Strategies for Effective Tech Interviews

At UpTeam, we’ve put together a workshop specifically for technical interviewers focused on improving how we assess candidates during the hiring process. The goal is to sharpen our approach to evaluating both technical and soft skills while creating a more structured, consistent interview experience.

This workshop gives our team a clear framework to confidently assess candidates at every level, ensuring that interviews align with each role's requirements. We’re sharing this with other tech interviewers and potential candidates to offer insights into the key elements of effective technical interviews.

Setting the Foundation for Effective Interviews

🔷 Determining Candidate Grade Levels

At UpTeam, we rely on the SFIA framework - Skills Framework for the Information Age - to assess and assign the correct grade level for candidates based on their technical and professional capabilities. This framework provides a clear, structured way to map out the specific competencies expected at various levels, ensuring that both technical and soft skills are aligned with the job’s complexity.

For senior roles, SFIA helps us define expectations around leadership in technical decision-making, mentorship, and extensive experience across projects and technologies. These candidates are expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy, contribute to broader team strategies, and take ownership of more complex and critical tasks.

Junior positions, on the other hand, are mapped with a focus on potential and foundational skills. While we don’t expect extensive experience, we look for candidates who show a solid understanding of core technologies and have the problem-solving aptitude to grow into more advanced roles.

The SFIA framework also plays a key role in interview preparation. It allows us to craft questions and scenarios that are closely aligned with the grade level we're hiring for, ensuring that candidates are tested on the specific skills and responsibilities relevant to the role. By adhering to SFIA, we ensure consistency across interviews and make it easier for hiring managers to objectively evaluate whether a candidate meets the required skill level.

Moreover, this structured approach helps the entire hiring team stay aligned, avoiding any ambiguity or misalignment when it comes to understanding what success looks like for a particular role. This makes it easier to benchmark candidates across various stages of their careers and improves the accuracy and fairness of our assessments, ultimately leading to better hiring decisions.

🔷 Interview Preparation and Avoiding Pitfalls

Preparation is the foundation of a good interview. Skipping it or rushing through can lead to unclear, inconsistent interviews that don't give you the full picture of the candidate. Always review the job description, the skills you're looking for, and any information from prior steps in the hiring process, such as resumes or coding tests.

Here are some of the common mistakes to watch out for:

⛔ Lack of Preparation

If you go into the interview without reviewing the candidate’s background or the job description, you won’t ask the right questions. Take the time to prepare questions that align with both the role and the level you’re hiring for. Review any checklists or evaluation guides you might have in place to stay on track.

⛔ Asking Leading Questions

Leading questions suggest an answer and can skew your assessment of the candidate. Instead of asking something like, "You’re comfortable with microservices, right?" try open-ended questions like, "Can you walk me through your experience with microservices?" This allows the candidate to demonstrate their understanding without being nudged in a specific direction.

⛔ Not Digging Deep Enough

Moving on when a candidate gives you a yes or no answer is tempting, but this doesn’t tell you much. Use follow-up questions to get more context. For example, if someone says they’ve worked with Kubernetes, ask them to explain a problem they’ve solved using it. This helps you assess their real-world experience versus theoretical knowledge.

⛔ Bias in Evaluations

We all have biases that can unintentionally affect how we assess a candidate. Stick to job-related criteria and try to structure your questions in a way that’s consistent across interviews. This helps minimize bias and ensures you compare candidates on an even playing field. Using a standard set of questions and evaluation methods also lets you stay focused on what matters most for the role.

⛔ Inconsistent Questioning

If you’re interviewing multiple candidates for the same role, asking similar questions across the board is crucial. If the interviews are too different, it becomes hard to compare candidates objectively. Prepare a baseline set of questions; from there, you can go deeper based on each candidate’s answers.

Being well-prepared and avoiding these pitfalls will make the interview process more effective, structured, and insightful. This, in turn, helps you get a clear read on how well a candidate’s skills and experiences align with the job you’re hiring for.

Assessing Hard and Soft Skills Effectively

✍🏼 Hard Skills Evaluation

When evaluating a candidate's hard skills, it’s crucial to take a structured approach. This allows you to go beyond surface-level knowledge and understand how people think and apply their technical abilities. One of the most effective ways to do this is through scenario-based questions and real-world problem-solving tasks.

