What have been your experiences as an interviewer (either first time or seasoned)?

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Check out my article “From software tester to interviewer: Lessons from my first interview process,” on the MoT site to gain an interviewing perspective from someone ‘new to the game’.

What you’ll learn:

  • Why different viewpoints matter: Getting a mix of employees involved in the interview process, even those who are newer to the field, can really shake things up and make the candidate pool better while also boosting the company vibe.
  • The power of being real: Being open and honest with candidates—like sharing your own stories and admitting if you’re a bit nervous—helps build a connection and makes the interview feel way better for everyone.
  • The perks of teamwork: Teaming up with your coworkers during interviews can bring in fresh ideas, help you make smarter choices, and level up the whole hiring gig.
  • Making it a great experience for candidates: Showing candidates respect, giving clear feedback, and making sure they have a positive interview can really boost your company’s reputation and help you snag the best talent out there.

After reading, share your thoughts:

  • Have you ever been involved in the hiring process for your team? What were your biggest takeaways?
  • Do you remember your first time interviewing? Have you got any tips?
  • Have you ever had any issues with being ‘allowed’ to interview?
  • How important is it to you to work for a company that values employee input and involvement in the hiring process?
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Great article, just to put your learning thoughts down was a really interesting read. :grin:
For me, the recruiting process I’ve followed is constantly evolving, I’m lucky to have been empowered to do that with my organisation. So my learnings so far:

  • You have to respect that your colleagues and the interviewees won’t necessarily see the world the same as you for all the great reasons of diversity. So having a broad selection of people to help and learn about the interview process for me is a must. But you have to balance that with them not being intimidating to the interviewee. I had an interview once with 12 people in the room sitting at a massive old oak board room table…my instinct was, I don’t want to work here.
  • After some successful and unsuccessful recruiting, we learned that top of the list is “team fit”. Forget processes, standards, skills, our QA team have their own mission statement - does this person fit in that mission statement? We’ve recruited some technically brilliant people that dazzled us in the interview, but in the heat of battle there were things they weren’t prepared to do - i.e. SHARE. Share their knowledge, share the pain, share the workload etc. which ultimately affects the whole team and its performance
  • So currently (coz it can still evolve) we have a 2 stage process. The first interview objective was to establish if this person fitted into our mission statement/culture, will it be great to work with this person. I learned quickly that I wasn’t the best person to lead this as they didn’t need to work with me day to day, so I handed this stage over to individuals in the team. If we thought they’d be great to work with, like you we sent them over a tech exercise but importantly there was no specific right answer. We wanted to see if they could technically do it but were interested in their approach to solving the problems they were presented.
    After using evaluation tools like codility, we realised thats not how they’re going to work in the real world, so why restrict them? I remember being invited to a dev interview that had a very different approach to ours and their candidate had a live coding test. Well they froze. I thought, this isn’t a realistic environment to how they will work.
    For me I felt strongly to give them freedom, tell us honestly how you solved it and explain your thinking. So the 2nd interview was all about that, where they come in with their solution and talk it through with the team - who’ll have different opinions but can honestly and openly chat about the approach and alternative approaches. After that process, we’ll be either filled with enthusiasm wanting to work with them or come to the conclusion they wouldn’t fit and would be better off in a different environment
    But different organisations, different cultures, different projects, different needs etc. means there’ll never be a silver bullet approach. Just be prepared to evolve it, but 100% involve the wider team.
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Thanks for writing it, and I’m glad that interviewing was a way you could grow and reflect on your progress. A couple of thoughts:

First: Part of the two-way street is that you are trying to persuade people (sell) to join your organisation. You don’t need to get cheesey, but I think it’s wrong to assume that the opportunity will sell itself.

Second: You should work backwards from requirements. This helps the process to be effective and fair. What do we need from a successful applicant - skills, experience etc? Dig into this and check if you’re hiding real requirements that might be hard to test behind proxy requirements that are easier. Why is it 3 years’ experience of X → what does that give that 1 year doesn’t? Is it being able to work with X to tackle this kind of problem without support?

