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 Kersimir Tsonev. I'm from Bulgaria. I have roughly 20 years of experience in the web field. I wrote some books. Actually the first two doesn'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. And 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. So 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. And 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. So 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? So 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 because when you're reading a lot of stuff for a lot of people, you can't really remember everything. And 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. And 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 do traditional assessment looks like so far? To be honest, it's kind of changed the last 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 kind of a focus on the technical skills, on the stack of the company, whether the person is able 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 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. And 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 communicate better, basically, and you have to develop these soft skills if you want to kind of pass the bar to the next level.

So how to identify senior people? It's easy. I really like this meme. It's kind of stuck in my mind every time when someone said, oh, it's just 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 doesn't look that hard. And in 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 this 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 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 a 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 micro service that is dealing with emails. And I ask from you that you go there and then you change something from the template. 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 code. I do the change. I maybe write a unit test. Then maybe I ask a colleague to check the change. Maybe I 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 codes 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 micro service 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 a question, 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 they like to solve problems. They are problem solvers. The senior people, they think is 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 were 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 a new funding because we did this project and so on. So you pay attention to the phrasing, to the to the mood when 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 are 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 are 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... And you see that all these things are actually a bit connected to each other. So by giving them these questions, I'm kind of trying to see all these angles, all these characteristics which I care about and the ownership is actually one of them. So here I'm actually asking them 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 what do you do? The more junior people, they go with communicating the problem, which is fine. It's correct. This is probably the first thing that you have to do. Communicating the problem is you being the messenger, basically. But it's kind of just giving the problem to someone else. It's basically saying, hey, we can't finish this service because we have this dependency and what we're supposed to do. Should we move the deadline? And then you are kind of passing the problem to someone else. Meaning that you're communicating, which is OK. 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 cut some of the deliverables at this point and then do this 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 they want to finish it.

The fourth thing is about the people doing stuff without supervision. I think this is the natural progression of every software developer, basically, especially if you're if you spend a lot of time on one place. You start seeing the you start seeing the the whole code base. You start seeing the whole project. You start seeing how the company actually works. You see the processes. You see how the teams communicate between each other. And at some point you just learn everything and you are able to do everything and you are able to do this without supervision. So this is kind of natural progression. But at the same time, it's it's a bit different with with more senior and people that actually lead. And here the question is usually, hey, can you walk me through your recent recent project? And then then you see the people with less experience, they talk about a specific part of the project. Usually I was the designer. I did the design. Then I slide the design to HTML and synthesis 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 ownership, you actually need to see the whole picture. So so you 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 our 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 are the the this aspect aspect could be seen from many angles.

I'm usually interested about the failure, how the person is actually dealing with the 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 that people are not able to click. And the company is losing a lot of money because this was the campaign and it was important and so on. So the question is how these people, how the candidate is actually able to solve some sort of problems with this one situation. 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 an example when they failed with something and you ask them, hey, so 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 these lessons to other people, then this is a good match with. In terms of this direction, setting up their own processes, it's 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 startup and what kind of things they actually start doing. And this is the moment when they start about designing their own processes, basically. And it's really interesting to see how people, 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 parts of the process. So they usually design the process according to their needs. And this is a 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 split 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 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. While 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 could 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.