8 Steps To Finding The Perfect Technical Screening Questions

Involve CTOs And Senior Managers

Due to a lack of technical knowledge, it will be daunting to gather the best technical questions to ask a candidate. However, involving CTOs and senior managers in the hiring process, it becomes easy for you to collect relevant information, and they will also help prepare technical screening questions.

As a non-tech recruiter, you should spend time researching the role and asking senior management for their tips for technical interviews, then write up your list of questions.

Don’t Rely On Google

When you search ‘web developer interview questions’ on Google, you will get tons of questions to use in your hiring process – and some of them will be great.

However, your interviews should test the specific skills you need for the job. If you need fast, active developers, it’s no good to include a long list of specific, technical math questions.

Know What Skills You’re Looking For

Knowing in advance what skills to look for in a candidate will help you prepare the right technical questions. For example, suppose you are looking for a web developer. In that case, you need to prepare skills-related questions rather than based on the experience.

Think about what you need from a particular candidate to land a job – and done well. Ask yourself the below questions:

• Do you want someone motivated and eager to learn new tools and technologies?
• Does your team need an innovator or a technical whizz?
• Are you missing proficient knowledge of a particular job role, or could a programmer with some experience of similar languages learn it on the job?

When you get answers to these questions, you can easily prepare screening questions for a technical role.

Resume Review

Judging a candidate based on a resume is a bad practice. A resume is a wordy document where 80% of statements are false. However, to evaluate the technical skills of a candidate, you can ask the following questions:

• In which of our projects did you [X] software? – This question will give you an idea of how familiar a candidate is with modern tools and technologies.
• Tell me about your previous project? How much time you took to complete the work before the deadline. Questions like these will help you assess the problem-solving skills and the time management skills of a candidate.
• What did you learn from your past projects? It will help you assess whether a candidate is familiar with modern tools, technologies, and software and how eager they are to learn new skills.

Collect All The Relevant Information During Phone Screening

Before conducting a technical screening interview, you must conduct a phone screening interview with the potential candidates. You will get a ton of information about the candidates that will allow you to provide great value to your hiring managers and engineering team.

A phone screening interview can help you get the answers to the following questions:

• What are your expectations regarding your next job?
• What are your long-term goals?
• Why are you interested in your particular job profile?
• What do you love/hate about your previous job?

The best thing is you don’t need to be an expert in a technical role to ask these questions. Just make sure to take notes and communicate everything to your senior hiring managers.

Don’t Ask Leading Questions

Suppose you have a long list of technologies to tick off. In that case, it can be fascinating to ask, “have you ever used Eclipse?” or “how many years of experience do you have using Java or any other programming language? Leading questions make it simpler for candidates to hide the truth and may not result in a fair interview. Instead, avoid discussing the names of technologies and keep questions open-ended.

Questions About Tech Tools, Systems, And Security

In most cases, tech candidates make it clear in their resumes about which technologies they’ve used before. Here is the list of questions you can ask them in a technical round:

• What tools have you used?
• What languages have you programmed in?
• What is clustering, and describe its use?
• What is a cross-site scripting attack?
• What is a honeypot, and how is it used?
• Have you used Eclipse?
• Have you used Java in your previous projects?

Standardize Interview Questions

The best way to balance the hiring process is by standardizing technical screening questions. There are some restrictions – you must adapt yourself to the situation and the answers a candidate gives you.

The standardized interview process will help you streamline the hiring process and determine whether the candidate is the right fit for the organization or not.

To sum it up, there are merely a few ways to find the right technical screening questions for tech candidates, but the key is to be inquisitive.

As a non-tech recruiter, it might be challenging, but you can easily conduct a technical screening assessment to find the right candidates for your organization with the above tips.