Career & Leadership › Technical Leadership

Interviewing Candidates

Running fair interviews that produce real signal.

Interviewing candidates is a structured way to gather evidence about whether someone can do the role’s work and how they approach unfamiliar problems. The interview should give the candidate a realistic chance to show relevant skills, not reward guessing what an interviewer wants to hear.

Use questions tied to role expectations, explain the format, and provide comparable prompts to candidates for the same role. A practical exercise might ask someone to reason through a design or review a small code sample; keep the task bounded and avoid extracting unpaid production work. Give the candidate time to ask questions and describe constraints they considered.

A polished performance in one conversation is not the whole picture. Collect independent notes against agreed criteria, then discuss evidence rather than vague impressions. Avoid judging confidence, accent, or familiarity with a particular tool when those are not requirements. Follow applicable accessibility, employment, and privacy rules.

Backend interviewers can ask about an interface change and its rollout consequences. Frontend interviewers might explore how a candidate handles an ambiguous interaction requirement. Data interviewers can probe how someone validates a new source before trusting it. Explain time limits and what you are listening for. Take notes during the session so the later discussion uses evidence, and give candidates space to describe constraints they would check.

Backend, frontend, and data interviewers should understand what good work looks like in their domain and make the evaluation rubric explicit. Candidates also evaluate the team, so explain the role honestly. See hiring, technical leadership, and onboarding others.