How to conduct an interview for a development position remotely?
- by sharptooth
Usually we run interviews in office. We have a room with a table, the interviewee and one or two interviewers sit at the table, interviewers ask questions, often accompanied with code snippets on paper, the interviewee (hopefully) answers them, writes code snippets to illustrate his point. Usually it's something like an interviewer writes about five lines of C++ code and asks some specific question - quite a little code.
Now we need to do the same remotely. We will be in our office and the interviewee will be far away - we are asked to help hire a person for another office located abroad. Of course we can use some technology for voice calls, but I'm afraid it's the most we can count on. I see a whole set of obstacles here:
how to write illustration code snippets and exchange them efficiently?
what to do to compensate for the fact that we're not native English speakers and the interviewees might or might be not native English speakers (I'm afraid this can make conversation significantly harder)?
Are there any best practices for this situation? How could we address the obstacles listed? What other things should we consider to run the interview most efficiently?
