Interviews That Test Judgement

Most security interviews test memory: what port does this use, what does this acronym mean. Memory is easy to look up. Judgement is not. The people you want are the ones who make sound decisions when they do not have all the facts.

Use a real scenario

Give the candidate a short, realistic situation and ask what they would do. Then change one fact and ask again. Watching how someone updates their plan when the situation shifts tells you more than any quiz.

• "An alert fires at 6 p.m. on a Friday showing a finance account logging in from a new country. What do you do first?"
• "A product team wants to ship with a known weakness to hit a deadline. What do you say?"
• "You find that a colleague has been closing tickets without fixing the issue. How do you handle it?"

What good answers sound like

• They ask questions before acting.
• They say what they would not do yet, and why.
• They name who else needs to know.
• They admit what they are unsure of instead of bluffing.

Keep it fair

1. Ask every candidate the same core questions.
2. Agree what a strong, middling and weak answer looks like before the interviews start.
3. Have each interviewer score alone before anyone discusses.
4. Write down the reason for each decision.

Consistent questions and written scores reduce the pull of first impressions and of hiring people who remind you of yourself. They also make it easier to explain a decision to a candidate who asks.

Close each interview by letting the candidate ask about the hard parts of the job: the incidents, the budget, the board. What they choose to ask tells you what they care about. It also gives them an honest picture, which saves you both from a hire that ends badly six months later.

Rule of thumb:Rule of thumb: if a question can be answered with a search engine, it is not testing judgement.