It of course depends on what you’re hiring for, what qualities you value, and the scale you’re working at. But:
> I want to assess how you think, not which tools you use
suggests you have a more nuanced approach and aren’t just aiming for large numbers of drones.
What worked well for me (in a couple of smaller companies/teams) was:
- Talk to the candidates about their experiences in a project-oriented course where they had to work in a team. (Most CS programs have at least one of these. Get the name of that course ahead of time and just ask about it.) You want to find out if they can work in a team, divide up work and achieve interim goals, finish a project, deal with conflicts, handle setbacks and learn from mistakes, etc.
- Similarly, find out the names of some of the harder elective courses, and ask about their experiences in these. This gets at what they find interesting, how they think, and can help filter out GPA gamers.
- Talk to them about their experiences in whatever jobs, internships, volunteer work, or extracurricular activities they engaged in while at school. It doesn’t have to be directly related to your field—-you’re screening for work ethic and initiative.
Admittedly it’s been a while, but we used this approach for both on-campus recruiting and remote phone screens, and got pretty good at hitting these topics in a 15-20 minute conversation. We’d have one or two people screen maybe 30-50 candidates each recruiting season, identify 5-10 for on-site interviews with a larger team, and end up hiring about half of those.
This sort of bespoke screening does take some work on your part, and can be tough to scale. But we found it consistently identified solid candidates and led to outstanding hires.