The Dark and Obscure Art of the Phone Interview

[nonnihil]

Being in the midst of a job hunt, I am doing a lot of phone interviews. Because I hate phone interviews with the burning fury of a thousand suns, I would very much prefer that the phone interviews that must be conducted yield a maximum amount of useful information in a minimum of time, so that I don't have to do, eg, four or more phone interviews

Comments

[beth_leonard]

Having been the software interviewer on a hardware team for a hardware position that required some software experience, I know that questions about sorting very quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. Nearly everyone I interviewed had at least a course like CS 60 under their belts, but very few could answer a question about how to do an in-order list walk on a binary tree. I was actually appalled at the lack of ability of most of our candidates.

Yeah, a dull question, but if it weeds out 95% of the applicant pool it might be worth it from their perspective.
--Beth

[ukelele]

Surely, though, you could manage to weed out that 95%, while *also* determining whether the person you were interviewing was "minimally competent" or "up to the standards of awesome that our awesome company wants", by asking a harder question. If you ask a CS-60-level question, you give the impression you hire CS-60-level engineers (for your senior positions, no less).

[fredrickegerman]

Do I get points for guessing company identities? (But not here...)