It was about 60 minutes before my first phone interview. My life was becoming increasingly crazy because, well, startups are crazy, and our startup was doing well, which meant it was becoming crazier. More customers, more money, more problems. We needed an ops person badly because I didn’t have enough time, and we needed more structure and support if we wanted to keep growing. Okay, one hour until showtime; thank god for the internet. I read five blog posts about what makes a great ops manager, visited a half dozen sites looking for interview questions, and 10 minutes before my first call had a semblance of a plan, if you can even call it that. “I’ll just talk to them. Tell them about our company, ask about their background, and maybe ask a couple of these questions if we can’t keep a good conversation going.”
So what happened? I had some conversations. Some were good, some were bad, some were awkward. Some people made it to the next interview round, where I went through a similar exercise: procrastinated, came up with a marginal plan, and just shuffled on through. Eventually, we hired someone that we really liked and thought could do the job well. And, a month later, it was Groundhog Day for another position.
I’ve talked with many managers, founders, and even recruiters, and I know my story is not unique. If you’ve hired or even helped out by being an interviewer, I’m guessing you can recall a similar story or at least similar feelings. Until recently, despite knowing how important it was, I rarely felt confident about what our hiring process should look like, how I could get the most out of my time with candidates, or if the interviews we were running led to the best hires. Now, looking back, I know I could have done better. I could have designed an objectively better hiring process that led to better hires. Interviews should have been more candidate-friendly and could have given me more insight and data to make good decisions. We might have reduced the unintentional biases that can creep into a hiring process if you’re not careful. I could have, but it would have been hard. Hard because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and hard because I was swamped, startups are crazy, and hiring is tough.
I wrote this guide as a sort of Cliff Notes for interviewing and evaluating candidates for startup jobs. It’s what I wish I had known going in. It would have saved me a ton of time, turned haphazard planning into good plans, and yielded better hiring decisions. It would have been more fair, equitable, and friendly to the candidates who invested their time interviewing with my company. For this guide, I assume that you’re hiring for a startup job, you have interested candidates, and you want to run a great interview process — one that keeps candidates engaged, helps you vet candidates and helps them vet you, and gives you your best shot at making a great hire.
Some great resources have covered this or similar topics (like hiring at big companies) that I’ll include throughout the guide. Still, I wanted to mention a couple of great resources in case you’re interested:
This guide ended up being quite lengthy, and I ended up re-writing it a couple of times to make it a bit easier to jump around and find the specific information you might be seeking. It may make sense to give the whole guide a read and then dive back into the areas that will serve you best. The reality is that every startup and job is unique (a snowflake). You should tailor your interviews to understand how effective and successful a candidate will be in that job. So, it follows that every interview process should be a little different. I hope that this guide can help hiring managers and interviewers create a great hiring process or tweak an existing plan to take it to the next level. Here’s a quick rundown of the areas I’ll cover:
Before you start interviewing
During interviews
After interviews
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Unfortunately, there are a lot of things that make hiring at startups challenging, but knowing what these things are can make them a bit easier to overcome and can help you tweak how you hire based on where you are as a company.
So, why is hiring at startups hard? How much time do you have?
It’s not all bad news, though! Startups also offer an amazing opportunity to grow. A massive draw for candidates is that with the chaos, uncertainty and under-resourcing comes the chance to take on more significant responsibilities and learn and grow with your company. That’s huge. Make sure you’re clear in your job descriptions not just what candidates will do but what they’ll learn and what unique opportunities they’ll have that they likely wouldn’t at a larger, more bureaucratic company.
Understanding what skills a person will need to succeed in a job is the first and maybe most important thing you need to figure out before jumping into an interview (or even writing a job description). When you’re thinking about the skills your hire will need, it’s helpful to peer through the lenses of the job, the team, and the company. Skills like initiative, open-mindedness, and grit might be critical because you’re a startup (these may not be typical for the same job at a larger company). You’ll also want to consider that skills come in many different flavors: personal skills, technical skills, and other skill-like things (knowledge, abilities, values, etc.). Personal skills tend to be foundational and transferable. Technical skills tend to be nuanced and learnable. You’ll probably need a combination of skill types, but note that the more technical skills you require, the smaller your candidate pool will be. Don’t unnecessarily constrain your candidate pool by including skills that an otherwise capable candidate could quickly learn on the job.
To that end, it helps to think about skills in three categories: must-have skills, important skills, or bonus skills. Simply put, must-have skills are skills that a candidate must have to succeed in the job. Important skills will make a candidate more likely to succeed in the job, but you could also do without them, compensate with other skills, or train for them. Bonus skills aren’t required but could give the candidate a leg up or help you or your team in other ways. Your must-have skills should appear prominently in your job description and be the main subject of your interviews (by asking questions geared at assessing these skills). Your hiring process should identify people who have your must-have skills and qualify those skills through your interviews (or other assessments).
