> Put the candidate at ease - nervous people don't interview well
This is great advice. I have great success with it. I give the same 60 second speech at the start of each interview. I tell candidates that I realise that tech interviews are stressful -- "In 202X, the 'tech universe' is infinitely wide and deep. We can always find something that you don't know. If you don't have experience in a topic that we raise, let us know. We will move to a new topic. All, yes, all people that we interviewed had at least one topic where they had no experience, or none recent." Also, it helps to do "interview ramp-up", where you start with some very quick wins to build up confidence with the candidate. It is OK to tell them "I will push a bit harder here" so they know you are not being a jerk... only trying to dig deeper on their knowledge.
Putting candidate at ease is definitely important.
Another reason:
If you're only say one of four interviewers, and you're maybe not the last interviewer, you really want the candidate to come out of your interview feeling like they did well or at least ok enough, so that they don't get tilted for the next interview. Because even if they did really poorly in your interview, maybe it's a fluke and they won't fail the rest of the loop.
Which is then a really difficult skill as an interviewer - how do you make sure someone thinks they do well even if they do very poorly? Ain't easy if there's any technical guts in the interview.
I sure as shit didn't get any good at that until I'd conducted like 100+ interviews, but maybe I'm just a slow learner haha
