Interviewing engineers can be a challenge. You want to make sure you are recruiting quality talent, but at the same time you don’t want to overlook the soft skills that will make them effective within your organization. Keep a balanced approach in mind as you take on this challenge, and remember that examples and specifics will help you better understand their thought processes and work styles.
Here are three important questions to ask to get you started.
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How Do You Maintain Quality?
In interviews, quality engineers are often asked how they maintain quality without constant monitoring. To fully answer this question, keep in mind that this space is a very competitive marketplace. Consumers have more options available to them than ever before. Technology has made the cost of innovation very low, such that a few college students working out of their garage can pose a real threat to a multinational corporation. The cost of shipping products to consumers around the world has never been lower, and most companies are now competing at a global scale. In an economy where time to market of an idea is sometimes as important as the idea itself, it is important to think of optimizations which ensure quality without delaying the production process. That quality is critical, but how they achieve it is even more important.
In your candidate’s response to this question, look for discussion of implementing with confidence, while at the same time focusing on continuous improvement, attention to detail, and consolidation and efficiency when necessary. Feedback is also a key component to effective interactions around building quality products.
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Describe Your Previous Roles and What You Have Learned From Them?
In order to compete and come out on top, engineers need to invent ways to ensure high quality, quick validation, and fast delivery. The key lies in incremental feature delivery. One of the primary focuses of quality engineers is to develop products, platforms and processes that help their teams to validate the decisions in the production process while minimizing the risk to customers. Lessons learned from previous roles are so important to the career of an engineer, and weigh heavily into the overall expectations of them at the stage they are currently at. If they are not able or willing to discuss those learning opportunities in an interview setting, it is worth asking whether they have learned anything at all.
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How Do You Handle Feedback?
Feedback is a gift, whether it’s from customer complaints or collaboration with a colleague. Their response to, and handling of, that feedback should always be with the focus on improving the product and providing high-quality service. Nothing and no one are perfect. Everyone can learn something from feedback they receive. But it really takes the most skilled engineers to know how to filter that feedback in a positive and productive manner.
The world needs experienced, quality engineers. While this role has evolved significantly in recent years, in some ways engineers are more important now than they have ever been. For a helping hand finding the best of the best, contact the staffing experts at Verum Technical today.