Interviewing

Building talent density is harder than you’d think

Imagine there’s a pool of 100 candidates in your pipeline and you want to hire the top 10%. Your ability to assess candidates is 90% accurate. What will the mix of candidates you actually hire look like?

Of the 18 candidates you assess as “top 10”, 9 are from the top 10% and 9 are from the bottom 90%: a 50% error rate.

Hiring process principles for startups

Move fast. Speed is a huge advantage in hiring. Be as fast as you can at every stage of the process. Large companies can take weeks before they’re able to make an offer. By moving fast you signal to candidates how much less red tape there will be at your company.
Do things that don’t scale. Efficient hiring processes are super important when scaling, but don’t worry about that on day one. Applying maximum personal effort to find and close talent is a unique advantage that only small companies have.
Don’t aim for zero defect hiring. Hiring top performers requires taking bets. The kind of people who can transform your business tend to have unevenly distributed skillsets. They spike in one or two dimensions but might suck in other areas. Spotting those defects is easy. Spotting the potential to become a 10x employee is much harder.
Be structured. A structured process takes the randomness out of your hiring decisions. It’s how you maintain consistency across candidates and force good habits that lead to accurate, unbiased hiring decisions. It also dramatically improves the candidate experience.

Candidate experience

Every interaction with a candidate is a two-sided evaluation. Candidates get very high signal about your company from the hiring process.

Being disorganized is a major red flag. So is making candidates shovel shit and jump through hoops because you’re terrified of false negatives.

People should generally like going through your interview process. A good interview process should have:

Transparent and sensible steps
Consistent, fast communication
Clear expectations of the role across the team
Social time with the team
Respect for their time

Designing the hiring process

Competency

Screening

Technical

Work trial

Final

Hunger

Communication

Curiosity

Get shit done

Coachability

High standards

Resourcefulness

API design

A technical interview process might be something like resume screen (5 min), screening call (30 min), technical interview (1 hr), work trial (1–3 hrs), onsite interviews (2 hrs).

Your job scorecard plays a key role in designing the interview process.

Map each competency to the interview stages where it’ll be assessed.
Create content for each interview stage. Write standard questions for interviews and design the work trial task.
Review the entire process and revise any areas where you see gaps.
Assign a single owner to manage the process and all communication with candidates.

Hiring processes seem to be uniquely susceptible to entropy, so if you’re not the owner, be sure to check in often.

Screening calls

The goal of the screening call is to rapidly establish if there’s a potential fit. These conversations typically take 15–30 minutes.

The “screening call” can be an actual call, a video call or even coffee if you’re trying to convince a promising candidate to leave a comfortable existing job.

These calls are a two-way conversation. You’re evaluating them as much as you’re selling your mission, team and culture.

At the end of the call you should be able to answer:

What motivates this person? What do they care about?
What are they exceptional at?
Do they think of themselves as a generalist or a specialist?
Do they seem like an A player?
Are they excited to join a startup?
Will they be a good culture fit?

Topgrading interviews

Topgrading interviews are an in-depth, chronological walkthrough of someone’s career. The interviews take 1–3 hours, but they’re surprisingly easy to do. It’s conversational. It is natural. And it delivers immense amounts of relevant data.

For every full-time job, ask the following:

Why did you take that job and what were you hired to do?
What were your major successes and accomplishments?
What were some low points during that job? Reframe the question over and over until the candidate gets the message.
Who were the people you worked closely with?
- What was your boss’s name, and how do you spell that? What was it like working with them?
- What will they tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement when we do reference checks?
Why did you leave that job? Most people aren’t candid about this, so you’ll need to dig deeper and apply some judgement.

For education:

“What were some high and low points?”
“Through your teen years, who were major influencers (coaches, parents, or others)? And how did they influence who you are today in terms of your career goals, personality, and values?”

For leaders: “Tell me about the team you inherited. How would you rate the team you inherited on an A, B, C scale?”

What changes did you make?
What actions did you take with your team: training, coaching, hiring, firing?
How would you rate the team when you left on an A, B, C scale?

Work trials

Many startups have a work trial, where they ask candidates to complete a project that’s representative of the work they’ll be doing in the role.

For some companies that’s a made-up project you complete at home in 3 hours. For others, it’s a full-on week where you’re embedded with the team, working on real code and shipping features to customers.

Work trials strip away the interview theatrics. It’s not about what you say you can do; it’s about what you actually do when the pressure is on. It’s frequently surprising how someone performs relative to how they did during interviews.

Work trials eat up a ton of time for everyone, but the clarity they bring is well worth it.

References

For the love of God, don’t skip references. And don’t hand them off to someone more junior. Do them yourself. The interview process is a chance to develop a set of hypotheses about the candidates. The reference checks are where you test those hypotheses.

Some tips to make the most of references:

Don’t limit reference checks to people shared by the candidate. Go find people who’ve worked directly with them.
Start with an opener that makes it safe to convey private information: “I’m trying to find the right seat for Jane and I’m investing the time in speaking to people who know her. Everything you say will be off the record, and I don’t plan on conveying any of it back to Jane.”
Try to mess with the expected “script” of the reference. Ask hard quantitative and qualitative questions and ask for specific examples when they talk about the candidate’s attributes.
Go in with a curious, open mind. You’ll learn much more if you listen with fresh ears instead of trying to confirm what you already believe.

Interview red flags

These red flags aren’t all deal breakers, but they should be considered:

Put zero effort into their ATS application
Never stayed at a job for longer than 18 months
Late for the interview
Did no research before the interview
Can’t explain their job moves
No good reason to leave their current role, or salary is the only reason
More interested in compensation than in the job itself
The people most important to them are unsupportive of a job change
Wants to lead big teams
More interested in what they can get rather than what they can give
Any inappropriate or sexist comment, really any whiff of less than stellar ethics in their background or references
Doesn’t mention past failures even after repeated prompting
Exaggerates their answers or tries too hard to look like an expert
Takes credit for the work of others
Speaks poorly of past bosses
For managerial hires, they’ve never had to hire or fire anybody
Wants a fancy title they can put on LinkedIn
Expects work-life balance at a startup