How To Conduct Effective Technical Interviews for Remote Teams: Best Practices

When you’re recruiting, it’s hard enough finding a CV you like. 

That can take weeks by itself. And it’s only step one.

Because a good CV doesn’t mean a good candidate.

I could write a CV right now that says I’m an expert at landing jumbo jets, but if someone hired me, it’d be like that scene in Die Hard 2.

And with almost half of all candidates using GenAI to create their résumés, the likelihood of an application being less representative of actual skills is high. 

That’s why interviewing is so crucial. Even more so for remote teams, where there isn’t as much direct oversight into day-to-day activities.

And just as there are differences between remote and on-site work, the same is true with remote versus in-person interviews. 

Things like technical issues, with roughly 1 in 15 remote interviewees struggling to start the video call, and lower candidate ratings due to lack of rapport-building impression management tactics (like smiling, eye contact, etc.)3 all mean that remote interviews bring their own challenges.

All is not lost, though.

This article will walk you through what makes a good technical interview for remote teams, how and where to conduct them, how to assess technical and soft skills remotely, and what comes after.

Table of Contents

• Understanding the Purpose of Technical Interviews
• Preparing for the Interview
• Best Practices for Conducting Remote Technical Interviews
• Methods for Evaluating Technical Skills
• Assessing Non-Technical (soft) Skills
• Tools and Platforms for Remote Technical Interviews
• Post-Interview Evaluation and Feedback
• Conclusion 

Understanding the Purpose of Technical Interviews

Why do we need interviews at all?

The obvious answer is to prove the candidate can do the job you want them to do.

The thing is, that can look very different for a waiter compared to a software developer.

In both, interviewers need to assess soft skills, like comms and organisation, and culture fit, or how well they’ll fit into the team.

For software developers, though, you need to be sure they have technical knowledge, like database architectures or networking protocols, as well as the technical skills, like debugging or secure coding, to do the job. Or, at least, to demonstrate that they’ll be able to pick it up.

The way you gather this evidence is with a technical interview.

And it can make all the difference. Having a properly structured technical interview can result in significantly improved quality of hire.4

Preparing for the Interview

By definition, you can’t “wing” a structured technical interview. It takes preparation.

Here’s a few remote technical interview preparation tips to set you up for success.

• Create a job description that’s clear about what the technical and soft skill requirements are for the role. For this, you’ll carry out a needs analysis where you really think about what your successful applicant will need to know and be able to do. Not only does this ensure your candidates have the best opportunity to demonstrate what you want to see, but it also means you, as the interviewer, are aware of what’s required to be successful. 
• Decide what kind of assessment you’ll have – live coding, take-home assessments, online tests, etc. – and select the right tools for them. That means coding platforms or video conferencing software for remote technical interviews. We’ll touch more on this later. 
• Plan your technical interview process in advance. You’ve set out what you want to know about the candidate; now decide how you’re going to find it out. What questions will you ask? Will the answers prove (or disprove) the right knowledge? What tests will you use, and will they accurately showcase skills? By having a set structure, you apply consistency and fairness, in that every candidate has the same opportunity, and you’re less likely to miss or assume important experience.
• Create standardised scoring rubrics that define what “good” looks like for each competency. For example, if you have a coding task, your rubric might award points for problem understanding, code correctness, efficiency, debugging approach, and communication. If you’re quantifying it, you’ll have clear descriptors for what ‘excellent’, ‘adequate’, or ‘insufficient’ performance looks like in each category. This way, you minimise subjectiveness and bias.
• If you’re not conducting the interview yourself (or you won’t be in all of the stages), train interviewers on the structure, tools, scoring criteria, and how to reliably assess both technical and soft skills.
• Practice makes perfect. If you’re trialling a new interview format, or just refining your existing one, pilot it with current staff and ask for feedback. Ensure the tasks, timings, and scoring model work smoothly before using it with candidates.

Best Practices for Conducting Remote Technical Interviews

You might be asking yourself, “What is the structure of a technical interview?” or “How are technical interviews conducted?” 

