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

Quiz Day Morning:
I was surprised when I found Neetesh(one of the Quiz contestants) reciting every detail of Pele(the football player). He knew A-Z about Pele. Apparently, Jiten had told him about an expected question on Pele, which was never asked.

Quiz Day – The Show:
The quiz started with the why-what-how about the rounds which turned into chaos. And everyone accepted the rules as they were when it was later agreed that any more arguments would only cause everyone to go home late.

The game began with Laxman taking the Buzzer Round. Laxman had a peculiar way of saying things. If the team answered wrong, his tone turned to mocking and he used to point a finger at the team and say, “Thats the wrong answer”, as if they would be punished for that. However, if the team answered right, he would turn cheerful and say aloud after an abrupt pause, “10 Points to the team”. That sure would have made people sleeping in the room, wake up with a jerk. Way to go, Lucky.

The Audio-Visual Round was also taken by Laxman in his usual fashion. The teams could choose from one out of the five Audio questions and one out of the five Visual questions. Manoj Sir got the answer right for “SpiceJet” which none seemed to recognize.

Shekar seemed to suffer from 10seconds-memory-loss as he used to raise his hand to answer and forget what the answer was. At one moment when they were told to recognize the instrument played, he told Sarang. Sorry Shekar. There wasnt any Phone-A-Friend option.

Shailesh and Sunil were a relaxed, tension-free team who didnt get demotivated by their first wrong answer that cost them 5 points(taking their score to -5 as they were on 0). They answered the next question wrong too, taking their score to -10.

Jiten began with the “Name the personality round”, by which time, the bottom two teams were out, viz. Shailesh and Sunil, and Shekar and Pradip. I can remember Shailesh getting a right answer, an answer no one could have guessed, that of Rakhi Sawant, but that was sadly a sample question, so no marks and they were already disqualified.

I felt as if my questions leaked when I found Claudy raising his hand from the audience immediately after I asked any question.

The final two rounds were played between the remaining 3 top teams, Neetesh-Yogita, Manoj-Sachin and Jijo-Amit.

The final round being Rapid-Fire Round, everyone knew facing as much questions as possible from the 20 questions in 90 seconds, would increase their chance of winning. As there were no negative marks(Prathamesh who was our judge would have heaved a sigh of relief, given the pressure he was in to add the scores and subtract them), the teams could say anything they want, which was the reason why we got answers like “Europe” as the largest ocean as well as the largest continent, “Mother Teresa” the first Indian film at the Oscars and “Reda” as the vehicle of YamRaj.

Neetesh-Yogita got 6 correct, Manoj-Sachin got 7 correct and Jijo-Amit got 8 correct. Jijo-Amit had faced the maximum number of questions overall, around 18/20, and had they answered one more correct, it would have been a tie for the first place.

The final scores for the 3 teams were:
Neetesh-Yogita : 60
Manoj-Sachin : 80
Jijo-Amit : 75

Congrats to Manoj Sir and Sachin…

The Crowd enjoyed it

The Jhoota-Chappal awards was perfectly crafted humour. The categories included: The Most Sharmili/la WAite, The Most Hasmukh, The Most Pakaav, The Most Fekoo, The Most Chappat Chappat and many more hilarious categories. Each category had its own set of nominations(each nomination raising a roar of laughter from the crowd) and matching backgound score was provided when the winner walked to collect his/her award on the stage. Each award was succeeded by an equally humourous ad.

There is no use hiding your face Pradip!!!

Now I was left biting my nails as each frustrated winner and nominee came and tried to get their hands on me as if I had composed that list and I was the organizer. Come on, people! How can I organize something and not win a prize? As far as I am concerned, even I wanted to get hold of the organizer who left me out of even the nominations. No one knew for sure who had actually prepared the list. The people who wanted to break the organizer’s heads were divided into two groups: those who got the nominations, and those who didnt get the nominations(Ok, that included just me). Finally, when Deepika Vodafone’s performance was adjudged the best performance of the evening, Deepika Vodafone came on to the stage and surprise surprise, Shailesh Lende and Amiteshwar Prasad couldnt wait to scoot their way to collect the prize. Oops! It was when they finally came onto the stage did they know there was no way to back off now and they were exposed to the fuming winners and nominees(and me).

Thoughts Decoded was the official media partner for Deepika’s event.