The Art of Interviewing People or How to Identify Senior Talent

Hey, everyone. Thank you for coming. I'll be talking about interviewing people or how to identify senior talent. My name is Kirsimirdis Onev. I'm from Bulgaria. I have roughly 20 years of experience in the web field. I wrote some books. Actually, the first two don't make sense anymore, so don't buy them. The other two, they're kind of a good fit now.

So what's the goal? We have on one side, we have no one, and on the other side, we have our future colleague. This person comes to us at the interview with some luggage. They have some knowledge. They know stuff. On the other side, we have our requirements. We have some idea what kind of person we need. The interview is basically the process where we have to find the intersection between the two. It's almost never a full match. The luggage is never really matching all the requirements that we have. We have to start the interview with this in mind that the person probably doesn't really know everything that we want to see.

Every time I start with some sort of preparation, I know that most of this stuff are obvious, but still when I'm doing interviews and when someone interviews me, I'm still seeing that this stuff are kind of missing. The very first thing is the context to find out if you're doing this for your company or for some other company. You have to really understand the context, what kind of person the company needs. I know that this sounds really obvious. It's probably the first thing that you have to do, but sometimes people don't really pay attention to all the details. Is this going to be just filling a gap in the team? Do we need more of people management? Do we need more of technical skills? It's good to define the context. I strongly recommend that you check the CV of the person before the interview. Again, this seems like an obvious thing, but what I'm doing is very often I'm reading the CV just before the interview, like 15 minutes before that. Of course, I check the resume upfront a couple of days before when I'm kind of scanning the candidates, but I'm double checking everything before the interview. When you're reading a lot of stuff for a lot of people, you can't really remember everything. Just a quick refresh 15 minutes before the chat with the person, it's kind of making everything a bit more smooth and you kind of give a good impression to the other side.

At the end, I always have a list of topics, questions. I'm not always going to this kind of a plan, but it's a good idea to have this list because sometimes you kind of run out of questions. Sometimes you really need to cover some areas. So it's possible that you miss something and yeah, it's good to have a plan.

So how the traditional assessment looks like so far? To be honest, it's kind of changed the last five, five to maybe six, seven years. Back in the days when I started doing interviews with people, everything was about the technical skills. So for junior people, they should know something. Then when you go up into the medium and senior roles, you expect that the person knows more and more and more stuff. But this was always a kind of focus on the technical skills on the stack of the company, whether the person is able to to fix things quickly, to develop things quickly.

Nowadays, everything is changed a lot because most of the companies, if not all of them, care about the soft skills of the person, especially now, nowadays when we have AI everywhere. And you could pretty much solve most of the technical problems just by doing a short research about the problem. So the companies and I personally focus a bit more on the communication skills, on the leadership skills, on mentoring, on teaching, just in general communication with the people. When you go higher and higher, you expect more from the candidates, from this angle. So the things changed. Now, it's not enough that you know how to write Python, for example. You have to be, you have to communicate better, basically, and you have to develop these soft skills. If you want to kind of pass the bar to the next level.

It's easy. I really like this meme. It's kind of stuck in my mind every time when someone said, oh, you just do the interview, you just talk with the person and you find out. You draw two circles and then you draw the O. The thing is that it's not easy. I mean, from the outside, it looks it doesn't look that hard. And in such moments, in such situations, I basically rely on kind of more pragmatic approach on the process. And the process for me is to identify up front all the characteristics that I want to see in this person and then prepare questions which are revealing these characteristics. They are identifying if the person is if the person has these characteristics or not. And the rest of the presentation is basically me sharing with you my my favorite topics, my favorite characteristics of the senior people. And on this slide, I kind of lay out most of the things that we're going to talk about. And yeah, the first thing is that the senior people, they really like aggressive objectives. They don't like how to's, meaning that they like to receive the problem.

They don't like to receive the solution and to kind of answer whether the person is is thinking this way. I'm just positioning the candidates into the situation where I'm serving to them a solution. I'm giving them a solution and I'm expecting to see how they react on this. And of course, you could come up with something that matches your context. But this is one of my questions. It's you have a microservice that is dealing with emails. And I ask from you that you go there and then you change something from the templates, you change the footer, for example. So this is basically me giving the solution. Hey, you have to change the template and more junior people, more mid-level people. What they do is usually they talk about the process of doing this thing. So they say, OK, I'll check out the repo. I'll make sure that I run the service locally. I make sure that I understand the codes, I do the change, I maybe write the unit tests. Then maybe I ask a colleague to check the change, maybe ask for a code review and so on and so on. So they basically start doing the job while more senior people and the people which are more higher in the chain, they they care about the actual problem. So, of course, they'll probably say these things. They'll probably say all the things about checking out the code and making sure that everything works after that and so on. But they'll ask, OK, why we're doing this change. Are you sure that you want to touch this microservice? Because it's used by a lot of things. This template is important because it's probably part of every single endpoint. So why we need to change that. So when you ask such questions, make sure that you focus not on the process, not on how things happen, but they ask why and do we need to actually change this this microservice? Maybe it's something else. So this is really typical for the senior people. They like to solve problems. They're problem solvers. The senior people, they think as a business owners and this is one of the moments when I'm asking the question and I don't really care about the answer. There is no wrong and right answer really here and I'm usually asking about what exactly you are doing at your last company or current company. And the answer, again, is not really important. They'll start talking about their projects and their responsibilities and so on. But what you should pay attention to is how they talk about that.

If they say we did this, we achieved this goal, we went so far, we got new funding because we did this project and so on. So you pay attention to the phrasing, to the mood when the person is answering such questions, because the more junior and mid people, they they're still not there and they usually feel that they're just a little cog from the whole machine. So they probably talk about the part of the process which is delegated to them, while the senior people, they are more like business owners. And this is a bit connected to how the person is feeling when they are part of this company, if they're happy or not, of course. But in general, we all want that people at the management roles, they actually care about the company and they recognize the company as their own. So they are able to get excited about the new products and so on.

