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Tips for interviewer
5

Tips for interviewer

Tips for interviewer

(OP)
Did a quick search, lots of threads with tips for the job interviewee but not so many for the interviewer so here goes.

I've just been asked to interview a potential senior Mechanical Engineer tomorrow morning (9:30 PST to be precise).

I've reviewed a good few resumes before and I've done a few interviews before but mostly to assess a particular aspect of someones qualification (such as drafting/GD&T etc.) not just a general 'sit with this guy for 1/2 an hour and get a feel for him to see if you think he'd be a good fit'.

So, any suggestions of the questions you'd ask, or other tips?

I'm not particularly interested in any 'trick' question or anything too 'HRish' but am willing to be persuaded otherwise as to their merit.

Cheers,

Posting guidelines FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm? (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?

RE: Tips for interviewer

If there's anything in his resume that you happen to know something about, ask him to explain it to you in some detail.  The intent is to distinguish between someone who was doing the work, and someone who was watching the work.  I don't think that's a trick question.

Ask him about his hobbies.  For mechanical engineers, that's a relevant question.  I prefer hot rodders, model railroaders, and gunsmiths.



 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: Tips for interviewer

Can he talk to people above/below his level of competence
Use the phone - same as above.
Use the computer - write a memo that makes sense.
Knows something about your company
Knows something about engineering
Can he manage a few people
Can he prioritize
Can he get things done in a timely manner
Can he read
Can he Google

If he/she can do all this - you might have a winner.
 

RE: Tips for interviewer

Why did they leave their last job? and why did they REALLY leave their last job.

If it was a personality clash, does that trend follow them or does it follow their last boss. Independent investigation prior to the interview might help with that.

Regards
Pat
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RE: Tips for interviewer

Listen for evidence of attitude regarding past accomplishments.  It is one thing for them to simply list off what they have done in the past in a matter of fact manner, but if it is something about which they are truly proud and passionate, it will show, and be a positive point in their favor; if it is also an accomplishment that would be highly valued by your organization, that may make up for a couple of negatives as well.

"Good to know you got shoes to wear when you find the floor." - Robert Hunter
 

RE: Tips for interviewer

Ask these questions:

When you beat your wife does she deserve it?

When you stole from you last job did you feel bad about it?

Really though I would start a conversation about the general job and let them speak about his past experiences. During this time I would be looking for clues as to what type of person they are and if they would fit in well with the organization. Does he want to be the boss? Does he think he is above doing busy type of engineering work? Will he produce inferior work if assigned lower level tasks? Some experienced people can bring a lot to the table but if they don't have any real interest other than getting a paycheck then it won't be good for anyone. All you'll get is a talking head sitting around who isn't producing.  

RE: Tips for interviewer

Not a ton you can see about his true work experience from a mere half hour, just what he can BS you about... but you can glean a lot about his general personality.  Is this someone you wouldn't mind working next to on a project for 6 months?

All good suggestions so far... ask him to describe a project you can grasp well, then ask the same about something you don't know well (but can likely comprehend) and see how well he does describing it to a layman.

Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com

RE: Tips for interviewer

You already mentioned "good fit" which is the key.

Look at what types of skills are required for the position. Are they technical? People skills? Both? Will they be learning most of the time? Leading other engineers? Talking with suppliers or customers?

Focus your questions on the areas appropriate for success in the job.

RE: Tips for interviewer

Most times when I get asked to interview someone in a higher position than myself, my co-workers are looking to see if the candidate would make a good addition to the team, not on a technical level but related to their personality.

I'd let others dig deeper into the technical qualifications (especially if only 30mins are allowed), and focus more on discovering if the candidate has any "chips on his shoulder" or "quirks" that might not be nice to deal with on a daily basis if the person is hired.

Topics of conversation: enjoyed sports, hobbies, favorite food, last or future vacation

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."


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RE: Tips for interviewer

Ask him to describe some design decisions he made and later regretted.  What were the lessons learned, and how did it change the way he did things?

 

RE: Tips for interviewer

2
Some interviewers think they are being clever by trying to throw the candidate off balance.  I think there is more to be gleaned by putting the candidate at ease and seeing what falls out of their mouths when they let their guard down.

RE: Tips for interviewer

Similar to graybeach,
What one task (product, project, analysis ...) is he happy with.
What one task is he unhappy with.

If you have time, if he could be a color, what color would he be?

RE: Tips for interviewer

How did it go? what did you use?

I have been told a few times that if we have the right candidate come in for one of our posted job positions I would be in on the interview.  

