Found this great article today that is perfectly timed given how we’re interviewing right now (and kind-of always are):

“Conduct the Perfect Job Interview in Twelve Simple Steps” via Jeff Haden on LinkedIn.

Contactive is always looking for great people. I find that the way I interview here in our 10-person startup is not too dissimilar from the way I interviewed at Microsoft. I continue to focus on assessing a candidate’s personality, their passion, and their skills (in roughly that order), using mostly experiential questions like “Talk to me about a time on in your old position where you had to talk someone down from a bad decision.”

Given the odd jobs that you sometimes have to do in a smaller company like ours, I’ve added a new one which is “Tell me about the most random task you had to do in your previous job that wasn’t in your actual job description.” I like to see how weird their “odd job” was to get a sense for their tolerances for doing random stuff. It may not be a perfect question, but I’ve heard some pretty interesting responses because of it.