Interviewing for BizTalk employment

More then a few times I have seen interview questions that people post on their blogs for use when interviewing people for a BizTalk Server job opportunity. I never use interview questions. I’m not sure if the market and access to BizTalk developers is so good in these places where they use the questions that you can pick and choose to get the “best” one. Here, the demand is far greater then the supply it seems. Especially for companies that might not have an outright image as an attractive IT employer. I try instead to form the questions so that they fit into a natural conversation. I suggest that an experienced  BizTalk developer and/or architect can derive how knowledge-able the interviewed individual is from how he (or she, but to be fair they are mostly he) talks about his experience with BizTalk Server, which parts he has been responsible or involved with and things like that, without turning it into an interogation. Most of the time (given the lack of supply) the BizTalk Server experience is only part of the picture anyway. I’m not claiming to be a person termometer in any way, but just listening to someone and what and how they offer information about their previous engagements can tell you alot, often enough. Now on the other hand, if you do find the person to appear knowledge-able, and would really like to make sure before deciding to pay that person that far higher the average salary, by all means, do a deeper knowledge based interview. But to pull that of you really need to already have someone that knows his stuff to evaluate the answers.