Although getting signal on a candidate’s skills is critical, hiring is about alignment at multiple levels. That’s why growing startups like Gusto evaluate candidates on traits beyond functional skills, such as motivation and values. Exploring these traits will provide better signal around how a candidate matches up with the company’s mission and culture.
A hiring plan is the set of steps that an interview team will go through (such as recruiter screen, interviews, coding test, etc.) to vet candidates and ultimately make a hiring decision. It typically starts with an application and ends with an accepted offer but the full process can take many forms depending on the job and company. A hiring plan gives structure and consistency to the hiring process, keeping interviewers organized, evaluation fair, and candidates informed and prepared—helpful for busy leaders of startups!
A typical startup hiring plan might include:
The hiring plan above might look overwhelming if you've never written it all out or might look overly simplistic if you're hiring for a highly technical role. However, keep in mind:
A hiring rubric is a set of criteria that you’ll use to evaluate potential hires and make a hiring decision. A hiring rubric typically includes a combination of skills and values that you’d like your candidates to possess. Your hiring rubric should also have a scale with meaningful, defined anchors that will help you rate candidates for each skill. A hiring rubric may also include a scoring system that allows you to calculate a total score for each candidate. This could simply be adding up the ratings for each skill or a more complex formula that gives more weight to essential attributes. Ideally, you validate that your scores relate to job performance across a set of hires.
Creating a hiring rubric is a great exercise to help you organize your thoughts around what matters before evaluating candidates. Doing so helps to ensure you and your hiring team stay objective, unemotional, and unbiased through a hiring process.
Whatever you call it, having a well-thought-out and fair process to evaluate candidates is critical to making good hiring decisions. So, do you need a hiring rubric? Yes, you probably do! If you're working with WhoCo's recruiting team, we'll help you create a hiring rubric behind the scenes and go a step further by helping you create a purpose-built interview plan.
It’s crucial to involve your team in the hiring process to drive good hiring decisions, give candidates a realistic preview of their future team, and gain buy-in before a new employee starts. Here are some tips for who to include:
A screening interview is typically the first interview a candidate has with a company. It quickly qualifies the candidate for or eliminates them from further evaluation so that no one is wasting their time. Here are some key things to know about screening interviews:
A screening interview is still a structured interview, but they’re usually relatively short, broad, and shallow. Later interviews should go deeper into the essential skills needed for the job. While a later-stage interview might have several specific questions geared at understanding the candidates’ proficiency or even an exercise that has candidates demonstrate their skills, you can ask one such question in a screening interview.
Interviews are one type of assessment—a way to learn more about your candidates. However, there are many other types of assessments that you can use to understand your candidate’s skills and aptitude for your job, and you might be tempted to run the gamut. Don’t overdo it here, choose assessments that make sense to candidates (they should be able to understand why they’re doing it and how it’s relevant to the job) and don’t overreach—asking candidates to do too much may prompt them to bail altogether. For example, if you ask a candidate to do homework as part of your hiring process, try to confine their work to 2-3 hours at most.
Homework, exercises, and a hybrid of both are increasingly common in startup interviews. Asking candidates to do part of the job helps you see and evaluate their work. The right homework assignment or exercise can even get candidates excited about the job and give you a sample of what they can do that you can objectively evaluate. Homework, in particular, can also allow them to show off what they can do without the added pressure of being in an interview. However, you need to be careful with homework assignments: you will lose candidates if you ask them to do too much. And not having clear evaluation criteria (how you’ll grade the homework) can make the whole exercise a colossal waste of time.
Homework and exercises are part of a bigger family of assessments called “work samples,” literally a sample of someone's work that you can objectively assess as part of your hiring process. In some professions (think designer or open-source developer), candidates will even be able to point you to publicly available samples of their work. In this win-win scenario, candidates don’t need to do extra work and you still get a feel for what they can do.
There are many other types of tests out there, including many skill-specific exercises that may be suitable for your hiring process. But always bear in mind what you ask candidates to do and how it might be perceived. Cognitive tests, which measure a candidate’s cognitive capabilities, such as memory, language, object, and pattern recognition, are a great example. Even though they correlate well with job performance, they often leave candidates with a bad taste in their mouth because they don’t see how those questions are relevant.
Simply put, yes. We think you should be transparent with candidates about what you plan to ask them in the interview. Why? Glad you asked.
Getting good at running interviews is a skill you cultivate with experience and time, but it’s still helpful to start with a solid model. Here are my top tips for running an effective interview:
The interview is your opportunity to understand if a candidate has the skills and values to succeed in the job, so ask questions that help you assess that. Since each job and company is different, what you ask will depend on the job and the company you’re hiring for.
