Better than the whiteboard?
There is no one way to conduct a technical interview. People have often used the dreaded whiteboard interviews, take-home coding assignments and even reviewed existing code on Github. There is a lot of backlash against the whiteboard coding interview, understandably so, as that rarely portrays the day-to-day responsibility of the applicant.
At Zola Electric, we were recently looking to hire a Junior Android Developer and this meant we had to conduct interviews for a couple of applicants. Since this was a Junior role, we had no major expectations. We were looking for people who had basic experience with Android development, some source control and testing knowledge, great communication skills and were looking to level up their development skills.
There was an initial phone screen where candidates were shortlisted based on the above criteria and after that, the Android team (which consists only of Annyce Davis and I) decided on a pair programming session. Before this, I had never conducted an interview of this nature but the aim resonated with me. Since we were going to be working closely with this person everyday, it was best to see what a pair programming session with them would feel like as this was going to happen a lot if they were hired. I was a bit nervous before the interviews started and had to remind myself who the interviewer was even though I was the one typing the code. 🙈
Every interview session was conducted remotely via Zoom and started with me sharing my screen with the applicant and explaining what our app did. Then I picked up a ticket from Jira and walked through the description and acceptance criteria with them. I also opened up the designs for the ticket on Zeplin to ensure that we fully understood all the changes we needed to make to the app, down to the dimensions. I did all of this before opening up Android Studio. Because I wanted the whole process to feel less like an interview and more like a typical day at my job, we googled some things and checked the Android Developer documentation together as this is a very common occurrence for me. There was time for some testing before wrapping up the one-hour session.
Just from us attempting to implement the ticket together and me asking them a few questions, I was able to learn a lot about each candidate and was delighted to receive implementation suggestions I didn’t think of myself. Here, I was looking out for a knowledge of Android Studio, basic knowledge of testing, good questions asked and their reasoning ability. Apart from assessing the candidate, my other objective was to ensure that they learnt something in that time frame even if they can’t all be hired. From the feedback I received from all of them, they all did and that’s a win-win on both ends.
I think we were able to pull this off because we were interviewing for a Junior Android Developer role. It will be interesting to see how this can be adapted to more senior positions.
Have you ever interviewed or been interviewed in this way? How did it go? Please let me know in the comments!