RE: Tips for interviewer

(OP)
Well, the guy was fairly, shall we say garrulous so I kind of went the approach MM & Tick allude to.  Pretty much started with the classic 'tell me a bit about yourself and why you want to work here' which led to a brief conversation which gave me a rough feel for the guy.

I then asked him about work related but not hardcore technical stuff - like are you ok learning a new CAD system (not that exact wording but along those lines) what's your philosophy on GD&T/drawing standards (feeding off stuff in his resume) things various.

I basically managed to discuss non technical work related stuff in a way to find out if he had an obvious chip on his shoulder, was happy doing 'dull & dirty' work etc.

I also tried to remember he was interviewing us and so tried to give him a reasonable amount of info - hopefully not enough to put him off though!winky smile

I thought it went pretty well and told my manager he looked like he'd be a reasonable fit, a bit more outgoing than many around here but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I then asked him what color he wished he was but he got all upset said something about discrimination due to being Hispanic and that he was gonna call the ACLU - so I promptly walked him over to his next interviewer that was handily HR.

Posting guidelines FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm? (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?

RE: Tips for interviewer

(OP)
Mood colors, that sounds like the kind of touchy feely nonsense I meant by 'HRish' questions.  If I'd asked the question, and he'd said anything other than "WTF" or equivalent, I probably would have nixed him there and then!

Posting guidelines FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm? (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: FAQ1088-1484: In layman terms, what is "engineering"?

RE: Tips for interviewer

Just for the record I want to be the colour red

http://www.nceng.com.au/
"A safe structure will be the one whose weakest link is never overloaded by the greatest force to which the structure is subjected" Petroski 1992

RE: Tips for interviewer

KENAT knew I was just being a wise guy.
I thought his post was funny.

Just a play off of previous posts on the off-the-wall interview questions.

RE: Tips for interviewer

Too late now, but one of my favorite interview questions is to hand the candidate a simple pen type tire pressure gage and ask them to provide a sketch of how it works.

This simple question accomplishes several things:

1.  It identifies that a disappointingly large percentage of candidates for mechanical engineering positions do not have a grasp of even as simple a fundamental as force equals pressure times area.

2.  It identifies the candidate's ability to produce a technical sketch to illustrate a concept.

3.  It identifies the candidate's ability to explain how something works.

 

RE: Tips for interviewer

MintJulep:

I guess you wouldn't hire me, then.  All these years I have been using that very thingy to check my tire pressure, it never occurred to me to draw a sketch about how it works.  Of course, now that you mention it, I am just going to have to figure that out.

But really, be careful with questions like that, unless you have a few of them that cover a broad spectrum of what you are looking for.  You wouldn't want to be turning away candidates that can do process simulations in their head or design a helicopter rotor assembly from scratch simply because they have never bothered to take apart the guts of a tire gauge to see how it works.

If the candidate has made it to an interview, then that candidate should already be there on the strength of what he or she has been able to demonstrate that he or she knows or has done.  Ask the candidate about those things and look for how those skills might fit to what you are looking for.  It's easy to find countless things that you know something about that somebody else knows nothing about, but that's not being fair, and it does a disservice to the interview candidate.

On the other hand, I suppose questions like that become fair if they are aimed at trying to assess how well a candidate can think or conjecture or formulate; then you are evaluating a "thought process", not a "knowledge".  Then questions like that are in-bounds.

Regards,

SNORGY.

RE: Tips for interviewer

When I answer the "color" question, I always say paisley or plaid.  I hate HR questions, but usually answer them with humor.

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."


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RE: Tips for interviewer

One of my bosses used to conduct his interviews around a big cut-away drawing of an engine. He'd just start with something like "Describe this picture". Scale of replies

It's an engine
It's a gasoline engine
It's got four cylinders
etc
etc

People who recognised that it had twin balancer shafts were doing well.

Best answer he ever had (and one he hadn't even realised) was that the drawing of the gear mesh between the shafts was wrong - the helical gears wouldn't mesh like that.

I was once given a drawing of a diesel fuel injector and asked to describe what I thought would happen to the needle as the pressure increased. A pretty good practical question about pressure area and force. The extra points came for realising that as soon as the needle had started to lift, the area that the pressure was acting on suddenly increased.

 

- Steve
 

RE: Tips for interviewer

After my *fourth* interview with a potential employer, in a process that even involved a psychological assessment of answers I had provided in a written "Who are you?" type of exam, I was told that they were favouring the other candidate because they judged me to be one who had no sense of humour and who didn't communicate well with people of lower levels of intelligence.

