So they will never get it

This is not a guide on how to ace an interview or how to run one perfectly. It is just me sharing what it feels like to sit on the other side of the table—as the person asking the questions—and what you notice when you have done it long enough. I was not planning to write about this at all, but something happened in an interview last week that I could not stop thinking about. I will get to that. First, some context.

How it all started

I joined Infosys in February 2018 and started taking interviews from June of the same year. Since then I have evaluated somewhere around 400 candidates—probably more than that if I count honestly. That includes people from outside India too, not just local hires.

Over the years I have assessed candidates across frontend (React, Angular), Node.js, AWS, Python, DevOps, SQL, NoSQL and Databricks. Freshers on one end, people with twenty years of experience on the other. When someone with twenty years in the industry sits across from you and waits for your questions, it does feel a little awkward. I will not pretend otherwise.

In the early days I was never evaluating alone. There was always at least one senior pairing with me the one from the technical side and another from management. Both asked different kinds of questions and I learned a lot from watching how each of them approached it. Those interviews were also face-to-face, which meant I actually met a huge variety of people—candidates, HR folks, and senior Infosys leaders. That visibility stuck around. People remembered me. Within about two years, when it was supposed to be a two-panel interview and I was just the technical evaluator, the other panelists simply stopped showing up. They would say I could handle it on my own, and off they went. That became the norm.

Types of interviews

Not "group interview vs. panel interview"—those categories exist in every HR textbook. What I mean is the different situations you end up in based on why the interview is happening.

1. Walk-in interviews

HR posts on social platforms and gets a few paid consultancies to blast invites to anywhere from 500 to 2,000 candidates across technologies. Some companies genuinely need people. Some do it for the optics. Either way, by end of day only 50 to 100 people get shortlisted, and most of the time you never know who actually joins after that.

These are the easiest to run because the depth required is not very high. Nobody is checking closely and the panelists are not at their sharpest either—most of these happen on Saturdays. We have worked five days straight, then instead of resting, we come in early, do paperwork, go through resumes that HR randomly assigned us, find a bay or cabin, and sit with people who may have come with a lot of hope. You try to ask questions that do not unfairly rattle them, extract what technical understanding they do have, update HR right after, wait for a free lunch token, and then figure out your own way home. Sometimes HR promises compensation leave or an allowance and quietly forgets about it.

But there is a brighter side. You get to see such a wide range of people—different attitudes, knowledge levels, backgrounds, energies. That is genuinely interesting to me.

I still think about one candidate from 2019. He did not have a strong background on paper—his dress, his English, the companies he had worked at, his college, his scores—none of it would have stood out. His technical knowledge was average and he did not perform brilliantly. But I wanted to give him a chance. I asked my co-panelist, a Group Manager, whether we should move him forward. He said yes. I asked what if the candidate could not keep up later—and he said, let the probation period decide that. Right now we give a chance to someone who needs one. I think about that before I start almost every interview now.

2. Scheduled interviews

These are formal and pre-planned. You know the team, the project, the client, and what exactly they need. There is no room for being lenient here because if you pick the wrong person, you are the one who has to answer for it. No emotional decisions—just: does this person fit the requirement or not?

What is quietly exhausting about this type: I often get asked to evaluate for technologies I have never actually worked in. I will give you one example. A data engineering role opened up for a different project in my client. A week before the interview I had to teach myself the basics of Python, Apache Spark, medallion architecture, ELT and ETL jobs, and workflow orchestration—just enough to be able to tell whether a candidate's answers were real or not. That exercise later ended up pulling me into actual Databricks work. I learned DevOps and cloud platforms the same way. Most managers says that coding is coding and anyone technical can evaluate anything. They know that they are wrong, but that is the reality.

Then there are the calls you get just before an interview starts—a senior manager ringing you unofficially to say the candidate needs to be selected, figure it out. Which makes you wonder why you are sitting there at all. The process becomes a formality.

A separate category in this bucket is the Bar Raiser interview. The client needs someone specific—say, a Python developer who can build REST APIs using serverless or containers. But the manager hears only "AWS" and calls in an AWS expert to evaluate. That expert does not take the time to understand whether the team needs a junior or a senior, a full-stack person or a DevOps specialist. They just fire their standard questions at whoever sits in front of them—"do you know what I know?"—and whoever clears their personal bar stays, everyone else goes. All I can do is sit next to them, stay quiet, and make a face that says: do you have any common sense?

