I won’t be the only one on the call so I can’t just give him an impossible interview. we’re planning the interview together today. how do I make sure we can’t hire him?
luckily his background doesn’t line up with what our team does, at least from his resume – god it’s the worst to read from the formatting alone. so maybe I can just lean into that? my team is part of a software infrastructure group and we’re tasked with making the rest of the org stop sucking ass at software development – secrets don’t go in git repos type of stuff. so people skills and writing little bits of code that ensure the culture changes over time. his background is in operations and maybe a little software dev.
I need suggestions for questions that will make him a no go. I can’t take someone who worked for Palantir, for nearly a decade no less, seriously.
If you want to go hard, are comfortable with it, and can weaponize your personal experience or identity, take notes of how he doesn’t seem to listen to or respect you and afterwards say, “as a [X], he made me uncomfortable”.
You might not even have to lie, candidates often do that shit. Especially to femmes. I’ve helped with interviews and watched candidates listen to a question from a femme interviewer and then proceed to address a masc interviewer as if they had asked it. That kind of stuff.
If you’re allowed to ask non-technical questions, you can also ask about how they would resolve an office conflict, or when they’ve had one in the past. Dudes regularly flunk that question or at least distinguish themselves as less thoughtful than other candidates through their responses. It’s actually just a good thing to ask during an interview in general.
For the technical portion, highlight that gulf between what you all are doing and what he’s done. Pick out things that the other candidates have that he doesn’t and ask questions about it, ideally hard ones that would require experience doing the task. This is not really a particularly unfair way to weed out candidates anyways. Sometimes they might surprise you and give a good answer despite their resume. You’d be banking on them not doing that. At minimum, you’re setting up a scenario where if you ask the same questions of all candidates, you’ll be able to quantify how much better your choices performed. A particularly good style of question for this is to ask them to demo a design or spec based on a problem description. People with relevant experience will list things they’ve done before and go into reasonable detail. A candidate that is winging it will usually take longer to come up with a plan and therefore present one that’s less fleshed out. IMO this is not a good interview question in general but it’s great for biasing against a candidate.