Job Interviews

I have been conducting some job interviews recently. It is ironic that someone who has never passed a job-interview in his life, is now conducting job interviews instead. My boss has some head-count to fill so we have been interviewing some candidates. However, the candidate that I had to interview today, takes the cake.

First of all, the candidate arrived late – really late. The candidate contacted us to say that there are traffic problems which will cause about a 5 minute delay. After 30 minutes, the candidate had yet to arrive. When the candidate finally did arrive, the candidate was empty handed – there were no supporting documents brought. Therefore, we had no way of discerning the candidate’s education.

The candidate was asked to describe some previous work done, particularly the latest project being worked on. This was for a Java developer position. So, naturally, we talked about Java. The candidate claimed at first to have never done server-side Java programming but only done client applications and GUI. So, I began to do some questioning down this path. However, after a while, the candidate claimed to have been mistaken. The candidate now claims to have neither done client application nor GUI programming but had only done server-side Java programming. So, I switched and began questioning down the server path instead.

Since the candidate was unable to satisfy me in either of these respects, I decided to just ask some basic programming questions instead to test the candidate’s aptitude for programming. I asked the candidate about evaluating the quality and performance of Java code. I wanted to know how the candidate would go about testing not just the functionality of Java code but to also test its performance, identify bottlenecks and introduce improvements. The candidate totally faltered.

Needless to say, I doubt that I will be seeing the candidate again.