So, we're having some candidates for tech writer positions come in sometime next week, and I've been asked to be one of the interviewers. Yipes. Now I get to find out what it's like to be on the other side of the desk.

Having been interviewed a fair number of times, I have some notion of what the standard questions are. There are some that I don't like. "Where do you see yourself in five/ten/fifteen years?" is one that kinda annoys me, because you never really know what you're going to be doing that far out. (I know that's not why they ask the question, but still.) On the other hand, I did once answer that question with, "Oh, I'd like to win the Nobel Prize, but I haven't decided whether to do it in Chemistry or Literature." And I got the job. Don't try this at home, folks -- I think it only works for cocky 17 year olds.

From what little I've read on the subject of interviewing, "behavioral interviewing" is the way to go: questions of the form, "Tell me about a time when you did x?" or "If you were in a situation like y, what would you do?" As an interviewee, I usually liked the questions of the first sort, and was a little bit more uneasy about the pure hypotheticals. (Mostly because the best answer often seems to be, "Well, it depends.")

Though, one of my least favorite has to be, "Tell me about a time when you had a dispute with a boss or your coworkers." Because every "dispute" I've ever had with a boss or coworker has either been unbelievably trivial ("So, I was working in this lab, and we couldn't agree on what kind of spectrophotometer to buy. So I put together a PowerPoint presentation summarizing the pros and cons of each model. And then we took a vote.") or has been so complex that it would take the entire interview and then some to explain it. (The reason why I have a Masters in Chemistry instead of a Ph.D. in Chemistry could be described, I suppose, as a dispute between me and my advisor, but it was a dispute that took about two and a half years to play out. It's quite complicated to explain, and I definitely wasn't ready to try when I was interviewing for jobs a little over a year ago. It's quite a story, really - I should tell it properly one of these days.)

Um, anyway, I've kind of gotten off the point, which was to ask: Any of you out there interviewed people for jobs before? Got any tips? Any favorite questions? Any help you can give me in hiring a non-sucky co-worker will be much appreciated.