· interviewing

Interviewing: Communication

I’ve been in India for around 4 months and in that time I think I’ve probably interviewed more people than I have in the last 4 years.

Over this time I’ve come to realise that the two main things I’m looking for in candidates are passion and ability to communicate effectively.

It’s relatively easy to pick up on whether someone is passionate about what they do in a conversation or while pairing with them but I find the communication aspect a bit more tricky.

I’m typically trying to see whether the candidate can explain things at various levels of abstraction, moving up and down the levels as appropriate to get their point across.

With some people it’s really easy for me because they’re able to do this flawlessly without much feedback from me about whether I understand what they’re talking about and if they need to reframe.

However, in the majority of interviews I end up in the situation where the candidate perhaps isn’t explaining something in a way that I can understand.

Either they’re giving way too much irrelevant technical detail or end up beating around the bush at a high level and not really answering the question.

If this situation happened on a team I was working on then I would certainly consider it my job to try and guide the conversation so that we could both get what we want out of it.

After all communication is very much a two way thing.

In the interview context I do the same thing but I would expect the candidate to pick up the hints that I’m not understanding them easily and adjust the way that they reply to future questions to take that into account.

If they don’t seem to take that feedback on board then it’s quite likely that I’ll make the judgement that they’re not able to communicate very clearly and we won’t proceed with the candidate.

I’d be intrigued to hear the approaches others take because it does feel a little bit like I’m doing it wrong in this respect.

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