> If I’m hiring “senior” developers, being comfortable communicating technical topics and answering questions is a requirement.
While I agree completely, I also know plenty of people who fit this description, but would probably aren't the folks you ask to give a power point on a technical topic.
TBH I've done my time in management and done my fair share of presentations, but I would HATE this to the point that I might well opt out.
There's a reason I'm not in management anymore, and a presentation like described is a far cry from working with stakeholders and engineers to define and document technical requirements. Or even presenting those to a group with shared context.
I might well take the fact that you've made it a part of the interview process to be an indication that this is a regular job requirement as opposed to something I have to do here and there.
>The only problem is taking into account those that are not good at public speaking.
A very common concern, but overblown in my experience. If you notice, I never actually said "judge the candidate's presentation skills" (or anything of the sort) in why I think this process is great. The presenation is really just level-setting; the candidate gets to set the topic and give sufficient context for a conversation to occur. The presentation is at most the first 15 minutes out of a ~3 hour in-person interview process. That's how little it matters.
It's the Q&A and subsequent discussions that matter.
The problem is that interviewers have a strong tendency to judge candidates based on whether they come across as self-confident, even when instructed not to. It's possible to get people to not do this, but it requires fairly rigorous training. tptacek wrote about this a decade ago: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
I'd argue the "presentation and Q&A" format addresses that directly. The candidate gets to pick exactly what the interview is going to be about, at least at the beginning, so they have full control over first impressions. No gotchas at all. Who wouldn't pick something they're confident about?
If someone thinks Cmake is super cool and knows all sorts of great use cases for it, then they should present that. They should also be prepared to answer open-ended follow-up questions like "broadly speaking, how could a project transition from something like Automake to Cmake?" or "what are some footguns in Cmake and how can we avoid them?"
The idea is to pick a topic you're so jazzed about that your enthusiasm overrides The Fear.
One of the things I like to do on the hiring side is hold interviews in the smallest room people won't complain about. The way we think about public speaking has a lot to do with how close we are to each other.
Is your company hiring?