Interviewing a job candidate gives you an opportunity to not only determine whether they’re qualified for the position but to get to know them as a person. Learning what a candidate’s skillset is, tells you if they are capable of performing the job they are interviewing for, but whether their personality matches your company culture and their prospective team is the bigger question. In our experience as a software development company for 19 years, we have learned that teaching someone new programming languages or sharpening their existing technical knowledge is achievable. But personality matches are not guaranteed, so we do our best to get to know candidates on a personal level as much as we can during the interview process. Our CEO Eknauth Persaud was recently interviewed by UpCity to touch on this topic:
“Don’t be afraid to ask deeper or harder questions. You won’t scare them away, but you want to make sure you have enough information to choose the right fit for your position. I am particularly fond of asking, ‘tell me about a time that you made a decision that later turned out to be the wrong decision; what did you learn from that?’ This really makes the candidates stop and think, instead of steamrolling through the basic questions everyone asks. This is the opposite of ‘where do you see yourself in five years?’ which many candidates see as a ‘gotcha’ question with no good answer. And quite frankly, most responses don’t generate any useful data for hiring anyway.”
~ Eknauth Persaud, CEO of Ayoka Systems: Made in USA Software Development
