Our Approach to Hiring Manager Interviews for Software Engineers

At Kry, Paul and I developed our way of interviewing engineers as engineering managers, which worked quite well for us and I’m happy to share with you in this post.

Setting Our Intention as Interviewers

First of all, we realized how we want to approach interviewing. And for us, what we wanted is not to stress people so we can see how they behave under pressure, or try to expose things they may hide by interrogating them. We wanted to expose values and see who people are when they are the best version of themselves. So when we sat to start an interview, we were imagining ourselves trying to create the best podcast episode with this candidate. Get the most interesting stories and the most excitement. We also did it due to our understanding of how interviews are for women many times, that women tend to diminish and even hide great stories about their achievements, and we had a goal to expose all the good stuff from each candidate.

To remove stress we tried to open with a short casual chat, and our first question after the introduction was what is a technical thing they did at work they are proud of.

We also wanted to give a lot of information about how we roll, so our people can choose us, and people that don’t connect to our way of working can understand that it’s not the best match for them.

Preparing for The Interview

A good interviewing process ends with the right candidate being matched with the most fitting team to their goals and skills. We used the following template for notes:

• Full name
• Link to LinkedIn profile
• Summary of their background from the CV and LinkedIn.
• Things to take in mind during the interview follow the above (e.g., moving quickly out of several companies, inconsistencies, and so on).
• What team are they interviewing for, and what are we looking for from the best match for this team?
• Then we had our list of regular questions, that we tweaked based on the above. After certain questions we explain how we work, for example, after a question about what feedback they received that made them grow, we explained how we work with feedback. After a question about career aspirations, we explained about how we grow our engineers.

During the Interview — Working With Assumptions

An important thing we tried to do during interviews is to understand what assumptions we start having about the candidate and to prove/disprove them. For example, if we started thinking they don’t have experience with something and that could impact our decision, then we would ask more questions to make sure it’s not just because they don’t think it’s relevant to mention.

Not Only the Answers but Also the Way the Candidate Answers

Since communication and energy were really important to us, important parts of the interview were also to see if the candidate explains in a clear way, and can enjoy conversing with us. That’s with the caveat that people are not exactly themselves during interviews.

Summary

For us, setting the intention and preparation, and being aware of our processing during the interview, were keys to making the best matches. I hope this post can inspire other interviewers, and help candidates understand what (some) interviewers are after.