When interviewing engineering candidates, resumes give hiring managers a solid idea of someone’s job experience, education history and technical skills.
But engineering managers aren’t just looking for a list of coding languages; they want to see thought process and problem-solving skills in action. Processes like whiteboarding and code reviews shed light on whether the potential candidate would be a good fit for the company and the team.
The coronavirus has forced many growing tech teams to rethink coding interviews, however.
While interviews can be intimidating, a couple of engineering managers we spoke with recommended opening and closing with casual conversation. Light banter allows both the hiring manager and interviewee to get a sense for how they’d interact in the office as teammates.
Bill Hicks, an engineering manager at travel company Expedia, doesn’t rely on shared whiteboards for virtual interviews. Instead, conversations about how the candidate thinks and works through complex problems help him determine whether they’d be a collaborative teammate.
What tools or technology do you use to conduct code review and whiteboarding interviews virtually, and why?
I don’t rely on interviewing tech like shared whiteboards, proctored questionnaires, or shared docs or IDEs for programming to do virtual interviews. I am far more interested in using conversation to explore the thinking and problem-solving process than whether the candidate can recite the right syntax of some programming language.
In a virtual interview, the candidate can have any number of cheat sheets, off-screen aides, Stack Overflow or other search sites available during the interview. Personally, I feel that if I do hire someone, I will expect them to make use of as many sources of information and help as they can to do their jobs efficiently, so I encourage that sort of thing. It’s not whether the information resides in their brain or on the internet, but rather how they understand and apply it. If they can quickly understand the problem and formulate a search that helps them solve it, then that gets the job done.
Real-life software development is not the same as solving puzzles on a whiteboard.”
How do you adapt the format or content of these types of interviews when conducting them virtually?
We’ve been conducting virtual interviews for quite a while, so we haven’t had to modify our process for the current situation. There are sophisticated tools that can be used for coding interviews, such as Quora, but I usually just use a video chat app like BlueJeans or Zoom, which allows for screen-sharing and text chat. The screen share can be used to present a UI challenge, problem statement or flowchart to the candidate, and then the text chat can be used to allow sharing of code, or pseudo-code, that might solve the problem.
It’s important to carry on a conversation with the candidate to assess their decision choices and reasoning. Taking an interactive approach puts the candidate at ease, as well as allows them to elaborate on their choices, which can reveal creativity that would never show up in a programming quiz. Real-life software development is not the same as solving puzzles on a whiteboard, and programmers should be allowed to draw on a wide range of resources, including the interviewer in the role as a peer programmer.
What’s your single best piece of advice for engineering leaders who are now tasked with handling technical interviews virtually, and why?
The problem with conducting interviews remotely is you don’t get the normal body language feedback you would in person. You can’t necessarily catch the nuance of facial expression, breathing or body motions. These are all subtle cues that people normally get from each other when engaged in an in-person conversation, which tell a lot about the meaning behind the words.
As an interviewer, you should put yourself in the position of a team member who is peer programming with the candidate because that’s how the team will have to work together for many months to come. The most important skill of a new employee, besides having basic domain knowledge and the willingness to learn, is their ability to work with the rest of the team.
The worst new hire is the one that disrupts the social interaction of the team, drives down morale and antagonizes other members of the team. A genius new hire to a team of 10 might raise the productivity by 20 percent, but if they don’t fit in with the team, you might have a team of one a few months from now. So, as an interviewer conducting a virtual interview, pay less attention to the score on a standardized test and more attention to how much you want to work with this person.