The third thing is that most of the senior people, they have a strong sense of ownership. So this means you see that all these things are actually a bit connected to each other. So by giving them this question, I'm kind of trying to to to see all these angles, all these characteristics which I care about. And the ownership is is actually one of them. So here I'm actually asking them to to answer on the question how they react. If they see that something is not OK, so only you notice that the team can deliver on time. So so what you do? The more junior people, they they go with communicating the problem, which which is fine. It's it's correct. This is probably the first thing that you have to do. Communicating the problem is be is you being the messenger, basically. But it's kind of just giving the problem to someone else is basically saying, hey, we can't finish the service because we have this dependency. And yeah, what what we are supposed to do to remove the deadline. And then you are kind of passing the problem to someone else, meaning that you're communicating, which is OK. It's it's correct. But if you're more senior, you usually before communicating the problem, you kind of come up with a solution. You think about, again, the problem solving. You see the problem from different angles. You see the whole picture. You need to see the whole picture. You have this need to see the whole picture. And then you communicate the problem. And then at the same time, you kind of come up with a solution. Hey, can you make a trade off? Can we not deliver this feature because this one is more important? Can we, I don't know, can we cut some some of the some of the deliverables at this point and then do this like next quarter and so on and so on? So it's always really nice to see that the person is not just the communicator. It's actually the problem, the problem solver.

And this is connected with the ownership. They feel that this is their own project, their own future. And they want to finish it.

The fourth thing is about the people doing stuff without supervision. This is the natural progression of every software developer, especially if you spend a lot of time in one place. You start seeing the whole code base, the whole project, and how the company works. At some point, you learn everything and are able to do everything without supervision. But it's different for more senior people and leaders. They need to see the whole picture, not just their part of the process. They need to understand the processes and how different teams communicate with each other.

The fifth point is about emotional intelligence. It's difficult to assess in a short interview, but one aspect is how the person deals with failure. For example, sending out emails with the wrong copy. It's important to see how they handle and learn from their mistakes.

Usually I was a designer. I did the design. Then I slide the design to HTML and CSS and I pass it to the to the front end developer or I pass it to the back end guys and and and so on. So this is just me doing my job really well, but I'm just a part of the process. While if you're leading, if you have this sense of of of ownership, you actually need to see the whole picture. So so you see, OK, this is just the design. Then what happens with the design after that? Then when the front end is done, how is communicating with the back end? Do we have to set up a meeting with the backing guys to come up with a contract between the front end and the APIs? And then and then you see how how this person is actually talking about the processes that happen in the company as a whole, not just about his job, his part of the whole process, but but the whole the whole thing basically.

The 15 is about emotional intelligence. I know that this is really difficult to to nail in an interview, which probably takes 30 minutes to hour. It it's it's almost not really possible to actually get to know someone and and figure out whether they are emotional intelligence. And here the the disrespect aspect could be seen from many angles. I'm usually interested about about the failure, how the person is actually dealing with with a failure. And this is one example which happened to me. I did send five hundred thousand emails to people with the wrong copy. I basically put the link which was not the link. The people are not able to click it. And the company is losing a lot of money because this was a campaign and it was important and so on. So the question is how how these people how the candidate is actually able to to solve some sort of problems with this one situations with this one? Of course, there will be apology. There will be I'm going there and fixing the problem. But if you want to take the extra mile, you have to make sure that you learn your lessons because the failure, the mistakes are basically the source of the really good lessons. And if they are able to give example, when they failed with something and you ask them, hey, so what what happens with you after that? And if they talk about the lessons, if they talk about how they make sure that this doesn't happen, how they kind of communicate this lessons to other people, then then this is a good match with in terms of this direction, setting up their own processes. It's it's, again, a part of the ownership of the strong sense of ownership, of feeling as a business owner, people are usually the senior people. They are usually up for that because they see how the whole picture works. And what I'm asking usually is if they're part of the of the startup and what kind of things they're they actually start doing. And this is the moment when they start about designing their own processes, basically. And it's it's really interesting to see how how people which are which have less experience are actually struggling with this because they just don't have enough knowledge about how everything should work. And this is usually an easy question for someone with more experience and with more kind of leadership roles because they know the different the different parts of the process. So they they usually design the process according to their needs. And and this is really valuable characteristic. And the last one I want to finish with just giving them a chance to ask questions.

I think this is really, really important. And just and it's it's actually one of my favorite parts of the interview, because this speaks about where the candidate is at the moment. Usually the junior people and the mid-level people, they talk about logistics and processes. Hey, how how you do your spending planning, how you do estimates of your tickets. So this is logistics. Of course, there are some good practices, bad practices, but the more senior people, the people at the management level, they usually ask about culture. They ask about big picture. They ask about how is the company financially, how many products you want to develop in the future, how many teams you have. So they they kind of want to see everything from from above and and make sure that that this is the place where they want to be working. And it's yeah, it's it really speaks about where the person is at this moment of their career, because during the years you actually change.

And yeah, I want to finish by saying that it's hard. And to be honest, I'm happy that it's hard, because if it was easy, everything would be taken by AI and it would be really, really, I don't know, easy to find someone. Well, the majority of the of the characteristics of the senior people, you actually have to feel them. The judgment that you do at the end is based on on your feeling. Most of the times, as you can see, I prepared some questions which kind of reveal some of the aspects. But most of the stuff are just you chatting with this person and trying to see where she or he is at their career.

Thank you. This is my last slide. If you have anything to say to me, if you feel to contact it in this URL. And yeah, thank you. Thank you.