Even if they’re remote, no two IT interviews are ever going to look the same. There’s far too many variables.

But when you boil it down, all interviews, remote or otherwise, are about 4 things:

1. Establishing whether the candidate can do the job well
2. Selling the opportunity to the candidate
3. The candidate selling themselves (by explaining they could do the job well)
4. The candidate finding out if the job’s right for them
   

That’s it. The rest is just the specifics.

The keen-eyed amongst you might note the synergy between these points. 1&3 and 2&4, especially, are flipped sides of the same coin.

So, whatever your goals, there are some universal methods for improving how you run your remote interviews. 

Here are some technical interview best practices. 

Start with a Warm-Up: 

Interviews can be nerve-wracking. Even if the candidate doesn’t feel they need the job, it’s still a relatively high-stakes environment. But for interviewers, it’s different, even if they’re desperate to fill the role. Because interviewers often have several interviews in a short space of time, individually, they lose a bit of that tension. So it’s a good idea to build rapport to ease candidate nerves. Rather than diving straight in with technical questions, break the ice with some chit-chat. Acknowledge any nerves, and try your best to put candidates at ease.

Use Realistic Scenarios

This aligns with points 1 and 4 from earlier. If you’re using hypotheticals that aren’t grounded in reality, you give yourself less of a chance of understanding how well a candidate would do working on a real task, and the candidate will have less of an idea what the job entails. So, something like, “Imagine your CTO tells you that starting tomorrow, all production deployments must be written entirely without using any third-party libraries. How would you redesign our systems to comply?” – that’s just never gonna happen. Instead, consider asking how the candidate might handle a challenge you’ve actually faced in the last year or so. That way, you’ll know how they work, and they’ll know what the work actually looks like.

Balance Technical and Communication Assessment

There’s more to being a good developer than just coding, debugging, algorithms… 

You also need to establish whether they have the soft skills to do the job – they can be just as important.

It needn’t be a surreptitious test. You can make the candidate aware you’re measuring things like problem-solving and clarity of thought.

To establish a balance, work out which soft skills are most important for the role, and how critical they are, and compare that to the technical requirements in terms of necessity. Consider what could be taught or trained. Then, weigh each requirement accordingly.

Time Management

Assuming you’ve got an “actual” job to be doing that isn’t recruiting, interviews are already eating into a lot of your productivity. The same could easily be true of your candidates, particularly if they’re having to do it during work hours. So it’s important to make sure everything stays on schedule. That includes both in the wider sense – making sure it starts and finishes on time – as well as the interview itself – ensuring you have time to cover each section or area. You can achieve this by creating a structure for your interview and sticking to it. However, it doesn’t mean there can’t be any flexibility – just make sure it’s budgeted for in your schedule. 

Encourage Questions

This helps candidates with point 4 from earlier – helping them determine whether the role is right for them – and you with point 2 – selling the opportunity. You might want to designate a time for questions to facilitate your interview schedule, or you might encourage them throughout, but definitely make the candidate aware you’re open to answering their queries honestly. It gives you a chance to gauge their interest and handle any objections or concerns they might have about joining.

Methods for Evaluating Technical Skills

As we’ve learned, one of the key takeaways from your technical screening interview will be learning if the candidate can do what you need them to, and to what extent.

For most software engineering, developer-type roles, that means understanding their technical skills.

But how do you evaluate technical skills?

Here’s a few tried-and-tested methods you could employ:

Live coding sessions These give candidates a chance to demonstrate what they know about coding, but also give you insight into their thought processes. Typically, live coding involves you presenting a clear, time-boxed problem and asking the candidate to talk through their approach while writing code in a shared environment. This way, you can assess how they deconstruct problems, structure code, and their debugging habits. It also gives an idea about their performance under pressure, but we’ll touch on that as a soft skill in the next section. Standardise the process to reduce bias by setting expectations up front: explain the format, the level of difficulty, whether you expect them to talk aloud, and what “done” looks like. 

