Actually that's a great question and probably worth an article or two. If Jeff/anyone else if up for it, send me a draft. I'm sure people are intereseted. Likewise Mr/Ms blandry, I think you have some good thoughts on your interview process. Want to formalize some of those into an article?

I've used a couple techniques, partially taken from what's been done to me, in technical interviews.

I usually give an on site pre-test. It's the same test to all applicants and it's more for a discussion point to give me something to talk about. I have them take it while I'm actually doing work, and then it gets to me and I might glance at it while they get a break, but I typically don't grade it. It's more to see what people know. It's 15-20 questions, asking in all areas of SQL, not too much code, but it's what I consider typical knowledge you should have. How to return identity values for an insert, find duplicates in a simple table, what's a good backup scheme, things like that.

For the technical interview, I like to have multiple people from the team asking questions. It's kind of round robin, people firing questions, building off other's questions or answers. We work through various issues we've had or we consider to require thought. It's scenario based, we allow them to ask clarification questions, but we want them to think out loud. The idea is to understand how a person thinks about problems. The answer is less important than to see if they collaborate with the team, ask us questions, logically pursue a solution. If they need to look something up, we'll provide some info, we don't require they know syntax for DBCC xxx, but that they know there are commands. We ask where they look things up. We may ask about things we haven't solved, just to see if they approach it like us or have an interesting take.

The written test provides a basis for where we test people. If it's on your resume, it's fair game to ask. We have set scenarios based on our environment we ask about (to be fair to everyone), but the answers and follow up discussion may lead anywhere.