Phone Interviews

My technique for interviewing developer candidates begins with a scheduled 30 minute
screening phone call.  This usually takes a pile of 10 resumes to 3 and allows
us to bring the remaining 3 people in for genuine interviews.

Tangentially Related Diatribe

I would like to mention quickly here that I cannot believe how much people exaggerate
on their resumes.  This is technology people!  Do you really think I am
not going to ask you about the technology that you yourself listed on your resume? 
I know enough about all of the major buzzwords to ferret out your lies and you are
wasting my time as well as yours.

Back to the Point

So I was recently on a phone screening for a developer wherein the question was asked
of her, “Please tell me about that project you mentioned.”

“OK,” she replied, “we implemented a database to hold the underlying data and used
a communications layer to expose that database.  Then we implemented the user
application in a 4GL language.”

Huh?  Did you just reduce and entire application to, “we implemented in a 4GL
language”?

“What language did you use?” I asked.

“Yeah… I can’t recall.”

Next.