By presenting a candidate with a situation they might encounter in the role, you give them a chance to demonstrate how they would approach it in practice. These types of questions let you see their problem-solving process, how they prioritize tasks, and how they handle challenges. This gives you insight into their ability to apply their knowledge, not just recite what they know.

Balancing depth and breadth in these technical assessments is key. Some roles require deep expertise in a specific technology, while others may need someone with a broader skill set who can learn quickly across different areas. To gauge this, make sure your questions are varied. Ask a few that require deep technical knowledge and some that check their range of experience. This way, you get a clearer picture of how well-rounded a candidate is and where their strengths truly lie.

✍🏼 Soft Skills and Behavioral Techniques

While technical skills are essential, soft skills often play an equally important role in a candidate's performance in your team. Using behavior-driven interviews is an excellent way to assess these. The goal here is to understand how a candidate has handled specific situations in the past, as this often predicts how they’ll behave in the future.

One technique that works well for this is the "5 Whys" approach. It’s simple: when a candidate shares a story or response, ask “Why?” five times (or until you get to the root of their reasoning). This helps uncover their true motivations, thought processes, and the rationale behind their decisions. It also encourages them to go beyond the surface and give you more meaningful insights into their experience.

Soft skills often tie directly into technical problem-solving abilities. For instance, a candidate who communicates clearly and collaborates well with others will likely excel in team-based technical projects. Or, if they demonstrate strong emotional intelligence, they might handle high-pressure situations more effectively. Integrating soft skill assessments with technical evaluations gives you a more comprehensive view of the candidates and how they’ll fit within your team.

Structuring Feedback and Continuous Improvement

🚩 Identifying Red Flags

Spotting potential issues early on in the interview process is crucial, as it can save time and prevent hiring mismatches. A structured approach to questioning and technical assessments makes it easier to identify these red flags. During technical evaluations, look for gaps in fundamental knowledge, an inability to explain their problem-solving approach or a lack of hands-on experience in key areas. For example, if a candidate struggles to break down a technical challenge they’ve supposedly worked on, this may signal that they were not deeply involved in that aspect of the project.

When it comes to soft skills, watch for behaviors that might signal poor teamwork or communication issues. For instance, if the candidate avoids giving specific examples or shifts blame for challenges they’ve encountered, it could indicate an unwillingness to take ownership. Red flags like these can help you dig deeper and ask follow-up questions to confirm whether this is a one-off or more significant concern.

🗣️ Structured Feedback for Better Hiring Decisions

Once the interview is complete, the feedback process becomes as important as the interview itself. Providing structured, consistent feedback across interviews helps minimize bias and ensures that all candidates are evaluated fairly. Without this structure, it’s easy for personal impressions or tiny details to outweigh more critical factors like technical ability or cultural fit.

Feedback templates help keep things organized and ensure that each interviewer is rating the same aspects of the candidate. Quantitative data—such as numerical ratings on technical skills, problem-solving, and communication—adds another layer of consistency. This makes it easier to compare candidates objectively, especially when multiple interviewers are involved. You can focus on the actual criteria that matter for the role rather than relying on gut feelings or scattered notes.

Structured feedback doesn’t just benefit the immediate hiring decision; it also helps refine the entire recruitment process over time. Reviewing past feedback allows you to identify trends or areas where interviews might need improvement. It’s a continuous loop: the more structured and thoughtful your feedback is, the better your hiring decisions will be and the stronger your interview process becomes.

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We hope that by sharing our approach to technical interviews, you'll find valuable insights to enhance your process. At UpTeam, we’ve put a lot of effort into refining how we assess technical and soft skills, and we’re proud of our progress.

If you’re a candidate, you can expect an interview process that is structured, fair, and designed to bring out your best. For tech evaluators, we hope this guide gives you practical tools to improve how you assess candidates, ensuring that every interview leads to stronger, more informed hiring decisions.

Thanks for exploring our methods; whether you're hiring or applying, these steps will help create a smoother and more effective interview experience for everyone involved.

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