If he's reaching the interview phase, it isn't the job market.
Almost nobody want's to interview more candidates than necessary. It's a huge hassle and the cost is pretty damn high.
Baseline is that in an interview I try to determine a few things:
1. Ability to perform work. Can you be in consistently, and perform work that is of an adequate quality/quantity to be worthwhile?
2. Ability to work with the team. Are you going to damage morale, will you communicate in a manner that doesn't cause excess problems.
3. Ability to not upset the exterior of the team, will a person dress/speak appropriately around customers/ bosses/ HR
For likability go for candor.
Some people feel uncomfortable with that, if so go with a mistake that could have been averted by another party -but- take full ownership of it. Leave enough of the story in there so that the interviewee can see that it was another party mistake, but not enough that it appears blatant. An instance might be making a bad commit to the code base, realizing it too late, then finding out that the svn repository died horribly AFTER everyone had pulled out YOUR broken update. Then have some canned speech about how you stopped mixing the debug and production directories from that point on.
Lot's of developers are intolerably arrogant, and there are a bunch of queue's that the interviewers are looking for, show that you can hide these signs. Talk yourself up in a way that doesn't show arrogance.