3. Talent mapping interviews

This is close to a scheduled interview, except the candidates are internal—people who recently joined the company or were just released from another project. The Talent Management team (different companies call it different things) tries to fill gaps with whoever is available, without caring too much about the project's actual needs.

Scenario: I need an AWS + Node developer. Talent management sends profiles. The candidates agree they know the stack. When you drill in, they admit they are familiar with parts of it and will learn the rest quickly. That is not always a bad answer, but it depends on how quickly you need them running.

The awkward part here is personal: because I had a reputation as a thorough technical evaluator, I would get pulled into evaluating friends of friends of managers in completely different accounts. I could not easily say no. And walk-in contacts would also pull me in whenever they saw me. When I rejected a candidate for one project, a few days later the exact same profile would come through a different manager asking me to evaluate them again. Some candidates eventually landed somewhere; most did not.

4. Campus interviews

Employers recruit directly from colleges. In my experience, a lot of this in India is a performance. The company shows up, runs assessments, picks students, and then offers a salary that barely covers living expenses—while making the students feel like they should be grateful. Keeping them in a student-like mindset as long as possible is part of the formula.

I never enrolled for campus interviews. It meant travelling by leaving the project work for no extra allowance, no leave compensation, no reshuffling of your actual project work. I know some people choose to go and enjoy it and I am not judging them—it is their call. It is just not mine.

Types of candidates

This is actually the hardest part—not the questions, but reading the person sitting in front of you.

Before you even ask a question, a lot is already visible: how they dressed, what shoes they wore, how their resume is laid out, which companies they worked at, how long they stayed at each one, what locations, which college. None of that is a verdict, but it is context. You can picture the path they took to get to this room. The real question I am always asking internally is: whatever they bring—does it deserve a chance and at what cost to the team?

It is not just about what someone knows or what they can do individually. It is about how they collaborate, how long they are likely to stay, how they handle things going wrong, what they can grow into.

What follows are the patterns I have come to recognise. They are not personality profiles — most real candidates do not fit cleanly into a single box. These are more like recurring shapes that show up across hundreds of interviews.

1. The confident candidate

Junior or senior, if they are right, confidence is great. If they are wrong and junior, you try to shake it a little to see how they react under pressure. If they are wrong and senior but still confident—surprisingly, some managers still select them. That is a management problem, not a candidate problem.

In one walk-in interview a candidate with two years of experience showed up with just a single-page resume and nothing else. I asked why. He said: you ask, I will answer. I had no reason to reject him and did not.

2. The personable candidate

Some candidates experience the interview as something being done to them rather than with them. A simple logistical question like "this role requires late-night calls with onsite clients" gets read as an attempt to screen them out. They push back on the interviewer or escalate to HR mid-session. It makes the conversation tense and rarely ends well for anyone. This one is not tied to any particular demographic — I have seen it across the board — but it does carry a specific emotional signature: the candidate arrived expecting a fight, and any neutral question becomes evidence of one.

3. The detailed candidate

These are people who actually listen to the question, then answer it fully and precisely. Every panelist's reaction is the same: finally. The catch is that a strong candidate of this kind often already has multiple offers, and Infosys HR will try to negotiate their package down to a number the candidate has no reason to accept.

4. The bragging candidate

Talks at length about achievements and makes everything sound impressive. In reality, maybe five percent of technical depth. Likely has never shipped production code with real pressure behind it. I try to screen these out early, but sometimes a less experienced manager evaluates them first, gets charmed, and I end up working with that person on the project.

The first week you know. And then starts the cycle: cover for them to avoid client escalations, manager promises a replacement, nothing happens because the manager is also now relying on you to keep things together. You end up doing their work while they keep their billing. The only way to break the loop is to deliberately let one of their gaps surface in front of the client so an escalation finally forces the manager to act. That is an unpleasant place to be, but it is sometimes the only way out. These candidates are almost always a "no" from me, but almost never a "no" from the system.

5. The appeasing candidate

Agrees with everything, commits to anything, never says no. Somehow these people get through. Even more surprisingly, they get promoted—especially in environments like Infosys—because they never push back on anything senior management asks, even when it is unreasonable. They squeeze their teams to deliver and take the credit. In interviews they come across as cooperative and easy to manage. That is exactly what certain managers want. My answer is always no. Unfortunately, in my observation, a large portion of middle management is built from this category.

6. The nervous or shy candidate

There are different versions of this. Some have already decided they will be rejected before they walk in—their body language says it, their answers are rushed and clipped. Some are nervous because they genuinely do not want to switch jobs but feel they have to. Some have exactly the skills the role needs but do not know how to present them.

