Welcome back, and this week we’re going to go into more detail on how to design an interview loop.
A well-designed interview loop serves two purposes: (1) to clearly demonstrate the candidate’s skills and values, and (2) to give the candidate confidence in your team and your approach to team-building.
Below are some best practices to help you design a thoughtful interview loop that is specific to your team. These best practices: Viet Nguyenis our first Head of Customer Talent Advisory. His team advises hundreds of Gem clients on effective recruiting practices. Prior to joining Gem, Viet spent the past five years recruiting leaders at several outstanding startups, including One Medical, where he led technical recruiting.
High level best practices:
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Research and determine what you need – It’s hard to make hiring decisions when you don’t know what you want. It’s even harder to help others evaluate candidates if you can’t clearly articulate what you’re looking for. If you don’t take the time to document what you’re looking for, you’ll be aiming at a constantly moving target.
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Design an interview loop that reflects your team’s values – If your team is hands-on, creative and collaborative, make sure you use the interview loop to highlight this to your candidates.
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Value the whole person – When defining who you’re looking for, be sure to include all the skills and personality traits they need to succeed, and your interview loop has built in ways to assess these qualifications.
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Know how to evaluate your results – As with any experiment design, you need key performance indicators (KPIs) to objectively measure success and failure.
Define what you need
Before you begin your hiring process, it’s important to take the time to define what you’re looking for – there are many reasons why.
If you’ve never hired for a specific role before, or hired in general, the best way to build the background you need is to leverage your network. We recommend identifying 5-10 experts who have hired for that role or who currently/have held that role in the past. Learn as much as you can from them. Another option is to leverage investors to introduce you to experts from their networks.
Your interview loop says something about you
We’ve all had interviews that were completely unrelated to the job. This is often the byproduct of (1) there not being a better way to do it or (2) not having the time to do it better.
Design an interview loop to highlight your team’s culture and values to candidates. At Gem, we value practicality and collaboration, so instead of doing a standard whiteboard engineering interview, we decided to do an interview that was customized for Gem.
Our onsite interviews are 1-2 day events where engineering candidates spend time working on projects with other engineers on the team. When we were building our founding team, candidates did this interview alongside our founders.
This interview structure allows us to evaluate and showcase our emphasis on practicality and collaboration. How Gem interviewed our founding engineering team.
Know what you’re looking for
Before you design your interview process, you should take the time to write down what you are looking for. This list of hard skills and personality traits will guide you on how to design your interview process. With a well-defined list, it will be easy to crowdsource ideas from your network and evaluate each skill.
If you can answer at least the following questions, you’re good to go: Let’s call this a spec document:
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What are the two or three personality traits we value (e.g. collaboration)?
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What are the 2-3 hard skills required for this role (e.g., machine learning expert)?
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Do you have the experience required for this job (e.g. experience working in a small, agile team)?
I recommend 2-3, as you don’t want a comprehensive wish list, rather a list of requirements. Coming up with multiple items will force you to ruthlessly prioritize what’s important.
Extra credit: Define your standards, or the difference between “good” and “great.” If you can define these things, your debriefing will be much more structured.
Building an interview loop
Typically, candidates are reviewed in four or five stages. For example:
1. The initial sales conversation
The purpose of this section is to sell the opportunity to candidates – check out our dedicated guide for more details. First sales conversation.
2. Remote Screen #1
Your initial remote screening will tend to focus on the candidate’s background, experience, and specific personality traits you want to assess. This is where you’ll need to dig deeper into the candidate’s motivations and personality traits from your spec documents.
Founders and recruiters sometimes have trouble switching from the sales conversation to the first screen. Proper framing can really help here: “Up until now, I’ve been focused on sharing information with you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to switch gears and get to know you a little bit better. If that’s okay, I’d like to answer some standard questions to get to know you a little better.”
3. Remote Screen #2
This second screening tends to focus on technical or practical skills. This interview should map to the hard skills in your spec document.
For engineers, this might be a standard coding screen, for sales candidates, you might ask them to role-play a current product demo, for design candidates, you might ask them to review their portfolio.
This interview is important because it’s your first chance to assess the basic skills needed for the job. If it’s not designed properly, you’ll end up with an unqualified candidate on the job and wasting everyone’s time.
4. On-site interview
Previous interviews have given you a rough idea of the candidate’s hard skills and personality traits. During the onsite interview, you’ll dig deeper into each of these areas. We recommend selecting 3-4 focus areas from the spec document that you feel are most interesting or have given you the least signals.
5. Offer
To decide whether to extend the offer, Report. It also combines both formal and backchannel reference.
Don’t forget to design a thoughtful interview loop that represents your team.
Pro tip: Ask candidates for feedback on the interview process and continually iterate.
Pre-interview explanation
Once the interview committee has been decided, it’s important to hold a pre-interview meeting with all interviewers to align on the role so everyone is prepared and knows what they’re looking for.
The purpose of the briefing is to ensure that everyone understands:
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Role Overview.
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The focus areas each interviewer will cover.
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How you will evaluate each focus area, including specific questions and what “good” looks like.
Without advance briefing, there is a risk that the interviewer will miss important focus areas, ask the wrong questions, or ask redundant questions, which can result in false or missing signals and a lot of wasted time.
As part of the pre-walkthrough, we also recommend creating Slack channels for all interviewers in the loop to facilitate coordination between candidates, walkthroughs, and the loop itself (especially if remote). In Gem, these might be eng-hiring, design-hiring, product-hiring, etc.
next
in Part 15 In part two of our startup recruiting guide, we’ll go into more detail about the interview process, discussing best practices for interviewers.
During…
