Richard Langvin, senior project manager with MapleWorks Technologies Inc. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Many people have horror stories of sitting in a board room and undergoing a job interview, either from the employer side or the applicant side.

Whether it is inappropriate questions that give away a novice manager and leaves a bad impression of the company, or suspect answers that point to a resume that might have been embellished, interviews can make or break a working partnership.

When looking for the perfect candidate to fill a spot, the interview plays a crucial role in determining if the person is the right fit for the environment and position. Managers only have a short time to assess whether the candidate is the real deal, or likely to cause headaches for the company.

Richard Langevin is a senior software development manager at MapleWorks, a software development outsourcing company based in Gatineau. He said that after interviewing many different technically-minded people, he has a few techniques to get to know the applicant in a short time.

OBJ: Who does the interviewing at MapleWorks and how many people have you hired?

LANGEVIN: With employee numbers, we are in the mid-70s right now and we started in June 2004 with about four or five employees. I started a few months in and I was employee number nine.

I do a substantial number of new employee interviews. We have two basic roles that we interview for. The bulk of our positions are for software developers and verification engineers. We do have an administrative section which includes accountants and an HR person, but 90 per cent is in the engineering section.

OBJ: Do you have a multi-level process to your interviewing?

LANGEVIN: It's a three-tier process. We do the resume screening first, looking through them for the right skills, the right background and the right experience. Then from there we do a phone screening with 15 or 20 minutes on the phone to make sure that there really is a match to the resume. Then, assuming there is a good match, we proceed with in-house interviews.

We do three different interviews, meaning you'll meet three people in a row. Typically it's one or two managers and one or two technical interviewers. But we do them separately because we have found that a panel interview makes people uncomfortable.

The managers' primary role is assessing soft skills and technical skills in general. Then we'll have a technical expert who will get a much stronger feel for the technical skills. There are also tests for certain roles. We might ask someone to write a C++ or a Java test.

OBJ: You touched on earlier that panel interviews can make people uncomfortable. How do you get people be comfortable and open up in interviews?

LANGEVIN: Right from when they show up, we make sure that they are comfortable. We offer then coffee or water, we try to get them to relax a bit. That's the first step, to make sure they have a chance to settle. When it comes to technical interviews, it depends on the person. Some people are eager, others are not sure that they're ready. We try to accommodate people as best as we can if they want to do it at a later time, but if they are as skilled as they claim, it shouldn't be an issue. We give them time and give them access to a computer if there things they want to look up. An open-source test is perfectly acceptable.

We try to keep it conversational. We work very hard to find someone who is a good match for our environment. It is a friendly atmosphere and everyone ends up dealing with customers so we have to make sure that they are professionally polite and respectful of everyone else. There is a constant flow to get the dialogue going so we can get a good feel for their mannerisms and their general way of interacting with people.

The top attributes we look for in people is that they have to be smart, and they have to have some passion. There are smart people who are very personable that have a problem getting work done on a daily basis because they lack the passion for what they do.

OBJ: What are some of the red flags that have come up in interviews before?

LANGEVIN: Some of the red flags might be if they are unable to answer technical questions or give you generalized answers for something that they have claimed to be expert in. They don't necessarily have to be really hard questions, but they are questions which anyone who has worked as an expert in that area should be able to handle.

Sometimes I get a red flag from the resume in which they claim to have a certain skill, but in the job experience there is no experience to match that skill. You say, "OK, how did they get that skill?"

For soft skills, I ask how they felt about working for certain people at certain jobs. If they become negative, I don't like that. It's OK, to say that there were certain issues, but you don't start dumping on people. Everyone is different and you have to learn to adapt. It's a level of professionalism and part of that is not saying derogatory stuff about past employers. Even if it is true, it's not professional.

OBJ: What kind of advice would you have for other employers who have to go through the interviewing process?

LANGEVIN: Personally, I enjoy meeting people. To become a manager, to go down that path, you have to like working with people. If you don't, you should become an architect or a deep specialist.

THE EXPERTS SAY

We deal with a lot of recruits who specialize in technology sales. A lot of time is spent with employers helping them pick, as well as with candidates helping them decide on where they want to apply themselves. So we evaluate them after we have interviewed them, but we also help them do their best in interviews as well. At the end of the day, we want them to present themselves as who they are and nothing else.

From the employer perspective, everyone has their own interviewing style. Most of the firms we deal with have a fair bit of experience and they often want to share notes with us to compare our techniques with theirs.

We use pretty simple questions to determine if people have what we are looking for. We ask a lot of open-ended questions, so things like, "What motivates you? Are you good at selling?" People usually say yes, but you would be surprised by how many people hesitate. If they say yes, you ask why. We like to know how they are going to fit with our customers, so we ask where they worked recently and how that fit with their values. We just watch body language and that says a lot.

In our company, we have someone from just about every sector of the technology business. We have someone who has sold that type of product or service to that particular market involved in the interview so we can dissect the interview from both the sales and industry sides.

Eliot Burdett, founder, Peak Sales Recruiting

Before the interview, it is good to decide what is really important to the job and build from that. Decide what is critical as opposed to what you would like in a candidate.

Apart from the skills and knowledge, another important thing is cultural fit. They must think about what their work environment is like and determine what kind of person would fit. Is it an entrepreneurial culture or bureaucratic?

There are no perfect interview questions – it's about how you ask the questions. We do what we call "performance prediction" and behavioural style of interviews. These types of interviews work on the theory that past behaviour is the best predictor of how candidates will handle similar situations in the future. So, rather than asking candidates how they would react in a hypothetical situation, we ask them how they actually reacted in the past to a challenge.

A lot of managers are sceptical about these questions because they say that the candidate will just tell you what you want you to hear, and to a certain point that can be true. But it can be startling at what you can find out. Some will say things like they hung up on a customer when conflict arose. Then you ask them if they would do anything different, they say, well no because they did everything they were supposed to. By asking them about a real-life situation they experienced, it's harder for them to make it up.

Tanya Pyne, HR manager, Aon Consulting