Technical Interview

Common formats

• Technical screening call: 30 to 45 minutes of knowledge questions and a short problem, used to filter before longer rounds.
• Live problem solving: the candidate works through a problem with an interviewer, explaining their thinking.
• Take-home exercise: a task completed in the candidate's own time, then discussed. Cap it at two to four hours.
• System or process design: for senior roles, designing a solution and defending trade-offs.
• Troubleshooting scenario: common for help desk and technical support: "A user says they cannot connect to the VPN. Walk me through what you check."
• Work review: discussing code, a model, a spreadsheet or a project the candidate built.

Building a fair technical interview process

Start from the job analysis: list the three to five technical skills that matter most in the first six months, and test those, not trivia. Use the same problems for every candidate at a level, with a written rubric, ideally on an interview scorecard, describing what a weak, acceptable and strong answer looks like. Have interviewers score independently before discussing.

Technical interviews overlap with skills assessments and work sample tests. A short automated test is a cheap way to screen at volume; the interview then explores how the person thinks, communicates and handles ambiguity, which tests capture poorly.

Technical interviews for support and frontline tech roles

For a contact center hiring 40 tier-1 technical support agents, a whiteboard-style interview is the wrong tool. Better: a 10-minute troubleshooting role play with a scripted customer, plus a few questions on the systems the agent will actually support (operating systems, routers, common apps). Score logic and communication separately. A candidate who asks good diagnostic questions but does not know a specific setting can be trained; one who jumps to conclusions usually cannot.

Common mistakes

• Puzzles and brain teasers with no link to the work.
• Each interviewer inventing their own questions, so candidates are not compared on the same basis.
• Penalizing nerves. Live coding under observation is stressful; give candidates a moment to think and permission to talk it through.
• Unpaid take-homes that take a weekend. Long assignments push out strong candidates with jobs and caregiving duties.
• Ignoring accommodation requests. The ADA applies to technical assessments like any other selection step.