Thoughts Decoded

I came through an interesting article on how a recruitment team should behave in a recruitment drive. This, I read a few days after our company’s latest recruitment drive(on Saturday, 24th April). I was happy we followed most of it. In addition to the points in mentioned in that article, I have added mine too in this blog.

On Saturday, after the initial screening tests, we narrowed down our candidates to around 25. Resumes were distributed to 3 teams, each of 2 panelists. I and the other panelist in my team had to interview 5 candidates.

This was my first big experience interviewing. I had some experience while shortlisting candidates of our company’s previous batch(last year).

Bipin Sir advised us to not get into a tough technical interview as the candidates shortlisted were freshers and had already cleared the technical round. The emphasis was to be on whether the candidate could “learn” and improve his/her skills.

Now to the tips:

1. Most important tip to avoid unruly candidates:  Never disclose the answer:

Last year, while most candidates were defensive, some turned aggressive upon not answering simple questions and remained adamant that their answers were correct.

For example: When asked to explain Encapsulation, one candidate remained adamant that its definition was “to encapsulate“. After I explained its true definition,  I was asked a few more questions as if I was being interviewed by the candidate. I observed after the completion of that particular round that my mistake was to disclose the answer to the candidate.

I didnt face any candidate like that this year as I didnt let the candidate know if his/her answer was correct.

2. Read the resume:

In my experience of ‘being’ interviewed, I have faced situations wherein I was asked questions that were already present in my resume. That left a bad impression about the company in my mind. Taking this bad experience forward, I made it a point to completely read the resume of my candidates, most importantly the ‘interests’ and ‘project details’ and then finally the ‘academic record and their institutions’(Remember? The emphasis is on whether the candidate can  ”Learn and Adapt”).

The presentation of the resume also tells us a bit about the person.

Since the emphasis was on learning I wanted to know if the candidate was able to clearly explain to me his/her project and the role they played in it. One of the candidates had mentioned ‘application development’ as his interest and upon enquiring I came to know he developed some applications(like a puzzle game).

I also wanted to know the technologies learnt by them on their own or they had tried to understand how online applications like Gmail or Social Networking Sites functioned. Some of them tried to answer these.

One of the candidates had work experience in testing but couldnt explain to me the difference between blackbox and whitebox testing apporaches.

The resume took care of 90% of my questions.

The other 10% was to explain to my panel the questions asked in the previous paper test they cleared. Some were able to understand the questions upon reading twice and thrice while some couldnt understand what was being asked.

3. Don’t purposefully lob tough questions just because you can:

This is one another important point. I have experience of people trying to ask me tough questions just because they wanted to show off their knowledge. Ofcourse, nothing productive comes of this and you might be left with no candidates at the end of the recruitment drive. Luckily, as stated before, Bipin Sir had already advised us about this.

Reference:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=1980&tag=nl.e101