As I recently have two open positions on my team for software testers, I’ve been thinking about interviewing again.  One thing that I have learned over the years is that “Interviewing is not easy.”  Few managers (let alone non-managers) get training on how to properly interview. A person can get promoted to management and are expected to know how. 

Early on, I saw hiring like playing the lotto.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.  But, later, through mentoring and the school of hard knocks, I learned that there are techniques I could use to improve my interviewing skills and thus improve my odds of hiring great people.

I have sat through interviews that are painful to watch.  Folks come with few questions. Some people don’t ask any.  The questions that are asked return some useful information, but not as much as there could be.

To begin, keep the purpose of the interview in mind .  That purpose is to gather information to help you make a decision to hire this person or not.  Much of your ability to get that information is based on the type of questions you ask.

When interviewing, you want three questions answered.

First, is this person able to do the job? 

Does this person have the knowledge of the techniques you use?  Do they have experience with the tools used in your shop?  Do they have an understanding of the processes that you use?  This is the easiest question to answer and most interviewers questions are toward this end.

Second, is this person willing to do the job?  

This is important.  Being able to do the job and being willing to do the job are very different things.  A programmer may be a talented and knowledgeable.  They may know C#, Java and SQL like the back of their hand.  However, you don’t want to find out late that they only want to work on new programs.  They don’t want to work on maintaining existing code.

Third, is this person manageable once on the job? 

This is also important, but many times overlooked.  You are looking for maturity.  You want to root out problems with this person working with you and your team.  You want people that act their age, not their shoe size.

Stay tuned for some follow-up postings.  I’ll discuss types of interviewing questions.

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