---
title: If you were hiring for this role, what would you look for?
description: Interview · Vision · Question 47
section: mind
tags: [interview, vision]
genre: reference
stability: stable
lastUpdated: 2026-04-17
url: https://fardiniqbal.com/docs/mind/interview/vision/if-you-were-hiring-for-this-role-what-would-you-look-for
---


I'd look for evidence over credentials.

I wouldn't ask "how many years of experience." I'd ask "show me something you built and tell me why you built it that way." Because the person who built a single well-reasoned, well-tested application with real users is more valuable than the person who spent three years writing CRUD at a company that did their thinking for them.

I'd look for self-awareness. I'd ask what they're bad at, and if the answer sounds like a LinkedIn post, I'd probe deeper. The person who can clearly articulate their failure patterns and what they're doing about them is the person who will grow fastest on the team.

I'd look for curiosity outside of code. Not as a "culture fit" checkbox. Because the engineer who reads philosophy, trains martial arts, plays music, studies history, that person brings a different kind of thinking to problems. The connections between domains is where the non-obvious solutions live.

And I'd look for the person who asks questions during the interview that I haven't been asked before. Because that means they're thinking, not performing.