V-Base Development Blog

We’ve been recruiting right from the start of the project and have been fine tuning our recruitment process ever since. In the beginning we invited people in if their CV looked good. Soon it became very obvious that what is on paper is not always what you meet in person (This is a very big understatement). We interview with three people: me, the Product Owner (Tracey) and someone from Central Services, so a candidate who totally doesn’t live up to their CV wastes a lot of time. After several of these failures, Tracey gave me this little book: Smart and Gets Things Done. A very valuable book on how to recruit developers. One of the things I implemented straight away (the same day I got the book) was phone interviews, hooray! This is purely to see if a candidate lives up to their CV. Let me explain a bit more about this ‘phone interview filter’.

It consists of three parts:

1. CV specific questions. I read the candidate’s CV and ask specific questions about technologies being mentioned. (E.g You have implemented cached program listings in XSLT/XML, how did you do that?) I’m careful not to turn this into a technical test, I just want to give the candidate enough room to talk ‘tech’ to me ;-P
2. I present the candidate with a technical problem. This is to see how they approach a problem. Even if they don’t know the solution it’s good to see if they make an effort and how well they can reason. One candidate once bluntly said: ‘I haven’t got a clue how to do this’, followed by a silence. (Including my own silence) We skipped part 3 of the phone interview.
3. Last but not least; I ask the candidate if they have questions about the project or YouthNet. This shows if they have a healthy interest, have themselves prepared and I think it’s good to have a two way interview.

With this ‘phone interview filter’ I’m able to decline about 80% of the CVs that get sent to me. A massive time saver. Also I’ve had some pleasant surprises where the CV was not very well written but the candidate made a good impression on the phone. So overall I can really recommend this, however I do keep in mind not to turn it into a full on interview, it’s just to see if the candidate lives up to his/her CV. The real test comes in our specially brewed ‘in house interview’ More about this in a later post.

Olivier