Fast food interviews

Hiring a right kind of resource is always crucial in the IT industry. This blog is intended to slam the technical interview boards in the Indian IT industry. I have so far attended umpteen no of interviews and was not able to find many of them to be really valuable. I have also got a chance to attend interviews directly from some US and UK based software companies and I could really make out the difference in the standards at which the interviews are conducted in India and other countries like US and UK. I would like to highlight some of the points which make the Indian interviews hapless.

1. Most of the technical interview boards in India are totally incognizant about the actual requirement for which the candidate is recruited. They are not trained properly to pick the right resource. The interview panel starts with the most irritating question “Tell me something about you”, trust me this question will be repeated from technical to the HR round. What I really do not understand is after scanning through our resume why they ask this question. As a matter of fact only a few people in the technical interview panel take the pain to scan your resume. Before a candidate is being interviewed it is really important to scan his resume to identify his Core expertise, projects he has undertaken and his roles and responsibilities in each of them. It is really important to jot down an interview plan for each resource being interviewed.

2. I have often seen interviewers asking some text book questions. For instance I was once asked the funniest technical question on earth. “What are the new features of .NET 3.0 when compared to 2.0.”? There are umpteen no of questions like this which could be easily googled and found out in no time. This could be advantageous for most of the book worms who imbibes the text book answers and narrate them eloquently. In one of the interviews I was asked, what is the difference between Varchar and Varchar2 data types in Oracle? Remember such question will only help you to pick a bunch of coconuts for your team.

3. Most of the time the real coding skills are not tested. Coding is something one should never forget as long as he or she is the technical career path. In India the interviewers treat most experienced technical resources as someone equivalent to immortals. Let me quote this with an example, in certain companies they recruit coders after conducting written technical tests. My present company also does that and when I came for the interview I was not asked to take the written test. The test had a bunch of good technical questions pretty close to Brain bench standards. I asked the recruitment team why I can’t take the test. One of the recruiter said that it is because I was a more experienced guy and a test is not necessary for me. I was keen to take the test and clear it. According to me a written test where your coding are technical skills can be tested are really mandatory to hire the best technical resources. It is a good idea to make the candidate write some programs and also ask him to write the unit test cases for that.

4. I have seen people getting rejected just because of not knowing a particular skill within a language. I have seen some companies rejecting candidates who do not know Web services or Remoting. In such cases we tend to loose the real maverick candidates. A guy who knows the text book answers about the aforesaid technologies will sneak in to the company. Trust me such people are not going to shine in the organization. In IT industry technology is something that keeps changing every year. Hence it his highly important to choose candidates who have the aptitude to learn or master any technology. Any skill set a person brings to a company will be obsolete in couple of years.
5. HR managers also play an important role in recruiting candidates. The initial screening of resumes are done by the HR managers who are really not techies and find the profiles which will insatiate your requirement. Ideally it should be the Technical lead or an Architect who needs to scan and pick the candidates who can get the job done

These are some of the silly mistakes which every interviewer makes and finally finds the resource he hired to be delinquent. The eeriest thing which could happen is the candidate might join and report to the interviewer who hired him.