Take-home assignments: These tasks mimic a real-world feature or bug fix, often scaled down. As we mentioned earlier, they’re best if they reflect genuine challenges from the role rather than abstract puzzles. Candidates can showcase structure, documentation, and testing without the pressure of being watched. They’re a little less invasive and restrictive in that candidates work at their own pace and in their own time, but the trade-off is that you need to ensure fairness and authenticity. Because you can see how candidates build something end-to-end, you get a clearer view of their design choices, code quality, and approach to problem-solving than you would from an on-the-spot test. Set a reasonable, explicit time limit – a few hours or so – and scope the task to match it. Don’t make them too long; you don’t want candidates to feel they’re doing unpaid work.

System design questions: These are for examining how a candidate thinks about architecture at a high level. It covers things like how they break down large problems and design scalable, reliable components. You might have them sketch out services, databases, or caching layers, with constraints. This way, you get a window into their ability to reason about complex systems without having to deal with low-level code. As with your other scenario-based assessments, frame yours around a realistic challenge the role would face. Ask the candidate to justify their decisions rather than guess the “right” answer. As well as seeing what they get right, look for how they handle setbacks – how do they identify bottlenecks, anticipate failure modes, and balance competing priorities?

Remote Crew have put together a free one-pager you can use to plan your own tech skills evaluation, with a neat little video explaining how best to use it.

Assessing Non-Technical (soft) Skills

We touched on balancing assessing non-technical skills with “hard” skills earlier, and how they can be every bit as crucial to your quality of hire.

But how can you measure soft skills in an interview?

The first thing you need to do is establish what soft skills are most important for the position and for your team. For example, for client-facing roles, communication skills may be more important. 

Still, good communication is never unimportant. To that end, here’s how you can gauge some of the more common, business-critical soft skills.

Communication: Assessing comms might seem obvious, but it goes beyond “do they speak well”? Instead, pay close attention to how clearly and logically candidates explain their thinking as they work through problems. It needn’t be a separate assessment to the technical skills – you can ask them to narrate their approach during live coding or system design discussions, and look for structured explanations. Bear in mind, it’ll probably always feel like an interview rather than real life, but ask yourself: do they adapt their level of detail to the audience? Do they stay calm, refine their explanation, and correct course when prompted? Of course, you can also ask directly about times they’ve had to communicate well as part of their job, with a classic “Tell me about a time…” scenario. The “meta” part is that if they describe it clearly and well, they’re probably good communicators.

Collaboration: You want to know your new hire can work with your existing team, as well as the wider business. Assess this by examining how candidates engage with feedback and approach teamwork scenarios. During live coding or design discussions, offer small nudges or alternative ideas and observe their reaction – if they acknowledge and consider the input, it’s a good sign they’re team players. Look out for signs of openness, respect, and problem-solving, rather than defensiveness (though, of course, you can balance this against their conviction and self-assurance if they truly believe in their answer). Again, there’s nothing stopping you from asking behavioural questions about past projects here. These could include how they’ve navigated disagreements, shared ownership, or supported others in distributed teams. 

Adaptability: Projects rarely go exactly as planned, so the ability to pivot as needs change is crucial. You can assess this adaptability in a scenario by throwing in a curveball mid-way through – maybe the solution needs to accommodate 10x more users than the original plan. How would your candidate adjust? As always, rather than (or as well as) measuring an on-the-spot response, you can also ask about past experiences where there were big upsets, interruptions, or U-turns, and listen to how they tweaked their approach. Look for evidence of flexibility, proactive problem-solving, and the ability to stay effective without constant guidance. Strong candidates can articulate not just what they did, but how and why. 

Incidentally, the one-pager from earlier also works just as well for soft skills.

Tools and Platforms for Remote Technical Interviews

Once you have a structure in place and an idea of what you want to ask and assess, you need a practical way of doing it.

With face-to-face interviews, you at least remove the need for any technological facilitation – you just have the old-fashioned “inviting them to the same place you are and talking” trick.

But with remote interviews, you’re looking at video conferencing programs. Luckily, these are pretty ubiquitous, and all the main ones – Teams, Meet, Zoom, etc. – are generally okay. Just make sure your candidates are comfortable with them beforehand, and be as flexible as possible. 

