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In my job as an innovation advisor in Sweden, we often conduct a form of presentation evaluation called “Value Creation Forum”, which requires a panel of four judges who wear four different, funny hats to indicate the perspective from which they will be judging an entrant’s idea and presentation.It’s a bit like “Dragons Den”, just funnier.There is a green hat, who talks first after the presentation has finished, and points out everything positive about the concept shown. Then there is a red hat, which tries to be constructive and points out ways to further improve the concept, a gold hat which talks about feasibility and the business perspective, and some silly eyeglasses which represent a consumer or member of the general population.These four roles are assigned anew for every presentation, and this usually happens with words like these:“Tobbe, you’re the green hat this time; Pelle, red, Chris gold, Hildur, the silly glasses.”Last time we ran that event, we had a new, British colleague as moderator, and his way of saying it went more like this:“Tobbe, would you mind taking up the role of the Green Hat, this time, please; Pelle, the Red Hat, that would be very helpful; Chris, it would be great if you were to take on the role of the Gold Hat; and Hildur, the role of the consumer, as indicated by wearing the Silly Glasses, that would be very helpful. Thanks everyone. So, we continue now with the…”It struck me right there and then how very differently the British communicate, compared to the Swedes. There is this endless stream of polite, mellifluous diction, taking care of all diplomatic eventualities, almost like Japanese.I just grinned to myself and enjoyed it while it lasted.

If your interview process is well-designed, no single thing should make you want to hire a candidate. Over-indexing on any particular point or aspect will do nothing except inject bias, randomness and noise into a process already rife with all three. Instead, you should adopt a process to minimize noise and bias and then trust the process.If minimizing bias and randomness is your goal—and it should be, for both moral and business reasons—snap judgements are your enemy; you want to avoid making conclusions with your gut and restrict yourself to systematic evaluation which has, ideally, been validated with actual data and research.A pattern I’ve seen over and over is interviewers who effectively expect candidates to read their minds. This can take different forms:questions with trick answers—if you don’t know the trick, you don’t pass the interviewunasked-for details in the answer—the candidate can answer the question as asked, but unless they also volunteer something additional (how to scale the answer 1000x, for example), they don’t passhow the answer is presented—evaluating based on how a candidate writes on the whiteboard, how they “think aloud”… etcthe answering process—evaluating how the candidate answers a question (candidates are penalized if they don’t ask enough clarifying questions, don’t gather requirements… etc)A few of these patterns—like trick questions—are always counterproductive. The rest can be fine as long as you tell the candidate what you’re looking for. But too many interviewers don’t say anything: they present a normal interview question and then silently ding the candidate for not doing something extra that wasn’t explicitly in the scope of the question.The theory, I suppose, is that a person who doesn’t exhibit desirable habits in interviews won’t have them in day-to-day work either. I don’t buy it. Interviews are such a different environment from actual work that whether or not candidates do something extra without being asked means little. If a candidate writes messy, rushed code in an interview, it’s probably because they’re nervously answering a synthetic problem on a whiteboard with a time limit, not because that’s what they do in their day-to-day code.Looking for behavior you didn’t ask for in an interview will tell you nothing about how a candidate actually works; it only selects for candidates with an unspoken understanding of the same interviewing norms you know. An illustrative example I’ve seen is a candidate getting dinged in a review for not using the right phrases when discussing a mathematical concept. That tells us something about the social groups a candidate is part of (they don’t “sound” like a mathematician) but nothing about how well they actually understand math! It’s nothing but a shibboleth.I feel that this is a particular problem for “red flags”: if you reject candidates who didn’t read your mind well enough, you’re going to reject perfectly qualified people and actively bias the process in favor of people who think like you do (or, at least, live in social circles with the same interviewing norms). However, it’s still a problem for the same reasons even when it only gives candidates a boost. Being able to read the interviewer’s mind should not be a factor in either direction. Even if it only comes up in the candidate’s favor, it still biases the process in the same way, just to a smaller extent.The core goals of an interview process should be fairness, accuracy and consistency. You need to approach interviewing with a scientific mindset—you’re developing a repeatable experiment to predict whether somebody will be a strong hire. Individual factors that “make you immediately want to hire somebody” do not contribute to this goal. Your process should try to minimize these, not encourage them.

Interns get an intern evaluation form from the placement cells which are filled by the project guides at the end of the internships. This form is sealed and should be submitted by the intern to college once he returns. Apart from this they need to submit an executive summary (2-3 pages) of their project. If you don't get positive reviews in the form, then the student needs to do an extra 3 credit course.