Mad Skillz, or What Does the Hiring Manager Look for?

Speaking strictly for myself, I look for the following in an in-person interview:

• Communication skills
• Technical knowledge
• Problem-Solving skills

I judge communication skills not just by how well you talk, but also by seeing how you handle ‘soft’ questions. Your vocabulary, inflection, enunciation, and tone of voice also factor in, as does your posture and body language. This is not to say that you should obsess over your every little movement, but you should remember that most and everything you say and do is being judged or at least noticed.

As for technical knowledge, that is evaluated by asking --well, technical questions. I try not to make it too much of a trivia contest, but I will of necessity ask both straightforward as well as obscure questions.

In terms of technologies I typically cover all the ones that a web developer at our company would use. This may also include databases, although admittedly a front end developer is unlikely to work heavily with the database except maybe for testing purposes. Certainly they will never touch a production database; team boundaries and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations will see to that.

Problem solving skills are difficult to evaluate in an interview, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. I ask the candidates some hypothetical design problems and also get them to write some code or markup on the whiteboard.

These exercises require a combination of technical knowledge as well as problem solving skills, and I find them more useful than purely abstract ‘Microsoft’ style questions. And as it turns out, some people who can answer the most obscure technical questions cannot write the simplest of code or solve the most straightforward of problems, and it becomes evident at this stage.

Finally, some people wonder whether the interviewer makes up their mind about the candidate within the first 10 minutes of the interview. I try not to let this happen; even people who sputter coming out of the gate they may redeem themselves in the latter part of the interview. Only rarely do I ever cut an interview short, and that only happens when it’s painfully obvious the person truly has no clue.