Comment Avoid Q&A style interviews (Score 3, Informative) 809
I've had a lot more success hiring great people when I stopped interviewing in a Q&A format and instead spend the time learning how the candidate solves problems. I typically spend 5-10 minutes asking some specific questions about technologies on their resume. Then I define a fictitious project and spend the remaining time ( typically an hour ) learning about how they might solve it, dive deep into a few areas, do some white boarding, a little bit of impromptu code examples and discuss the potential long term problems and solutions. You get a better feel for the breadth of someone's knowledge and their ability to think soundly on their feet. It lets you know that they have the knowledge and ability to apply it to a problem.