Questions about a candidate's background help you sketch in their experience. And a candidate's questions to you help them decide whether or not to stay in the process. But the most critical interview questions will be geared toward the skills needed to do the job. Three types of questions will help you here:
Almost as important as what you should ask is what interview questions you should avoid like the plague. Here’s a quick rundown/checklist.
Interviews naturally make people nervous. To ensure a good interview experience, you can make a conscious effort to reduce candidates’ anxiety—this can and should start well before the actual interview and continue after.
Bias is human, but it still sucks, and it’s no excuse for running a biased interview process. Here’s a quick checklist to make sure you address some of the most common sources of bias in interviews:
Keep in mind that how and where you market your job opening and how you choose who to invite to interviews can often be an even more significant source of bias, and there is much you can and should do to address bias in sourcing and selection.
Remote interviews are the new normal. If your company is hiring remote workers, or even if you’re just trying to cut down on travel and scheduling logistics, you’re likely running interviews remotely. While much of the advice on running a good interview also applies to running a good remote interview, remote interviewing is a different beast. With in-person interviews, the candidate gets to see and experience your office, meet other teammates in passing, and have an interview filled with eye contact and devoid of unfortunate audio issues. These things help you and the candidate connect and give the candidate a richer sense of what it’d be like to work at your company. While a remote interview may lack these soft elements, there are several things you can do to make sure your remote interviews still go off without a hitch and give candidates a flavor for life at your company:
Get the basics right
Level up your remote game
First, try to evaluate the candidate right away. That is to say, do your assessment immediately after the interview. Consider blocking time right after your interview to get it done. By completing your assessment right away, you ensure that the interview and the candidate's performance are still fresh in your mind. Having notes will help, but the sooner you evaluate the candidate, the more accurate your evaluation will be.
Next, ideally, you were responsible for assessing the candidate on one or more job-related skills. If that’s the case, your goal is to objectively evaluate their skill level. Having predefined skill-level anchors is ideal for objectivity and for normalizing across candidates and interviewers. Having a numeric scale is great, so long as the points on the scale are adequately defined and you and other interviewers use them consistently.
Last, leave any additional comments or thoughts if you have them. If your assessment will be reviewed by the hiring manager, a recruiter, or reviewed as part of a debrief, extra commentary can help qualify your answers, spark further discussions, or identify patterns across interviewers.
There are likely many people out there that you’d be excited to hire. Being flexible and open-minded as a hiring manager is critical to quickly filling job openings at startups. Looking at multiple viable candidates for your job opening is a great problem to have, but you’ll want to be thoughtful in the process.
In an ideal world, you would have multiple candidates at the same stage in your interview process. This makes it easier to advance all the strong candidates without worrying if someone better will come along. In the absence of having a group of candidates to choose from, you should advance a candidate if they meet or exceed your expectations, leaning on your job description, hiring rubric, and scorecard as an objective measure. While it can make sense to speed up or slow down a candidate in the process to have multiple candidates to choose from, make sure you are respectful of candidates in the process. Expect to lose candidates if you delay too long or push to move too quickly.
An interview debrief is when interviewers and decision-makers meet to determine whether to advance a candidate to the next round. They are most useful after a candidate completes multiple interviews or other assessments. In a debrief, interviewers share individual assessments and perspectives to help the group develop a more complete picture of the candidate. When does an interview debrief make sense?
You’re not done with your hiring process until a candidate has accepted your offer and is ready to start working. Making a job offer is a critical part of the hiring process, and how you do it can impact how likely the candidate is to accept. Here is what you can do to increase your chances of the candidate accepting your offer:
If you’ve read through this guide, hopefully, you have a great sense of what you should do when planning and running interviews and when evaluating candidates for startup jobs.
So, what shouldn’t you do?
Please don’t do what I did when I started my journey as a hiring manager. Don’t treat interviews simply as “a conversation.” Don’t go into them without a plan or preparation. Don’t evaluate the candidate based on good or easy conversation. As humans, our social tendencies and, indeed, our biases can quickly lead us down the wrong path—instead of finding the best person for the job we find a person that we like or think we’ll get along with instead. Don’t do that. You’ll regret it later when the person can’t effectively do the job, is underperforming and unhappy, and you are stuck in an uncomfortable position. Hiring mistakes can significantly impact company culture and team dynamics, especially at quickly growing startups and companies. With a more thoughtful, research- and science-backed interviewing process, you’ll make fewer mistakes and set your team and company up for success.
Hopefully, this guide has been helpful! If you’ve got comments or questions I didn’t cover here, you can send us a tweet @thewhocompany or find us on LinkedIn (WhoCo). We’d love to hear from you and continue to make this guide better.