Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
By Melissa Nightingale
In my day job I’ve been doing joint interviews lately. One candidate, two interviewers. I like this format as it means the candidate can meet more of the senior team. It also tends to be more efficient for the hiring organization.
One of the perks of this type of interview is that I get to observe how my peers interview candidates. I get to see what they look for, and how they organize the discussion with prospective hires.
At the end of the interviews, after we recap the discussion and organize our notes, we turn our attention to style and flow. We trade tips and tricks about interview styles. It strikes me that my process looks really different than the others.
I blame my time in PR
Public Relations people are all great interviews, I tell my colleagues. Not a little bit great — flacks are really, really great at interviewing. Many of them have worked as professional spokespeople. Even if they aren’t in that role today, they have likely taught other people how to sit in the hot seat. They are paid to be polished under pressure.
After years of interviewing professional communicators, I’m good at detecting bullshit. The space between a good PR interview and a bad one is much narrower than in other industries. It can be challenging to tell the difference between a comfortable, confident interviewer and a strong candidate.
Seasoned interviewees are often great at conversation but terrible in the role. Likewise, some are terrible at interviews but would be great candidates for the role.
Start with a layup
As I’m running through my interview process for my colleagues, I realize it’s pretty formulaic. I didn’t set out to build a system but after hundreds of applicants across a wide range of roles, a pattern emerged.
My first question is always a layup. Tell me about your background. Talk to me about how you found out about the role. Share a bit about why you applied and what got you excited about the position. The soft stuff.
Why?
I want to establish a baseline. I want to know what my candidate sounds like when they aren’t under pressure. Interviews are such a bizarre and false environment — most people come into them a bit nervous.
What does your candidate sound like when they are confident and know a subject matter inside and out? Once you know that, you can assess everything that comes next.
Move onto the tough stuff
From that place of baseline confidence, you can start to ask more specific questions. You can ask about the industry, relevant experience. You can push on how they would solve a problem or approach a specific project. But when you get to something your candidate doesn’t know, you’ll know that too. If you know what they sound like confident, then the inverse is also true. You will know when they are out of their depth.
Interviews are about determining whether a person can come in and do a job. But they are also about knowing whether someone will tell you if they don’t know how to do something. Will they be honest about where they need to skill up? This tends to be a good (though by no means the only) predictor of success in a startup.
We’re notoriously light on manuals for this stuff. Many of us working right up against the edge of science fiction. The likelihood that you’ve got a candidate who has solved your precise set of challenges before is low. You need to know which stuff they can do coming in day one and where you’ll need to invest in them.
Most candidates won’t deliberately misrepresent themselves, but some do. You can learn a lot by listening.
Work from the outside in
I’m not sure there’s a right or wrong approach here but this is what works for me.
In my head, I imagine three concentric circles.
The outer ring is all the fluffy stuff. It’s the general, how-you-doing, nice-to-meet-you stuff.
Tell me about you. Tell me about your background. Walk me through your past few roles. What did and didn’t you like about them? What were some highlights? Low-lights?
Don’t get stuck here. Resist the urge to spend all your time on the fluffy stuff. You’ve got an interview to run and you have questions that need answers.
The middle ring is all about strategy and context. This is where you go beyond the things your candidate should know without trying too hard. Press on perspective, pov, insights.
Tell me about the industry. Tell me the trends you’re seeing. What do you think they mean in the broader context of the industry? What accounts for those shifts? How has your approach to your work changed as a result?
Your strategy questions will differ wildly for junior and senior hires. Senior folks should be able to engage with this stuff head on. Junior folks may need a bit more prodding or support. Check your questions against the expectations of the role. If you’re looking for someone straight out of college, what things should they already know? And which things do you expect they will learn on the job?
The innermost ring is the most specific to your business and your candidate’s expertise. This was the starting point for a bunch of my colleagues. It doesn’t work for me. This ring is an opportunity to share conclusions. But if you don’t know the assumptions your candidate has made along the way, how will you know if they’re thinking or merely guessing?
Now let’s talk about the company and the role. What would you do here? How would you solve these specific problems? What approach would you take on this project? These are your objectives and key metrics, how would you design a plan to achieve them?
This section requires the most context for your candidate. It’s possible they got it all from tinkering with your product or reading your recent media coverage. But many candidates need to be closer to the day to day to grok the business. Be open to folks who take a different path than you. They are often the hires that push your thinking the most.
Ask me anything
By the time you wrap up the innermost ring, you’ve covered a lot. You should be able to articulate how your candidate thinks about problems and how they troubleshoot. By now, you’ve built some rapport in the time you’ve spent together and you should have a sense of how they’d do in the role.
With about 10 minutes remaining, I shift gears. We’ve only got a little bit more time together and I want to make sure to cover any questions they have. This is not a formality, it’s an important part of the interview process. If my top candidate leaves with a bunch of unanswered questions, it tanks my ability to close during the offer stage.
Do you have any questions for me? Either about the role, or the company, or the culture? Perhaps you’re curious about my management style or how we measure success?
They may ask about your leadership culture. They may ask why you don’t do unlimited vacation. They may want to hear how you deliver feedback or any number of other pressing concerns. Or they may ask nothing at all.
This is not some binary test where the presence of questions is a pass and the absence of them an arbitrary red flag. This is an opportunity for your prospective employee to tell you what’s important to them. This is their time. And if you are paying any attention at all, this is where your ears perk up.
Practice, practice, practice
When I first started interviewing, I’d jump right into the innermost ring. I’d run through a bunch of my questions, lose track of time, and then fail to ask the interviewee if they had any for me.
I had no style, no pacing, and no flow.
As I got more experience, I learned to keep an eye on the clock without being rude. I organized my questions in advance of the meeting. I made the best use of my time with a candidate. And I grew more confident about my hiring recommendations about prospective candidates.
Once I mastered my process, it was easy to spot the difference between a good interview and a good candidate.
