Inside Karat
10.31.2018
Interview Engineering: Golden Rules of the Technical Interview
The Karat Team

All too often, the technical interview is used to find flaws in candidates. When in fact finding their strengths is actually more effective in identifying their potential. Karat Director of Interview Engineering, Lus Mendel, recently presented a workshop revealing the best practices of technical interviewing for software engineering roles.
Co-hosted by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, this workshop covered best practices used by Karat to deliver a consistent technical interview and exceptional candidate experience at scale. Lus, who themselves started at Karat as an interview engineer, has developed a team of professional interview engineers that have conducted tens of thousands of technical interviews to date on behalf of Karat clients.
We believe the technical interview should make a candidate shine and predict their potential. To do this accurately, it is important to be thoughtful and consistent about in-interview communication and the technical interview itself. Here are a few tips to get started.
Be thoughtful about in-interview communication
Team members conducting technical interviews should be equipped, trained, and accountable for proper in-interview communication. This means offering clarity in questions, encouragement when needed, and guidance when it’s called for.
- Clarity:Judge candidates by what they do, not what they don’t do. After all, they may not have been aware of something they should have been doing, because it could be irrelevant to the role. Instead, be clear about the behavior that you’re assessing. The technical interview is about problem solving, not mind reading.
- Encouragement:Don’t enable poor candidate performance by being combative or aggressive (this happens more than you might imagine). Believe that the candidate can succeed and meet your expectations.
- Guidance (or hints): Don’t give harmful guidance that might confuse more than clarify. Contrary to popular belief, it can actually be okay to give hints. A technical interview isn’t a game of trivia, after all.
Deliver a consistent and structured technical interview
Who you hire is a big deal. It will shape your team and your company. It’s important to let candidates be human and treat them with fairness, but also to be rigorous in the technical interview. That’s why professional interview engineers at Karat are equipped with a structured approach that relies on shared indicators of success and technology that uses interviewer feedback to programmatically create a recommendation of how the company should proceed with the candidate.
- Avoid the “Yelp Review”:Candidates’ skills warrant more input than a simple star rating. Their abilities are multi-faceted. Instead, use shared language and guideposts that describe candidates’ abilities.
- Separate scoring from the recommendation:Interviewers’ feedback, if structured and using a shared language, should drive the recommendation without an interviewer explicitly stating “hire” or “don’t hire.” This makes it possible for others to review the feedback and identify aberrations that may be indicators of bias.
- Quality control: The entire interview should be reviewed by a fellow interviewer to ensure that aberrations in the interview process haven’t compromised its accuracy.
Getting technical interviewing right is hard, but the benefits are substantial. Those who do get it right will achieve more of their hiring goal, more quickly than competitors, while knowing that they gave candidates a truly exceptional experience.
To get updates about the next “Debugging the Technical Interview” event, please follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Related articles

Industry Trends & Research
10.31.2023
It may be the spookiest day of the year for those celebrating Halloween, but something else has been haunting the tech industry for quite some time: the technical hiring process. Job seekers looking for new opportunities in 2023 have had some pretty eerie experiences — experiences rife with scary strategies, terrifying tactics, and ancient rituals […]

Industry Trends & Research
10.26.2023
The tech hiring landscape continues to shift as the world’s workforce navigates global economic uncertainty. Fortunately, these shifts create opportunities for software developers and engineers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the job market for these professionals remains resilient with an expected 26% increase in employment over the next decade. Furthermore, Karat’s 2023 Hiring Trends […]

Inside Karat
10.17.2023
At Karat, our enduring commitment to our purpose to unlock opportunity is the driving force behind everything we do. A vital part of that purpose is the invaluable contribution of our Interview Engineers, who conduct technical interviews with software engineers worldwide. They not only enhance outcomes for our clients and candidates. They also create pathways […]