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Discussion on: Tips to Become a Better Interviewer

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Yurui Zhang

I've been helping my company interviewing quite a few candidates in the past few months. Honestly being an interviewer is just as stressful as being interviewed.

Usually I spend 1-2 hours before the meeting to study the candidate's resume - mostly focusing on recent experiences. If they have any publicly available profiles (personal site, github, linkedin, etc) I'd take a look as well to see if there's anything I'd love to learn more. My company usually sends out small take home projects a couple of weeks before the interview so I take my time to go through the submissions carefully and write down notes (bugs I found, stuff I don't understand, or things I find interesting and would like to learn more)

Personally I usually try to avoid asking "trivia" questions - like what is X, tell me about Y, solve this sorting problem with impossibly efficient algorithms. For me I would like to discuss the candidate's experiences, interesting past projects, the solution she/he submitted, side projects, etc.

This definitely doesn't apply to everyone. I think the important thing is to be clear about what's your goal for the interview.