The Effective Hiring Manager

15How to Conduct Technical Interviews

If you’re hiring someone whose job requires technical skills, assess those skills as directly as you can. Test them. As mentioned in the beginning of Chapter 5, testing technical skills for a technical job is in fact a behavioral interview, focusing on technical behaviors.

Do the testing in a separate interview. Don’t make the classic mistake of having every technical person spend 20 to 40% of his or her interview time making some insufficient attempt to verify a candidate’s technical skills. At the end of that interview, they won’t know enough about the candidate’s technical skills and they won’t know enough about other behaviors addressed in the behavioral interviews.

So one of your interviews on the final interview day addresses nothing but technical skills. The outcome of this interview is a hire/not hire recommendation based on the technical skills assessed.

Based on the types of problems you assign, do you need to provide 5 minutes for this problem, 15 for that to fill up 60 or 90 minutes?

Some examples of problems and questions: If you’re hiring someone who needs to be an expert in MS Excel, give a test to see whether he can create a pivot table. Give him a dataset—rows and columns of data in Excel—on a laptop, and give him 30 minutes to create it. (If you think this is trivial, you only have to assign it one time to have people fail, all of whom described themselves as MS Office experts.)

If you’re hiring a mechanical engineer, ...