I find it easier to come down to where they are—make the conversation feel less like a test—than to wait for them to climb up to a formal interview register they are not comfortable with. You can usually tell within a few minutes whether someone has the substance and just cannot express it today. Sometimes I can help get them selected. Sometimes the process does not allow for that, and all I can do is point them in the right direction for next time. I was on their side of the table once, not that long ago. I take it seriously.

7. The proxy and cheating candidates

This is where it gets interesting.

These candidates are not capable on their own, so either they get someone else to appear in their place or they use external help mid-interview. They almost always prefer video conferences for obvious reasons.

A few examples:

While I was based in Canada, Infosys asked me to evaluate someone in the US. The candidate was average. I said do not proceed. Almost exactly two months later, the same person came back with a different name and a different ID card. Whether he forged a government document or used a fake one, I do not know—but it was clearly the same individual. HR acknowledged it was "a consultancy mistake" and then everyone went quiet.
Another US-based candidate refused to show his government ID before the interview. I said I could not continue without verifying who I was speaking to. He turned it around and demanded my ID. He stayed calm—almost practised about it. When he realized I was not going to proceed, he escalated to nonsense. He was not the person listed for the interview.
In both the US and Canada, I have seen spouses helping each other through interviews—one person attends the call while their partner types or writes answers off-screen for them to read aloud.
In some cases, particularly (and repeatedly) in one regional group I will not name, the candidate mouths the answers while someone out of frame actually speaks. I have had this happen more than five times.
AI and Google are now just standard tools in video interviews. Some interviewers even use AI to generate questions on the fly, and candidates immediately feed those questions back into AI for answers. No one in the room knows what just happened. I am not impressed when someone tries to outsmart me this way. The timing of a response, the direction the eyes move, occasionally the reflection in someone's glasses, answers that sound like definitions rather than experience—these things are readable.

What surprises people is that we sometimes still select candidates who we know are using assistance. The reason is simple: some managers do not want expertise, they want someone in the seat who can generate a billing line. Someone who knows how to find the right answer at speed—even with help—might be able to manage a client too. When the escalation eventually comes, the problem is no longer mine to own. That is a sad truth about how parts of the industry work.

8. The lying candidate

No external help needed—they invent answers on the spot and stick to them with confidence. They will try to convince you that you are the one who is wrong. You sit there wondering how they have survived this long.

9. The certificate collector

Resume has six AWS badges, two Databricks ones, sometimes a Kubernetes one as well. The certifications are real — they put in the time and they passed. The gap is what sits underneath. Ask why you would pick a job cluster over an all-purpose cluster, or what a VPC subnet actually solves in practice, and the answer goes flat. Definitions, not decisions.

This is a different shape from the bragging candidate. The bragger is inflating. This one is not — they did earn the badge. They just never had to apply it to a system someone else depended on. I do not hold the certificates against them. I just stop expecting the certificates to tell me whether they can build.

10. The job-hopper

Six companies in four years. Every transition gets described as a growth opportunity or a change in management. That phrasing on its own is a pattern.

I do not reject this automatically. Sometimes the market did it to them — layoffs, project rolloffs, contracts ending, a bad first manager twice in a row. What I am listening for is one honest sentence about it. I left because the work stopped being interesting. I left because the pay was better. I was let go and I needed something fast. Any of those is fine. The rehearsed version is what makes me uneasy. If they cannot tell me the truth about why they moved, I have no read on whether they will stay.

11. Candidates in their own world

These are the ones who do not quite track reality in the interview context.

One candidate did not get selected. He somehow got hold of my phone number and kept calling to ask about the next interview round and when his joining date would be. When I tried to explain, he refused to hear it. He eventually sent emails to me and to HR saying that neither of us knew how to evaluate people properly.

Another candidate joined a video interview from her bed at home, in nightwear, in the middle of the day. I have no strong feelings about what people wear—what you put on does not determine what you can do. But I have also sat across from people in their fifties who showed up in suits they clearly saved for occasions like this. There is something in that choice. In another session someone was eating snacks and casually responding between bites. I am not setting a dress code. I am just noticing how much a person seems to care about the moment they are in.

12. Candidates belive in their charm than skills

Then there is a pattern that comes up occasionally — candidates who try to use charm as a strategy. It happens with both men and women, though it takes different shapes. Some lean into flattery, some into personal questions, some just seem to assume that likeability will carry them past the technical gaps. I have sat across from people who were clearly more comfortable performing than answering. I remember earlier in my career seeing senior interviewers play along with it rather than redirect. I always found that uncomfortable. My standard is the same regardless of who is in the seat: the work either supports the role or it does not.

