… NO HIRE
• Mechanically translate anything other than HIRE to NO HIRE (e.g.,
Well, Hire, I guess, but I’m a little bit concerned about… => NO
HIRE)
• Cost of Bad Hires >> Cost of losing a good hire

10. Overall Flow of an Interview
• Introduction
• Question about recent project candidate worked on
• Easy Programming Question
• Pointer/Recursion Question
• Are you satisfied?
• Do you have any questions?

11. Identifying Good Candidates
• Passionate
• Ability to Explain
• Leadership Role
• How fast does he solve the easy questions? (Super fast is good!)
• Pointers / Recursion – Make or break in programming skills
• “Where is the bug?”
• Sell the company in the end, even if NO HIRE

12. Hiring the Best
• Really smart programmers LOVE to be challenged
• Challenging them is the best way to motivate them to join us!
• The other advantage of having a challenging interview is:
• Good candidates are hired
• Bad candidates will be filtered

13. Successful Interviewing
• KNOW / Understand the position you are hiring
• Extract the BEST from the candidate – Get him to a relaxed
position (Offer coffee?, Crack a joke, Talk something general –
Avoid politics, religion..)
• Remove prejudices (IIT, Way he looks etc)

14. Thank You!