How to Prepare for Tech Interviews

Preparing new interviewers is a critical component of building an effective hiring process, a fundamental part of any healthy organization. Bad hiring decision can be harmful to the company'‘s culture and future success.

So, how do we prepare interviewers for tech interviews?

The most important part is on-boarding new interviewers. There are a few steps involved:

• initial interview training

• access to good documentation

• practical experience (shadowing and revere-shadowing)

Interview Training

Every experienced engineer who decides to join the interviewer pool needs to go through initial interview training, a workshop. This is where the basics are taught:

• how to structure an interview

• how to listen and evaluate skills

• what is effective communication and how to use it

Access to Good Documentation

Next, good (clear and detailed) documentation serves as the foundation of the interview process at Klarna. This documentation outlines the full interview process, the structure of the ideal interview, and the expectations that the interviewer needs to cover.

Practical Experience

After the initial training, the most important thing is practical experience.

New interviewers receive it through shadowing. This is the opportunity to observe experienced colleagues/consultants conduct a real interview, and learn by listening and taking notes.

Once the new interviewer is ready, he or she leads an interview with one of the experienced colleagues observing. This is called reverse shadowing.

According to Leonard, at the end of the day,

Even after doing lots of interviews, the learning never stops. Continuous feedback pushes the interviewers to improve, seek further feedback and ask for advice. Open communication and constructive criticism is a must here.

Summary

If there is one take-away from here, preparing new interviewers the correct way is the most important thing to remember.

If you read until here and are interested in the topics above, reach out to Leonard (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonard-thiele/).

He is always happy to have a chat about such topics and eager to learn more.

Hi, I am Kat Stam, the ex-CTO who helps you interview the right tech talent faster.

✳️ I train new interviewers and prepare all learning materials.

✳️ I prepare the structured technical interview (questions with answers and live challenges with solutions) for you and teach you how to evaluate each candidate.

✳️ I conduct structured tech assessments across all tech positions, including product, delivering the evaluations and ranked list of candidates straight to your inbox.

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1. Follow the 2h Tech Interviewer’s Blueprint https://katstam.gumroad.com/l/the-2h-tech-interview-blueprint

2. Learn how to think like a programmer (for non-technies) https://katstam.gumroad.com/l/think-like-a-programmer