Beyond this, though, you’ll also need a dedicated platform to judge technical software skills. This will help you standardise your assessments, removing bias through timed challenges and automated scoring.

Here are a lot of options, and they typically depend on what exactly you’re looking to test:

For fundamentals, you might try HackerRank. 

It’s strong for algorithmic tests, and has large question banks and auto-grading. It’s ideal for early-stage screening, making sure the basics are in place.

If you need consistency and scale, consider using Codility. 

This platform focuses on practical coding tasks and anti-cheating measures, so it’s well-suited for high-volume hiring with consistent scoring.

If you want to see live problem-solving skills, then CoderPad is a solid option. 

It excels in live, collaborative coding with a real Integrated Development Environment feel, allowing candidates to write, run, and debug code in real time.

Besides coding, you may also want to see the “paperwork”. Useful collaboration tools include:

• Miro (for visual problem-solving, like system design diagrams, whiteboarding, and architecture sketches)
• Google Docs (for text-based work, like test plans, drafting pseudo-code, or outlining approaches).

Ultimately, it’s a case of balancing what best suits your needs with what candidates can easily access.

Post-Interview Evaluation and Feedback

It’s easy to think the battle’s over once you’ve said your goodbyes, done your awkward video waves, and closed the call.

Far from it. Here’s some key steps a lot of interviewers forget:

Scoring

If you want a fair assessment (and you should if you want to ensure the best quality of hire), this is where your scoring really comes into play. 

We mentioned that various platforms will have auto-scoring, which removes some heavy lifting, but you’ll still need to combine technical skills scores with scores in other areas, like soft skills.

If you’ve prepared as we told you to, you should have an idea of what you want to measure and have your scoring rubrics in place. You can determine here how important they are compared to each other – i.e., does great coding make up for mediocre communication, and vice versa – and create a rubric that should enable anyone to work out a “final” score. 

It’s helpful to make objective notes, since honest feedback, which we’ll touch on shortly, is an important part of the candidate experience. Besides, having memory refreshers when judging more recent candidates against earlier ones is a lifesaver.

Debriefs

It’s sensible to reconvene with your interview panel immediately (or as soon as possible) after the interview to collate your thoughts – the sooner the better, so it’s fresh in your memory. 

If your scoring rubric is robust, it should minimise subjectivity, and you’ll hopefully be on more or less the same page, but if not, this is your chance to square it away. When you discuss performance, make sure you ground it in evidence rather than gut feelings. 

To avoid any groupthink – or you all just agreeing with the most senior interviewer – allow everyone to share their scores independently. Again, it’s good to keep a record of these conversations, even if they are more informal, to guide future hiring.

Providing feedback

It’s not everyone's favourite stage, especially if you have to deliver bad news, but it’s vital for keeping candidates sweet. Under no circumstances should you be ghosting any candidate, but especially not if they’ve invested time in interviewing.

You want to give any feedback promptly, ideally within a day or two, to make the process feel transparent and respectful of their time. At the very least, set expectations in terms of timescales.

You should be honest, too. This is easier if you can stick to the hard evidence you’ve gained from your rubrics, as it’s trickier to argue against. And balance strengths with areas for improvement, where feasible.

And of course, you’ll want to be following up with next steps for successful candidates, whether that’s another interview stage or an offer. Either way, be clear and open about the process.

Conclusion

Interviews needn’t be complicated. As we’ve learned, they can all be reduced to those four key goals: selling the role and assessing the candidate, and the candidate doing the reverse.

But nor should you think of them as a formality – the hard part having been done. They’re a crucial step in ensuring you make the right hire.

And for remote teams especially, getting them right makes an outsized difference. When you can’t rely on in-person rapport or day-to-day visibility, a structured, well-designed technical interview becomes your strongest tool for predicting how someone will actually perform in the role. 

So take them seriously. Plan. Prepare. Standardise. Give every candidate a meaningful chance to show what they can do.

It’s not always quick or easy, but it’s worthwhile. If you need some help, get in touch.