The ultimate guide to the technical interview

Technical interviews are used to assess candidates for IT roles. Their aim is to evaluate the technical ability of the candidate against the requirements specified in the job description. Technical interviews are frequently based on position-specific questions and tasks. They provide the prospective employer with insights on the candidate’s coding skills, the way they approach problems, as well as how they communicate. Here’s all you need to know about the technical interview, including best practices, technical interview tips, and how to conduct one.

How to conduct a technical interview?

For recruiters, the technical interview is a tough nut to crack because they typically don’t have the technical skills needed. For this reason, recruiters typically cooperate with tech leads. In the most common setup, HR typically covers soft skills and tech leads are responsible for the technical interview.

What you need to know:

Technical interview tips

Your candidate is here and it’s up to you to make the most of the time you have with them! There are a number of techniques you can use to give your candidates a great interview experience and get a good understanding of their skills while doing so. Rule #1 is to screen out all non-viable candidates before the technical interview so you can focus on quality candidates.

What you need to know:

Technical interview coding challenges

Technical interview coding challenges should mirror the work to be done on the prospective job as closely as possible. This is most easily achieved by using work sample assignments. Focusing on practical skills rather than theoretical knowledge comes with many advantages, high predictive validity being the top one.

What you need to know:

The whiteboard interview alternative

For quite a while, the technical interview has been the subject of heated debate, mostly because of the trivia-style interviews commonly referred to as whiteboard interviews. The problem with this type of interviews is that they focus on rote memorization and not real coding skills. These drawbacks limit how useful they are as a way of predicting a candidate’s ability to do the job.

What you need to know:

[BONUS VIDEO] 7 step formula to hiring top tech talent

Hiring the right software developers is hugely important. It requires a large investment to get the right person and if you get it wrong, you could be looking at a loss of almost a half million dollars in the worst cases. But it doesn’t have to be that hard. In this video, we explain our proven 7 step formula for hiring the right tech talent.

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