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

I have a semi SLR camera from Canon (SX100 IS). I tried lot of permutation and combination to get my snaps right. My camera gave me a lot of flexibility in experimenting but with some limitations as well.

I take this opportunity to share some basic tips of photography.

Following are some of the snaps I have clicked and little description about them.

Moon has been my favorite subject for photography. I had to do lot of trial and error to get these snaps. According to me taking a snap of full moon is difficult. If you observe the two photographs you can see the difference in the shadows on the moon. In the first photo the shadows are prominent. In the second snap the shadows seem to be black spots on the moon. These snaps required a lot of manual control of the camera such as ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. The auto settings of the camera would give you a white circle of the full moon snap and the half moon may not be bright enough. I had to keep my ISO settings to the minimal as higher the ISO, higher the noise (digital camera’s limitation).

This was taken during the sunset. The sky was looking amazing. The clouds gave a nice perspective of the sky. The challenge was to get the silhouette of the buildings and also the colors of the sky. To get the silhouette the shutter-speed was increased. To get the colors the aperture was to the maximum and the ISO was 200.

The color of the wings and the balancing of the bug made me take this snap. To get the detail of the bug I had to change my camera settings to Manual focus (It helps in focusing on a specific object). Due to this setting only the bug and the stick are in focus, whereas the background is blurred. This setting helps in giving the photo a nice depth.

This photograph was a lucky one. There was lot of lightning. I wanted a snap of the lightning. This snap was taken at around 9 in the evening. The sky was totally dark. I did not have a tripod with me so I kept the camera on a car top and waited for the lightning. I had to wait for around half an hour to get this lightning in my camera frame. For this snap the shutter-speed was 13 seconds. To minimize the noise the ISO was lowest and to get maximum light the aperture was highest.

This is one of my favorite snaps. The red lines are nothing but the tail lights of moving cars. As this snap was taken in the night I had kept my ISO to the lowest. To get the lines I had kept the camera shutter open for around 13 seconds.  Since the photo was taken on the highway I could get nice straight lines of the lights. The highway was very smooth and free of potholes. I had tried this snap on the city roads but could not get these types of lines, thanks to our roads.

The above snaps are the result of macro settings of my camera. Due to this setting you can go as close as 5 cm to the subject. I was lucky for the spider snap as the spider did not move during the snap. Otherwise the snap could have been ruined. The best thing was that I did not have to go anywhere for the spider. The spider just appeared on my office desk. Fortunately I had my camera with me. The second snap is that of rain water collected in the blossom of the lotus. This was taken at a resort near Pune.

This snap was a result of the zooming (optical) capability of my camera. The Kingfisher was around 50 feet away. The 10X optical zoom helped me in getting me a clearer and closer view of the bird. As it was daylight I did not have to make any drastic changes in my camera settings.

Adobe Photoshop CS4:

Enhanced automation features
Photoshop CS4 automatically process batches of Middle Eastern document. This new feature added in this version.

Font Support
CS4 also support for wide array of Unicode fonts as well as a large number of third party fonts widely used by graphics designers.

Bi Directional Text Flow
In Adobe Photoshop CS4 more layouts are possible. For example we can write left to right or right to left within a same document. Roman text written in left to right and Middle Eastern documents are written in right to left.

Dictionary and Spell Checking
It provides Aerobic dictionary for spell checking to avoid a typos(typing mistakes)

Find – Change Feature
In CS4 version there is option of “ignore Accent”. If it is checked it allows user to search for a string of text whether it contains same accents or not.

CorelDraw Graphics Suit X4
Application
It delivers results fast, whether user are creating a company logo or working toward demanding production schedule.

COREL PHOTO-PAINT X4
Corel PHOTO-PAINT X4 is a professional image editing application that user quickly and easily retouch and enhance photos

COREL POWER TRACE X4
Professional designers often receive poor quality bitmap images from client and face the challenge of turning these bitmaps into high quality vector images for business cards, brochures, or other professional items. Coral Power Trace X4 solves this problem by Letting users quickly and accurately convert bitmaps into editable vector graphics.

Supporting applications

Barcode wizard
The barcode wizard Lets user generated bar codes in a wide range of industry standard format

Enhanced–Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications
For user who wants to automate their workflow, Coral Draw Graphics Suit X4 support latest version of VB for application.

New–File format support
It maintains its position as market leader in file format compatibility by adding support for Microsoft publisher. It support Microsoft Word 2002, 2003, 2007