Pair Programming for a job interview [closed]

Question

Our company has been thinking about scrapping our interview procedures and bringing each candidate in for a 4-5 hours sit-down with some of the programmers and just do some pair programming.

I like the idea in theory but I am not sure how you can really make it fair for each candidate. How would you rate them? Wouldn't their input really depend on what each programmer was working on that day?

Any thoughts on whether this is a good idea/bad idea or how to make it work is what I am kind of looking for here.

Cheers!

EDIT:

RESULT - AS requested

We are going to conduct the first steps of the interview the same as before. Phone followed by face to face. Instead of bringing them back for a third and final grilling, we are going to bring 3 developers back to sit with all 7 members of the team. We have decided to let the team decide who is then hired.

We have come to this conclusion for a couple of reasons. We believe this will empower the developers by giving them a choice who they are working. The second reason is group dynamic. We think it is really important to have a good group dynamic and it is hard to tell until after you hire a person if they will fit in or not.

So the end result is we are going to go ahead with the pair programming sessions but in a completely different way and for a completely different way than was originally intended.

Any thoughts or criticism of this approach is more than welcome!! (this edit is posted as an answer below so feel free to downvote if you feel this is not the best approach)

Answer 1

Unless you use pair programming extensively in your real-world development, I'd be very hesitant to use this. I've met any number of high-quality professional developers who have mentioned a strong aversion to pair programming and whose skill would not be well-judged in such a process.

Answer 2

I hope you have a bunch of steps ahead of this one. For this to work you need an excellent resume and phone screen. You don't want to spend oodles of time on candidates that you shouldn't be talking to in the first place.

So you suggest an initial interview and possibly have the second interview as the pair programming session? – Ted Smith (1 min ago)

Yeah. You might even think of having a simple coding interview happen over the web using something like CoPilot.