We are coming back... baby....

It’s been quite a long time since I blogged about interviews. The reason is simple. My company had put a freeze on hiring for the past 15 months or so.

Now that the economy has supposedly improved, the freeze has been thawed (sic) and the formal recruitment process has started off. I salivated at the prospect of being on the panel for the simple reason that they give some fodder for my blog.

I didn’t get to interview many people and had to be satisfied with just 3. And out of these 3, only 2 interviews were even worthy enough to be blogged. And even they made the cut only because
(a) I haven’t blogged much about interviews recently due to the reasons mentioned earlier
(b) I haven’t blogged much about anything in the recent past

The first candidate was no good for this blog. But the second guy was. I will however start with the last guy. The last candidate I interviewed was unfortunately slotted around lunch time. And as it happens in all such interviews, there was a delay in starting the discussion on time and we actually started only around 12:30 PM. It was a fairly reasonable interview, with the guy meeting most of our expectations. Towards the end, I asked him the usual “Do you have any questions for us?” question. Usually people respond with some real simple question like “Do you have automation projects?” or “Do you have banking domain projects?” or a very terse “Nothing right now”. But this guy went one step ahead with the last option. He said “Nothing, I am hungry” with a big grin!

Now, to the second guy. He has around 4-5 years of experience out of which, 2 years have been in the realm of product testing in the mobile telephony arena. I asked him to talk about that project. He told me that he was primarily involved in testing the security feature in few high-end phones, whereby one can login to an application over the web and issue commands to lock the handset. So I asked him to tell me potential error points that can happen in this end-to-end workflow. The guy responded with issues that were related to application settings on the handset alone!

Then, I asked him to tell me how this communication from the web server to the mobile phone happens. His response – “Through WAP”. I then asked him to tell me how a web server that is connected to a hard-wired network (I even pointed to a computer in the interview room) communicates to the mobile phone. All I wanted to hear from him was about transmissions and receptions from servers to satellites or mobile towers, but he seemed to be on a different wavelength.

He said – “That’s through WAP technology” with a tone soaked in pride. He went on to say that it was only through “WAP technology” that SMS from one phone reached the other. Not wanting to hear anymore such gyaan, I went to another area altogether.

He said that he’d reviewed test cases written by his team. I asked him how he did that. First he gave me some of the standard answers like he’d check the layout, do a spell check etc. and would then look to see if all requirements have been covered. I asked him how he managed to review the work of some 5-6 of his team members from offshore while he was at onsite. His answer was that he had 2 reliable people in his team at offshore who would ensure all of that and he would simply collate the artifacts and submit to customer!

Slightly exasperated, I asked him as to what he’d do if he joins my company and his “reliable” team members don't. His response was that he’d first go through requirements and then check the test cases to see if they are all fine. And he then said that after a month or two, he’d identify a reliable person who would do all this for him! My friends felt that he was being too truthful and I don't disagree. But an interview is basically a forum where one’s ability to lie and ability to articulate theoretical concepts such that they sound practical, are the only things that help in selecting a candidate. So on that count (and also because he didn’t clear questions asked by another panelist on the technical front), I had no choice but to reject him.

Eagerly waiting for the next lot!