How I actually run an interview

Most people who interview professionally fall into the same pattern. Introduce yourself. Define this method. Name your achievements. What percentage improvement did you drive? What tools do you use? How do you mentor? The questions are roughly the same whether the candidate has five years or fifteen. The session becomes a checklist. Tick the boxes, move on.

I find that approach almost useless.

The percentage claims on resumes bother me in particular. Someone writes "reduced downtime by 80%" or "improved team productivity by 30%." My first question is always: whose idea was that? Did they initiate it, or did they execute someone else's initiative and then claim the outcome? That number tells me almost nothing without the story behind it. And usually the story is the interesting part.

Rapid-fire definition questions are the other thing I stopped using. "What is Event-Driven Architecture?" "Explain callbacks versus promises versus async/await." "How do you design a microservices system?" Those answers can be memorized in a week. They could be googled mid-session. They can now be fed by an AI earpiece. What they tell me about the person's actual capability is close to zero.

My approach starts differently. I ask about their most recent project — what they built, what their specific role was, what they understood about the system they were working in. Then I follow the thread. What did they explore beyond what the ticket asked? When something broke, how did they diagnose it? If they were handed the same problem today with a different constraint, how would they approach it differently?

What I am actually trying to read from that conversation is not technical vocabulary. It is:

Where they have come from and what their real constraints were
Whether they pushed against the limits of their situation or settled inside them
What they are genuinely curious about — not what they prepared to say they are curious about
How they think when something goes wrong, not just when things go right
Whether they see themselves as part of a team or as someone working adjacent to one

The level of my expectations adjusts based on experience. Someone early in their career should be curious and honest about what they do not know. Someone with a decade behind them should be able to tell me what they learned the hard way, not just what they learned from documentation.

I am not saying the standard approach is wrong. This is just what has worked for me. The difference, as far as I can tell, is this: for most interviewers, the session is a task to complete. For me it is a space to understand someone. When you treat it that way, you stop evaluating answers and start reading people. What someone has done with the chances they were given tells you far more about who they are than anything they can prepare for in the week before an interview.

The emotion behind all of this

Interviewers are not trained screeners. We are engineers, leads, and managers who happen to also run evaluations on top of our actual project work. Most of us have been on the other side of that table too, and we know what it feels like. I was never formally trained. I watched my seniors, took what was useful, dropped what was not, and tried to pass what I learned on to people who started doing it after me.

I cannot look at a candidate without thinking about where they came from.

In the face-to-face era, I would notice a lot before a word was spoken: how they dressed, their shoes, how their hair was, how they held themselves when they sat down. Their confidence level, Then the resume—which companies, how long at each one, how far they commuted, what city, what college. None of it told me the final answer, but all of it told me something about the journey. What I am actually asking the whole time is: does this person deserve a chance, and what will it cost the team?

After COVID moved everything online, candidates stayed in their own spaces. That gave them an advantage—comfort, familiarity—but it also gave me a different kind of window. I could see their actual circumstances.

Some candidates join from a corner of their current office, hiding from their manager or colleagues. Maybe they cannot take a leave day. Maybe they have a meeting right after. They do not tell you this. You just notice.

Some come from small towns or villages where they would never have had access to a face-to-face interview. Network is poor, background is bare, English is rough. That is the limit of what they have—not the limit of what they are. Some of them do not even know that cheating in an interview is a thing people do. All I can do in those cases is help them understand what they need to prepare for next time, because selecting them for a senior role when they are not ready would hurt them and the team both.

I remember interviewing someone with fifteen-plus years of experience who had spent all of it on a single legacy stack inside one large services company. He was out of date on everything we needed. I could hear his family in the background—he did not have a private room. And I could see in his face that he desperately needed a break, a change, something. Each "I don't know" answer was harder for him to say with his family listening. I felt it. But I could not manufacture a pass that was not there. All I could offer was respect and honesty about where to go from that point.

Then there was a woman who had left the industry to focus on her family, spent years on PHP, jQuery, and HTML, and was now trying to come back into a world asking for React, Angular, and Node. She knew the theory but had no hands-on time. She had done everything herself—found the small agency, got the experience she could, paused for her family, and was now trying to restart something she was probably passionate about before life got in the way. My read of her words was simple: she needed one person to give her a chance.

