Taking Interviews - Part II

In my last blog on Taking Interviews, I had written about few parameters that I use to test out different things in the candidate. In an update, I am sharing a few more new learnings I have had in the past few days:

Stupidity Handling Quotient: Anyone and everyone in this world has been stupid at one time or the other. It becomes very important for the person I am interviewing to have a High Stupidity Handling Quotient. To test it, I act stupid. Sometimes I do not need to :) If I am acting stupid, I would be very interested in seeing the reaction of the other person. Is he / she still smiling and offering me the answers or has the lid blown off? For ex. I will ask them "Tell me the port number on which RADIUS packets are received". Of course I do not expect them to remember it, but if they tell me its easy to find it out in RFC, then they can handle stupids like me :)

Listening Skills: I came across this last week while I was doing a telephonic interview with a candidate and it happened twice in 30 minutes. After asking him a question which he did not know, I explained him the answer. In an over enthusiastic tone, he repeated what I had said, with the only difference that what he said was completely opposite to what I had told him. Now I would have given him the benefit of doubt but it happened again within a few minutes. This was enough to press home the fact that he is not listening properly to the conversation.