We are looking to bring on a new Junior or Intermediate ColdFusion developer to help code a few large projects we have coming up. I've conducted about 8 ColdFusion interviews and have a standard set of questions that I usually ask but I'd like some feedback from the community.
What are some questions you guys typically ask CF candidates? What kinds of things are you looking for in a prospect?
I like to ask "What's your favorite CF tag and why." Says a lot about the type of work they do, how they approach it, how well they know what's available, etc.
ReplyDeleteI recently had an interview and one of the question I really liked was "say you are assigned a task for creating a simple shopping cart, how would you approach this?. what are the steps you will follow?".
ReplyDeleteI think that was a real good question.
I've found it invaluable to ask for the person to submit some code in advance. It can be anything, but let them know that it shouldn't be a ton of code, and that it should indicate their knowledge and skill level. Look it over and that will give you an idea of the ability of the person.
ReplyDeleteNext, during the interview, ask them to go through that code and explain what it does and why they wrote it that way, why they made the decisions they did. This isn't supposed to be a quiz, but rather a chance to a) let you make sure they wrote it and didn't just copy it from somewhere, b) let you see how they think about coding, and c) let you get an even better idea of their experience and skill level.
I've done this in the past and found that it really helped separate people who know what they're doing from people who either don't know what they're doing, or who are misrepresenting their skill/experience. Solid developers ENJOY talking about their code, so I've found this is a casual and interesting way to help you make a decision on who to hire.