Welcome! In part 15, we’ll dive deeper into best practices for interviewers. Let’s get started.
Always remember closure — The interview loop is a great opportunity for candidates to learn more about your startup.
If you have other co-founders or founding teams involved in your hiring process, we recommend walking them through interview best practices (this should take about 20 minutes). As you build your team, share these best practices with your new hires. A little bit of contextual information can help ensure interviewers get the best signals and candidates get the best experience.
It’s worth emphasizing the importance of candidate experience. Providing a positive candidate experience increases conversion rates and maintains your employer brand. Negative experiences (such as being late to an interview or treating the candidate poorly) can damage your company’s reputation. All it takes is one bad Glassdoor review to do serious damage. Everyone at your company that a candidate interacts with, from first contact to on-site to hiring, needs to understand the concept of candidate experience.
Below are some interview best practices that we share internally. These best practices were written by the Head of HR at Gem. Caroline Stevensonjoins Gem to lead recruiting and HR after six years at Dropbox, where she built a world-class team.
Feel free to copy/paste these into your own documents and share them with your team. If these best practices are more than you need, feel free to cut them down or adjust them as needed.
TLDR; Best practices for interviewers
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Best practices for preparing for an interview – Review the candidate’s resume before the interview to understand the areas/questions to be covered.
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Interview Best Practices – Put candidates at ease and ask probing or open-ended questions to let them express themselves. Avoid making assumptions about candidates, take notes, and allow time for questions at the end of the interview. Never ask directly or indirectly questions about age, gender, sexual orientation, race, skin color, national origin, religion, genetics, disability, etc.
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Post-interview best practices – Take prompt (detailed) interview notes, attend the debriefing, and do not discuss the feedback with other members of the interview committee before the debriefing
Best practices for preparing for an interview
Review candidates’ resumes before interviews
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When you go into an interview, you need to know where the applicant has worked and for how long.
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Before the interview, additional information about the candidate may be available. If so, be sure to read it. This may include information about why the candidate is looking for a job, how they were introduced to your startup, what is important to them in a job search, etc.
Know your area of expertise and the questions you are asking
Interview Best Practices
Reassure your candidates
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It’s natural for candidates to be nervous, so try to put them at ease from the moment they enter the room. If you can put them at ease, you’re more likely to get clear signals about their abilities and personality.
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A good way to do this is to start with some small talk to warm the other person up.
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If your candidate needs a drink or a bathroom break, offer to take a short break (sometimes they’ll even appreciate taking a moment to compose themselves).
Introduce yourself and explain the interview topic
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Introduce yourself. What do you do at the company? How long have you been working here? How do you plan to work with candidates for your open position? This way the interviewer has some context about who they’re talking to and why you’re here for the interview.
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Set the agenda. For example:
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“I’m really excited to get to know you better today. I have a lot to ask you, especially about your thinking about (insert field here). I want to get started right away, but I’d like to set aside some time at the end of the interview to ask you some questions as well. Is that okay?”
Ask open-ended questions
Make sure you get the signals you need from the interview.
You want to be sure you can make a hire/no hire recommendation at the end of the interview. Here are some tips to ensure you get the right signals:
Rather than going through a long list of questions, pick a few key ones that you can drill down into over time in your follow-up.
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Ask probing questions to dig deeper into answers, understand the candidate’s motivations, and clarify any ambiguous signals or language.
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Probing questions often begin with “what” or “how.” Questions that invite personal reflection often begin with “you” or “are you.”
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Questions beginning with “why” may put applicants on the defensive, so be careful.
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Here are some examples of how to ask probing questions:
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Here are some other clarifying questions you can use if you feel like vague or weak answers aren’t giving you the signals you need:
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Can you tell me more about .
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I’m not sure what you mean. Can you give some examples?
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Can you elaborate a bit more on your thoughts on that?
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I think that’s what I heard…did I understand correctly?
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What you’re saying is…
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Can you give an example of…?
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Why do you feel this way?
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Earlier we talked about… but I’d also like to know about…
Do not ask questions, either indirectly or directly, such as:
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Age, sex, sexual orientation, race, color, national origin, religion, genetics, or disability
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It is also illegal to ask how much someone is currently earning.
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Here are some Other questions That could be a problem.
Take note
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You’re likely to forget a lot of things if you don’t write them down, so take notes during the interview so you can refer to them later and use detailed examples when writing your feedback.
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If you’re interviewing in person, it’s best to use pen and paper – laptops can be a distraction (for both you and the interviewer).
Leave at least 5-10 minutes at the end of the interview for the candidate to ask questions
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This is the best time to be chatty (especially if the candidate feels they’ve done a good job and want to take a bit of time to sell themselves).
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It’s okay to allow yourself 5-10 minutes or more if you think you have the cues you need to invite an interview.
If you are conducting an in-person interview:
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Be sure to find the next interviewer after they leave – don’t leave the candidate in the room or at lunch without checking that the next interviewer is on their way.
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The interview schedule is Recruitment Calendar Alternatively, you can receive an interview invitation via a link in the calendar.
If you use VC:
lunch:
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Lunch should be a time to get to know the candidate. This should be more informal. This is not actually an interview, so you shouldn’t be asking interview questions during lunch.
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Be sure to introduce yourself!!
Post-interview best practices
feedback
report
Bonus Materials
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Interview Skills Ladder — A great blog post on how to assess your current interview skills and how to improve them.
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As you grow, we highly recommend investing in unconscious bias training. paradigm We implemented it when we had about 20 employees and found it to be so effective that we still use it today.
next
In the next installment of the series, we’ll discuss an alternative approach startups can use to hire founding engineers: employment contracts. Join us next week for part 16: How Gem interviewed its founding engineering team.
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