I think about the women I saw in the office who took a short nap after lunch. The younger version of me probably would have found that odd. Now I understand it. Up before sunrise, managing the house before the commute, carrying their workload through the day, managing the house again at night. That nap is not laziness. It is the only fifteen minutes in the day that belong entirely to them. Looking at those same people as candidates—people who temporarily lost their track in the industry for reasons that had nothing to do with capability—is genuinely hard.

Once I interviewed a PhD holder. His primary interest was research, not product engineering. He knew enough programming to get through the screen, but the conversation made it clear he was temporarily choosing a salary over a mission.

Sometimes the job description says ten years of experience and the person sitting across from you has twenty. They started as a developer, moved into management, got laid off, and now need something — anything — quickly. So they apply for a role that is clearly below where they were. They answer my questions well. They know things I probably do not. And I still cannot move them forward, because the fit is wrong in a direction that will hurt them more than the rejection does.

It not just sad stories,

When I was in Canada, I interviewed someone who turned out to be a former colleague from L&T Infotech — someone we had never met but had both reported to the same manager at different times. That interview went sideways in the best possible way. We spent half of it comparing notes on the legacy applications, the managers, the dynamics of a team we had both been part of without ever crossing paths. I do not remember how the technical evaluation went. I do remember the conversation.

Early in my career, one particular manager would specifically put me on the technical round so he could spend the session flirting with the female candidates. That part did not interest me, but it meant I ended up running the actual interview while he sat back. I still remember the way he watched some of those women. He is a delivery manager now.

Why I am writing this now

I am moving somewhere else. I may not get the same volume of interviews, or the same range of people sitting across from me. But out of everything I am taking with me from these years, this is the part worth carrying forward.

Here is the strange part. My current company has roughly 300,000 employees, and they could not find my replacement internally. They are interviewing externally, and management is comfortable bringing in subcontractors if needed. What is even stranger is that I have been asked to interview my own replacement. I do not think I am irreplaceable — everyone in a corporate structure is replaceable, and I would genuinely love for someone great to walk in so I can hand things over properly. But the bar I have been working to is apparently not easy to match straight away.

For context: the standard process requires both a technical person and a manager on the panel. At some point, management decided I could run evaluations on my own. No manager needed to sit in. That trust meant something.

Now, after six years of doing this independently, a Group Project Manager and a Senior Solution Architect are sitting alongside me for these replacement interviews — to make sure, they say, the evaluation is being done right.

I understand the optics of that. I also know exactly what it is. Their presence is a signal that my judgment is under supervision for the first time. What I cannot explain to them — and what I have stopped trying to explain — is that for me, this was never just a task to get through. It is a space I have always taken seriously. I show up to it the same way whether anyone is watching or not. Whether that is true for them when something is no longer their problem, I cannot say. But I suspect not.

There is an old story from the Middle Ages. Europeans who had never seen an elephant were asked to draw one. The best they could produce was a horse with a trunk and a castle on its back. Not because they were unintelligent, but because they were drawing from concept, not from the room. They drew the idea of the animal. That is what it feels like watching people who have always treated interviewing as an administrative step explain what good interviewing looks like. They will draw a horse with a trunk. They will never get it.

Forty-five minutes in an interview gives you a brief window into someone's life. Where they came from, what they have built, what they still want to do, what they are carrying, what they hope for. That is a privilege. It keeps me honest about how much I have to be grateful for. We are all, in the end, small and trying.

What happened in that interview

At the start of this post I mentioned something that happened in an interview last week that I could not stop thinking about. This is that.

The first candidate was not strong enough. I said no. The Group Project Manager sighed and said she hoped the next one would be a better fit.

The second candidate also did not meet the bar. After the candidate left the call, she asked me why I could not just stay. I did not respond. She pushed a little — mentioned sending me onsite, mentioned compensation. I stayed quiet. The Senior Solution Architect tried to smooth things over, saying AI can write code now, anyone can be trained, the next profile looks promising.

End of that conversation.

For the third candidate, I stepped back and let both of them run the evaluation. The Architect's questions were calibrated to the candidate's experience level, so the answers came across well. In the team chat, the Architect said he was good, let us proceed. At the very end of the call, the Group Project Manager asked me to add my questions.

I asked three questions designed to trip up the candidate — the kind of questions designed not really for the candidate, but for a Senior Solution Architect to realise what he was actually doing in that seat.

Meeting ended. I typed in the chat: you can select if you want to.