Advanced Interviewing: Behavioral Signals and Senior Signals
When hiring a Junior, you look for aptitude and curiosity. When hiring a Senior or Staff Engineer, the technical skills are table stakes. You must interview for Impact and Influence.
1. The Behavioral “Deep Dive”
Instead of “Tell me about a time you had a conflict,” use the Topgrading method. Walk through their entire career chronologically.
- “Who was your manager at [Company X]? What would they say are your three biggest strengths? What were your biggest failures?“
2. The Architectural “Pinhole”
Don’t ask them to build Twitter. Ask them to design a very specific component of a system they claim to have built.
- “You mentioned you built the notification service. How did you handle idempotency at the database layer? Why did you choose SQS over RabbitMQ for that specific use case?“
3. The “Code Review” Interview
Instead of having them write code, give them a PR with 5 deliberate architectural flaws.
- What to look for: Do they find the security bug? Are they kind in their feedback? Do they suggest a refactor or just fix the syntax?
Summary
Senior engineers are force multipliers. Your interview must determine if they make everyone around them better, or if they are just a “Brilliant Jerk.”
