In my company, the first interview is technical. After that there's a technical test, then the HR-type interview.

Seems to work quite well. So few people get through the first interview.

I will strongly agree on two points made here - back up your claims and don't look down on the interviewer.

We had one guy, claimed to be a SQL expert, lots of experience in optimisation (which is what we were looking for). When he came to the technical interview, he was highly arrogant. Once we started the questioning it got worse.

He couldn't describe the differences between a clustered and nonclustered index. Didn't know profiler. Couldn't describe to me how to get an execution plan, let alone read one. Went off on long tangents describing some system he'd written (in ASP) some years back

Most of his answers were a couple seconds of mumbling followed by "well, you know."

We didn't invite him back.