Interviewing Skills - Some thoughts and a very good online reference

I have been having hectic days last week because of the shuttling between my office and a vendor office. Since we still haven't got the hardware to work on, I have been asked by my boss to go and camp in their office until I get the work done.

Weekend was hectic as well. Had a lots of personal work on Saturday and then today On Sunday I had to interview fresh graduates who had been selected after writing a written test. The written test is basically to test their verbal skills, analytical skills and technical skills.

Coming to the process of interviewing, I've always felt that its a challenge and of course a big responsibility for the interviewer. Its a challenge because you need to ask the correct questions based on the candidate. A big responsibility because you need to ensure that you don't lose good candidates because of your ignorance or bias or ego. By losing a good candidate, you are doing injustice not just for the interviewee, but also for the organization. Same is the case for selecting a bad candidate.

While I had been wondering what exactly should i look for in a candidate and how to judge him irrespective of the field of study he is from, I had some very good guidance from Joel Spolsky's article - The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (You may want to read the lastest and revised version of his article here).

My own strategy for selecting candidates has been evolving and I have been refining my interviewing process as time goes on. I would like to update this post with my selection criteria or my way of judging a interviewee.

A very funny video - Making fun of Cingular-AT&T deal

This was really fun. Was laughing out loud in the middle of the night after watching this :). Am sure you will enjoy this.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4772595262731012292&hl=en

Interview of Eric Schmidt - Hear the latest update on Google

Its been a long time since I had blogged. Was thoroughly held up with the work - both personal and professional.

By the way, if you want to know what Google has been up to recently, you can look at the below YouTube video for an interview of Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxzDU3tTzGA



Some interesting points that I noted in this interview were about Google's declaration of Presentation application in http://docs.google.com; Google's view on Net Neutrality; Google Maps coming soon on iPod (Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board).