<p>turbo93,</p>
<p>Yes… again I’ll admit there are some people that become skilled by rote, or as you said… memorized the book. But they seem to be the minority (granted, they may actually be filtered out by HR before they get to me) and they are incredibly easy to spot.</p>
<p>So it’s not a case of me preferring to select skilled people over talented people and someone like hebegebe preferring to select talented people over skilled people. The experienced population I choose from are BOTH talented and skilled. </p>
<p>Also remember this is <em>design & development</em> engineering, not components, QA, etc… You can’t stay in design without skills and talent… period. It would be immediately apparent.</p>
<p>How one figures out if a new graduate is talented and/or skilled or neither is another matter entirely. Unlike architecture or design, there is no body of work to be examined for electrical engineers. We can discuss projects, but they’ve rehearsed these answers many times before ever seeing me.</p>
<p>We need to rely on the things I’ve mentioned… key traits, life experiences, hints at what the person is like, their method for decision making… etc…</p>
<p>It’s very difficult to decide between recent grads. Much more difficult than it is to hire seasoned veterans. I think that’s why we hire interns. You get the “devil you know.” But it’s not at all uncommon to have whole crops of interns rot on the vine before we get to pick them. 
So the interview process for new grads is here to stay, it looks like.</p>