As far as interviewing training and a bank of questions go, I strongly recommend training interviewers. One relevant anecdote is that the author of Work Rules! mentioning how at Google they created a bank of interview questions for interviewers to use, with each question intended to inquire about a particular trait. Interviewer compliance with the structure is hard, as interviewers tend to want to do their own thing, but at Google they designed a system in which the interviewer could choose questions from a set presented to them, and thus the interviewer still felt as if they were choosing which of the questions to ask the applicant. While they had a computer programmed system with lots of automation, it wouldn’t be too hard to put together a spreadsheet like this with a bunch of questions corresponding to different traits.[1]
Regarding sorting the “okay” from the “exceptional,” I found the idea of this Programmer Competency Matrix helpful (I think it is originally from Sijin Joseph). While I’ve never run a hiring campaign for a programmer, I think that this template/format provides a good example of a fairly simple version for how you could differentiate the different levels of programmers, personal assistants, or any other role. If you want to get a bit more granular than a binary accept or reject, then building a little matrix like this could be quite helpful for differentiating between applicants more granularly.
I’d be happy to lend a hand or share my perspectives on hiring-related efforts at any point.
I copied and adapted these questions a few years ago, but I don’t remember clearly where I got them from. I think it was some kind of a US government “office of personnel” type resource, but I don’t recall the specific details. EDIT: I figured out where I got them from. Work Rules! referred to US Department of Veterans Affairs, which has Sample PBI Questions, from which I copied and pasted most of that spreadsheet.
As far as interviewing training and a bank of questions go, I strongly recommend training interviewers. One relevant anecdote is that the author of Work Rules! mentioning how at Google they created a bank of interview questions for interviewers to use, with each question intended to inquire about a particular trait. Interviewer compliance with the structure is hard, as interviewers tend to want to do their own thing, but at Google they designed a system in which the interviewer could choose questions from a set presented to them, and thus the interviewer still felt as if they were choosing which of the questions to ask the applicant. While they had a computer programmed system with lots of automation, it wouldn’t be too hard to put together a spreadsheet like this with a bunch of questions corresponding to different traits.[1]
Regarding sorting the “okay” from the “exceptional,” I found the idea of this Programmer Competency Matrix helpful (I think it is originally from Sijin Joseph). While I’ve never run a hiring campaign for a programmer, I think that this template/format provides a good example of a fairly simple version for how you could differentiate the different levels of programmers, personal assistants, or any other role. If you want to get a bit more granular than a binary accept or reject, then building a little matrix like this could be quite helpful for differentiating between applicants more granularly.
I’d be happy to lend a hand or share my perspectives on hiring-related efforts at any point.
I copied and adapted these questions a few years ago, but I don’t remember clearly where I got them from. I think it was some kind of a US government “office of personnel” type resource, but I don’t recall the specific details. EDIT: I figured out where I got them from. Work Rules! referred to US Department of Veterans Affairs, which has Sample PBI Questions, from which I copied and pasted most of that spreadsheet.