IT interview structure - A review

It interview structure- a review Interview is a process to select the right candidates for the right positions. The reason for this article is the way nowadays interviews are arranged by some IT related companies in London. Usually there are different levels of screening now companies are putting to select the right candidates. First round will be a cv screening round, followed by a telephonic interview ( mainly telling as technical discussion). If you pass all this round you will be selected for a face to face interview. Most companies follows one or more face to face interview and interaction session with the co- workers. If you are successful on all this rounds then only you will be offered the job.   Especially in London a lot opportunities are available and can find a lot competitive candidates from different countries. So the level of competition are very high on this cosmopolitan city. All this above interview round should guarantee a right candidate? Or a person with raw talent ever get a job in this competitive job market? One of the reason for writing this article is because I went for one interview. After the 4 hours of  continuous( no break in between) interview that consist of technical test, numerical reasoning, verbal reasoning, program logic analysis and face to face Interview, the personal secretary of the interviewer was telling with a smile- we now gets a lot applications we need to select the right candidates( I don't know what she knows about the job the applicant is doing) so we have to do this much selection procedure. An adult person's brain can concentrate maximum of 20min on a task. All this 4 hour continuous brain teasing is this company think a person can perform on his optimum?The way people think is if somebody do all this test they will be the best candidate for the position. But in those four hour interview nobody never asked what's the candidates interest or what he is going to do best for the company. After the interview i felt i don't want to get a job like this. A person becoming a software developer or software architecture because he got passion for those kind of work. But people who is interviewing don't want to know which area he is interested in( but there are some companies who is asking about it, that kind if companies might be counted using our fingers)  Another telephonic interview started by saying we want to know about the technical experience and would like to discuss the cv.  The interviewer is a software manager from a online recruiting group. He started with technical cv discussion. Once he find the candidate skill is strong he jumped suddenly into asking technical text book questions. One of the question was what is the difference between div and span. The candidate did not answer the question. At the end the interviewer told the candidate you are so weak in HTML skills it will be good if you can brush up your HTML skills. How a question like difference between div and span can decide the HTML knowledge is weak. Might be thats the only question the interviewer knows about HTML. From database one question was asked what is inner join. Candidate answered the question. Interviewer replied you are so strong in database. With one question answering in database how he can decide that candidate is so strong in database. This show the inadequate way of interviews.  If a person don't knows the difference between div and span or knows the answer of inner join doesn't mean that his skills are weak in one or strong in another. In any type of interviews the interviewer should first need to know the taste of candidate. There might be argument coming we are getting thousand of cv's how can we identify all candidate. Screen the best 10 or 15 cv and arrange the telephonic or face to face interview,Understand their skills and from that ask technical questions or ask the candidate about a certain scenario he is expected to do in the future job. Analyse how he is thinking. One thing can be analysed in several different ways. Take an example 105* 9. Answer is 945 but this can find in several ways (100+5)*9 or (100*9)+(9*5) or (100+5)*(10-1). A candidate can find the answer in anyway but the interviewer will fix one thing in mind and behave like it can be done only by doing a multiplication table of 105 by 9. But that is absolutely ridiculous. I read some where Bill gate said, " If I want to do a difficult job I will give to a lazy person because he will find an easy way to solve it". Most of this people who is taking this kind of interviews need to understand the meaning of this sentence above in quotes. Especially in IT this sentence is driving the world. Talents can make the system differently in place of a div or a span a person can do it with something new.. If you understand the candidate caliber and talent might be your inner joins will be broken and can do with simple select statements........