How to weed out weak candidates for an interview?

Question

Career in IT

We are trying to find a signer for the position. The problem is that 80% of candidates have a senior-lead resume, but in practice they turn out to be middle-lead.
I know that you can:
* Add another stage of the interview. For example, in half an hour on Skype, remotely solve a children's problem.
But then the total acceptance time increases and the candidate may have time to accept another offer.
* Ask for a git account. But participation in open projects is not for everyone.
* Ask for sample code. But this is where it's easy to cheat.
There is also a second problem. The interview cannot be drastically shortened. Since you still need to "keep the face of the company."
I would like to hear about good practices and ideas. Or a good link.
PS
could not resist anglicisms in the gradation of the level - but he could not come up with Russian analogues.

Answer 1

At the selection stage, you need to carefully look at the "track record". Observation: if, in addition to the name of the employers, the list contains only the general "casting a shadow on the wattle fence", the candidate will disappear after three to five questions on the case. If the list contains technology stacks and a specific role in the project (done this, implemented this), it makes sense to take a closer look at the candidate.
And then only a face-to-face interview - no Skype and test tasks.
At the interview, I usually ask to choose from the track record any one project (at the discretion of the candidate himself - the coolest one: in which some particularly interesting solution was found, or some cool technologies were used, or some non-trivial task was solved. .. in short, which he himself is proud of) and tell about it in more detail, but, again, not in the sense of what eminent customers were or how immense the budget was, but in the sense that he specifically did what he loved in it, what he learned and what achieved. Usually the choice itself is quite indicative. (If a person is interviewing, for example, on a JEE signer, and as a topic they choose a site written in high school in PHP, on which there was a particularly successful photo of a cat, this is already a reason to think.)
And then, as the story progresses, I start asking clarifying questions (for lice): yeah ... they wrote tests ... and what was the coverage? How was it determined? And in what order will the tests from the same class be executed?.. So, so... JBoss... and which version was used? Descriptors or annotations? What's new in the next versions? Did you write servlets by hand? ...yep, SOAP. What are the three parts of a WSDL? Did you make mocks in SOAPUI? Well, and further - in depth or in breadth, according to the amount of knowledge of the candidate.
This approach has two sides. First: if a person has something to be proud of, he begins to load me with technical details with burning eyes, the situation of stress is removed. From the "test" mode, we are smoothly moving into a conversation mode on professional topics. If he begins to mumble something about the incredible importance of the project and his key role in it, but he cannot answer questions, because. “He personally did not do this,” and “these decisions were made by others,” then everything becomes clear with him very quickly and the conversation can end there.
And secondly, from a resume it is often difficult to even guess the level of "immersion" in individual technologies. In a conversation, it is possible to accurately find out the alleged strengths of the candidate and then ask specific questions, allowing him to reveal the depth of knowledge.
As for the individual technologies that are being discussed, I ask the candidate to evaluate their knowledge of it on a five-point scale "1 - I hear it for the first time, 5 - an expert." For experts, I have prepared specific questions from life, as a rule, code examples illustrating some non-trivial crap, which I immediately take out of my daddy and propose to parse together. Expert in Java - good! Let's talk about memory medley, garbage collectors or processor cache. Expert in SQL - great! Let's try to optimize the query. Expert in networks - wonderful! Let's figure out why this fucking socket is falling. Again, the goal of this approach is by no means to overwhelm a self-confident candidate, but to understand how a person thinks, how he seeks solutions to problems, whether he has enough knowledge and experience for this. No problem,

Answer 2

Put your HR manager on the phone and teach her to ask the candidate five simple questions on the topic you need. The distribution of candidates by the number of correct answers will become clear very quickly. Obviously, the worst do not need to call back, and you will not have to invite them anywhere either.
We used this - 80% of applicants do not get to the office, they are cut directly by five questions.

Answer 3

Many companies set conditions that a senior is:
== lead 2+ who wants to change jobs
== senior 2+ who wants to change jobs
== experience 3-5+ full time. Here you directly take and subtract the year of graduation from the university and the current one. This is if the resume was not sent by a lead or senior.