I’m working on the Jobyssey help section at the moment. In addition to the normal trouble-shooting stuff we’re adding advice sections, and we’ll have a section of interview questions for specific roles too (so, if you’ve never interviewed a project manager or head of QA before you can generate some ideas about specific questions for their roles).

After jotting down the questions we usually ask for these positions I went out and trolled the Internet to see if there was anything I’d missed. Pretty quickly I started turning up “gotcha quizzes” (see an example here for graphic designers). Basically, these are lists of specific facts to interrogate potential employees with- Is Avant Garde serif or sans? What’s the difference in PHP between include and require?

This is not a great approach for a plethora of reasons:

1. Knowing specific facts isn’t what makes someone good at a job- having certain thought patterns and ideas are what makes for a successful developer, or manager, or designer.
2. Quizzing tends to psych interviewees out, making it tough to see what they actually know and giving them a nasty impression of your company.
3. As a result of the aforementioned psyching out, they may forget stuff they actually know. If you’re firing questions at them Gatling gun-style (rather than working through hypothetical problems) they probably won’t have time to remember.
4. Using these questions as a proxy for experience or problem solving ability can lead to “book smart” candidates looking much better than they really are.
5. Here’s the worst problem- you don’t give applicants any chance to show you where they excel. The best they can do is demonstrate that they know a bunch of facts about the technologies you’re using. They can’t show you whether they have the mind for it or not.
6. If candidates do successfully complete the minutia gauntlet, they may not feel very good about the company. They may assume you don’t know much about the job and so you’re just throwing random facts at them, or that you have a company culture of poking and prodding people to look for weaknesses instead of strengths, or that you take a someone inhumane approach to dealing with potential employees.

Here’s some better ways to see if they know their stuff:

1. Ask them to send you samples of their work before the interview. Since they’re showing this to you as their best work, you can be picky here.
2. Ask them to critique something, such as the design of a well known site or an existing piece of software. See what specific issues they bring up and how much detail they can discuss them in.
3. Give them a hypothetical problem to work through with you. If they stall a bit at first, give them a hint in case they just don’t understand what you’re getting at, or they’ve got a bit of stage fright. Keep asking follow-up questions (in a pleasant, non-interrogating fashion) until you reach the limits of their knowledge.