As a department that designs, develops, and constructs web sites and web applications, one of the skills necessary is HTML development.  There are lots of other technical skills that are important – database development (i.e. Oracle or SQL Server), SQL and PL/SQL, C# .Net, ASP.Net, JavaScript, CSS, Java, Struts, and so on.  But since this is web development, it is critical to be able to understand and develop HTML that is interpretable by modern browsers.  To that end, it is important to ask technical questions about that technology.  And it is always good to start at the top.  So, one of the questions we typically ask in our interviews is, “in an HTML page, what goes in the Head Tag?”  Now, you would think that technical professionals with over 10 years in the industry would be able to answer this basic question with ease.  We have struggled to get an acceptable answer with this question.  Here are some of the ones we have heard:

• “You put tables in the head tag.”
• “Bold tags.  Bold tags go in the head tag.”
• “Dynamic content goes in the head tag.”
• And the only answer that we have gotten that was accurate… “the Title goes in the Head Tag.”
• None of the items (which I will not list here) that go in the Head tag were ever mentioned.

Typically, the delivery of this question is the Interview Killer.  People realize that this is an easy question, and that they should have answered this without problems, and get nervous, and the interview takes a dive from there. 

Do you have a question that is an Interview Killer?  Leave a comment and let me know.