C and C++ juniors either grow careful fast or they become your defect pipeline. Phone screens should reward humility and mechanics, not trivia about obscure corners of the standard.
Look for safety instincts and toolchain muscle, not a speed run through pointer puzzles.
1. Honest mental model of memory and lifetimes
They can explain stack vs heap at a practical level, why double-free and use-after-free hurt, and when smart pointers help in C++. They admit uncertainty instead of guessing when ownership is unclear.
2. Builds they can repeat
Comfort with CMake, Make, or your house toolchain—plus reading compiler errors without rewriting random lines. If clean rebuilds confuse them, integrations will confuse them more.
3. Debuggers and sanitizer habits
They use gdb, lldb, or your IDE debugger to inspect state, break on faults, and step through real crashes. Bonus points if they know what AddressSanitizer or Valgrind is for, even at a junior level.
4. RAII and resource discipline in C++
Constructors acquire, destructors release, respect static initialization order risks, and treat raw owning pointers with suspicion. They should sound bored by leaked handles, not surprised.
5. Respect for undefined behavior and standards reality
They know optimization can bite, signed overflow is not a game, and data races are not “sometimes fine.” That mindset prevents your seniors from becoming full-time firefighters.
Screen fairly and compare apples to apples
Pair or assign the same exercise to each candidate. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reminds small employers to apply consistent standards to applicants for the same role (EEOC hiring guidance).
Canvider CriteriaMatch encodes your safety and toolchain checklist. Collaborative Candidate Assessment keeps notes and decisions where the whole engineering panel can see them.
Next step: Explore CriteriaMatch, Explore Collaborative Candidate Assessment, then get started free.