Engineering interviewing methods are incorrect, enable bias, and stress the wrong skills. Yet, the interviewing process has still not changed for many companies.

These ideas, while not a silver bullet, will move your interview in a positive direction.

#1: Let them solve problems alone

Software engineering remains a career that is fundamentally relies on people writing their code on their own.

Instead of providing supervision and put them in an environment they are uncomfortable in (nothing resembling the job), offer a take home assignment or construct an interview and let them solve it on their own in a time period. This flexibility most closely mirrors daily work and reduces stress greatly.

#2: Offer a code review exercise

We focus so much time seeing how well they write code, but we do not actually know how well they read code.

Reading code is its own skill we take for granted. Building a meaningful code review exercise allows candidates to showcase how well they understand fundamentals of programming and software libraries and craft kind comments to the code without relying on them to solve a hyper specific problem.

#3: Choose an interview question where you don’t know the solution

If we know the solution, we will evaluate the candidate based on them reaching the same solution. Worse, we enable bias if the candidate’s process is similar to ours.

Choosing a problem with a solution unknown to both of you enables a conversation between the two of you and a curiosity to hear a different view to the problem, a common element of life in the workplace.

These small changes are just the start

Changing an archaic process takes time, but these ideas offer small, tractable ways to measure what you are looking for. Try these out and see how well they resonate to the candidate and their results. Good luck!