[reallydontask]

I can't say they are typical, but we've had two candidates become somewhat agitated when challenged about their experience, e.g. you said you were a developer for 2 years at company X but it seems that you mostly did support. This resulted in a tirade about job titles.

Another red flag for me is when candidates are asked about their level of expertise on a scale of 1 to 10 on a technology and they reply with anything above 7.

Statistically there are people that are going to be able to claim 8 or above out 10 on any technology, they just probably can command a higher salary that the company I work wishes to offer (we put salary ranges on our job ads), which means that they are exaggerating, can't judge their skills (either because of self delusion or because they just think the technology doesn't have that much more to offer) or worse lying.

The thing is we were asking this to be able to tailor the questions that we would ask. No point in asking somebody who says their skill level in sql is 2 about pivot tables.

[alexeiz]

The expertise scale level question is bogus. You'll get people with low expertise who believe their level is high because they think that's all there is to know about a technology (advanced beginners), while experienced people would rate themselves lower because they realize how much they don't know yet. And also there will be those who correctly estimate their level as average. Everybody's scale is different. You can't reliably distinguish those groups.