Once you have requirements, you can think of what evidence there could be for them, and how you could gather that evidence via questions etc.

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You need to be careful when making notes during interviews. Candidates can submit a Freedom of Information request asking to see those notes. Depending on what you wrote, they may be able to take legal action for discrimination. In face-to-face interviews, I always used to make my notes after the candidate had left, so I could deny having made any.

It’s even risky when doing online interviews. During a recent interview I made notes in a Notepad file, one of which was “Talks the hind legs off a donkey”. Later in the interview I shared some of my screens (I have 4) to show him some things, and I later realised I had accidentally shared the screen containing the Notepad file for about ten minutes.

CV filtering
Most of the CVs you receive will be junk, so you need an efficient filtering process. I immediately reject CVs based on a variety of heuristics including:

  • CV attached to an empty email.
  • Email contains leetspeak. Yes, plenty of idiots do this.
  • Email is clearly boilerplate and includes things that suggest the candidate has not even looked at our website.
  • The header of the CV contains an ISTQB logo. Anyone who does any research into our company would know we are totally opposed to ISTQB’s approach to testing.
  • The CV is excessively long. Most are far too long. I received one that used A3 paper size to reduce its length, which resulted in about 25 words per line.
  • The CV is in a tiny font. I received one that was in an 8pt font with zero left and right margins to reduce its length.
  • Any other obvious signs of idiocy.

If you have an HR department, don’t let them anywhere near the hiring process other than to apply the CV filtering rules you have given them.

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Some really good insight in the article.

Here are a few things from my own experience.

Get interview training for all involved.

We have bias’s, its natural to favour people like yourself, share similar views on things, have read a blog you liked, ones that fit in with the status quo, at peer level some people will hire purely on the idea they really liked them and thought they’d get on well with them, at manager level they are often thinking will this person be easy to manage.

These things are important but they are very basics, there’s a guy at the pub I like who matches all of those but give him a testing challenge and not such a great match.

Using scripted interviews, in theory these allow for consistency and more junior people doing interviews. You might as well automate this. Your interview is going to be a reflection of your work environment and you might be better hiring an AI if you are hard core sticking to a script. You’ll also get scripted answers that you will not learn from.

Hypotheticals - again in theory you are trying to see how they would react regarding potential real challenges your company faces. Even graduates have real experience.

Academic problem solving. Graduates often do better at this than senior resources. Its primarily a practice and familiarity thing. Example I picked up an example interview test for a company, my first run at it I was slow and hit about 30% in the time limit. Two days of practice later and I was hitting 90+ percent in actual interview. I had crammed 20 plus years experience into two days practice to pass the interview. If you use them allow the candidate to use the same tools your team will use, that may include AI chat boxes.

The two way element in the article is critical, they are interviewing your company, as an interviewer lose any company based hubris you may have. You want a good multi-way match not a one way match.

Real experience is usually the most important element, what challenges have they really faced, what they felt, did, learned, their thought process and what they would do in hindsight. Drill down into each response going deeper, deep test this so to say. AI is not going to help a candidate here as its personal.

In latter stages, let the walk the work environment and meet the team, let the team make the final hiring decision.

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One approach for testers new to this is to take their testing skills and apply them to an interview.

If you are a script focused tester this will though be much harder unless your hiring a script focused tester.

If your testing leans more to very human strengths, critical thinking, variation, discovery, exploration and investigation these are very good skills to take into an interview.

Try taking your test charters and write interview charters in the same format, perhaps even share the charters with the candidate before the interview.

Example. High level
Explore real experience using five why’s to establish the basics of a good mutual match between candidate and company.

Four or five charters will normally suffice, what information do you want to find out, what approaches will you use to garner that information, what decisions are dependent on that information. Ultimately again its a good match and hiring decision but you will also have matching skills and good team and company fit decisions leading to that final decision.

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Nice article! I find interviewing candidates scarier than being interviewed thats for sure - if I get an interview ‘wrong’ I’m going to loose credability within a company who has trusted my judgement or I’m going to impact the candidates career, whereas if I dont interview very well for a role, it doesn’t matter so much because they’ll move on.