My response:

"I'm here talking to you, aren't I?".

The other candidate got the job.  He turned out to be the wrong candidate.

Regards,

SNORGY.

RE: Tips for interviewer

I've been thinking hard about what The Tick said, and it's led me to reconsider.

I used to give an interview that lasted about 40 minutes, and included:
- In-depth questions about subjects the candidate should have understood, based on whatever was claimed in his or her resume.  E.g. "What does a moderator do?" for someone who claimed expertise with nuclear reactors.  Or "Write a program to do <nested loops> in any computer language you like, and then explain to me how it works" for programmers.

- A bunch of simple but possibly tricky questions stolen from textbooks or other interviewers.  E.g. "What parameters do I need to know to predict the deflection of a single beam used as a bridge?", phrased in a folksy way as a story involving alligators in a creek.

The really stressful part of my interview was that I never revealed whether the candidate's answer was correct or not; I just started the next question.

I recommended a relatively small number of candidates, all of whom worked out well.  I wrote brief reports to HR, and was occasionally asked to defend them, which I could do because I kept whatever the candidate scratched out, and my own post-interview notes in enough detail to reconstruct a narrative of the interview.


... But after a while, I noticed that HR was only sending me people they clearly didn't want to hire, but didn't have a legally defensible reason to exclude.  ... and that some real barrels of hair were just showing up to start work.  
That's when I knew the company was doomed, and so was I.  What little remains of it is up for sale again.


Now, I think putting the candidate at ease may be a better tactic, so you can get them talking about themselves, and hope to find out to whom they're related.  Because of my terrible handwriting and use of symbols and sketches, my notes from those days would probably be incomprehensible anyway, but it may be better to leave nothing for a lawyer to discover.

 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: Tips for interviewer

There's another tactic I like, but it's on the other end of the spectrum...

Early in my career, I worked for my father.  He was really good at creating prolonged awkward silence (usually while he was pondering what was said to him).  This often made people uncomfortable in his presence, so they would talk to fill the voild.  Many times, I watched and listened while some of these people accidentally spilled details that they should have kept to themselves.

RE: Tips for interviewer

KENAT...you are now qualified to work in HR...ask for a transfer!
rofl

RE: Tips for interviewer

So what would the interview to be an HR drone go like?

 

- Steve
 

RE: Tips for interviewer

If they answered yes to any of those questions normally they wouldn't pass the interview.  

http://www.nceng.com.au/
"A safe structure will be the one whose weakest link is never overloaded by the greatest force to which the structure is subjected" Petroski 1992

RE: Tips for interviewer

I'll throw in my two cents:

if you are looking for an Enginner to DO the work, make sure the candidate is not doing MBA  at night. A sure sign that the guy wants to be a boss in the short term and not be an Engineer.

Another one I like: We all had setbacks in our lives, tell me about one of your setbacks or disagreements with your colleagues/bosses and how did you handle it?

 

RE: Tips for interviewer

"One day long ago, my boss stormed into my office, threw my report in my face, called me a stupid S$*!##*@#, and stormed out. How would you have handled that?"

 

Good on ya,

Goober Dave

Haven't see the forum policies?  Do so now: Forum Policies
 

RE: Tips for interviewer

Star for cry22.  Watch for signs of MBA disease.  MBA students become useless (perhaps in preparation for their future muddle-management roles).

RE: Tips for interviewer

It's probably got to do with having a Massive Brain Anyeurism.

Regards,

SNORGY.

RE: Tips for interviewer

One that I think I craftily (and legitimately) answered was:
Name your least favorite boss...
Name your favorite boss...

My answer was the same for both.  Had a rocky start with a boss that caused lots of tension and frustration on both sides due to differing styles and lack of trust on his part (micro-managing).  But after time he gained trust in my skills and decision making and then we had the best relationship of any so far.

<tg>

RE: Tips for interviewer

Interviewing is only easy when the guy is a perfect fit. You just swap stories about how you have each solved the same problems at different places. The ones that are terrible are also easy to sort out. The hard part is figuring out if someone that is between O.K. and good will work out.

Personally I let HR figure out the personality stuff and concentrate on the technical stuff.

Don't forget to do a little selling and give them time to ask questions. Especially for engineers where investing things is part of the job the types of questions they ask can be the most important thing you find out.

 

RE: Tips for interviewer

investing => investigating

ENG-tips needs an edit button.

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