The Risk-Free Method For Interviewing Job Candidates
When quizzed by an audience member on what has been his “biggest mistake,” entrepreneur and Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk gave a long pause. The huge audience at Austin’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival was surprised when he gave his response:
“The biggest mistake, in general, I’ve made, is to put too much of a weighting on someone’s talent and not enough on their personality.
And I’ve made that mistake several times. I think it actually matters whether somebody has a good hear, it really does. I’ve made the mistake of thinking that it’s sometimes just about the brain.”
Even for Elon Musk, hiring is a huge challenge!
Hiring the correct person for your organization is one of the most important decisions you will make as an entrepreneur. The people who make up your team are the core drivers behind its agility, innovation, culture and effectiveness.
Billionaire investor Warren Buffett echoes Musk:
“Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy.”
Integrity, or personality, is in fact the most important trait to look for when hiring, and it couldn’t be more true today for small, agile teams where every member is mission critical.
So how do you make sure you are hiring the right person?
How to Interview Successfully
Through running GetApprenticeship, we’ve helped a lot of companies go through the hiring process and so we’ve learned a lot about the different stages. One of the most critical stages is the interview process.
While you can set up good systems for sourcing and organizing applicants for your desired role, the most tangible information about your prospective new employee comes from speaking with them face to face (or over a webcam).
I’ve put together this guide from some of the key lessons we’ve learned over the last two years helping companies hire ambitious entry-level talent, and it has some of our best processes that have evolved from interviewing dozens of apprentices and helping companies choose the best people for their organization.
We’ll be covering each step with broad strokes, as while there unfortunately isn’t really a one-size-fits-all process, I still think you can take away the main principles and with very little effort shoehorn them into what will be necessary for your next hire.
We’ll be breaking down the entire process into three stages of equal importance:
- Scheduling interviews with your top applicants.
- Crucial preparation steps for the interview.
- The interview itself (with suggestions for questions and tips to help it go smoothly).
Why You Should Spend Time Learning to Interview Properly
Hiring the right person can potentially make or break your company.
In small, agile teams, company culture and einheit are some of the most critical factors for your organization’s success. If you mess up the hiring process and bring someone in who’s anything less than A-grade, you’ve made a mistake with real consequences.
Hiring the right person the first time will also save you both time and money. Hiring can be a long and frankly annoying process for most companies, as it’s always time spent when you could better be executing on revenue-driving opportunities instead. Hiring is usually a sunk cost, and this only compounded if you mess it up and bring someone into your team who isn’t a good fit who has to leave not long after they are onboarded.
How can this be avoided? As was mentioned earlier, the greatest leverage point for improving your odds of hiring the right person is at the interview stage, so we’re going to break this process down into easy steps so you know exactly what you should be doing to get the most out of your applicant list and choose the right person.
How to Interview Successfully
Scheduling
Before even thinking about stepping into a meeting room or getting on a call with someone, you’ll want to get a thousand-foot overview of all your applicants and block out a time when you can do all your interviews at once.
This will have the advantages of:
(1) Not drawing out the interview stage too long, allowing your company to quickly wrap up proceedings and return to normal tasks. Better to do it all over the course of a week than spread it out over three.
(2) It allows you to interview applicants “side by side” to avoid recency and primacy effects as much as possible:
“The recency bias error occurs when an assessor (i.e. recruiter, hiring manager, etc.) is overly affected by information that was presented later (more recently) rather than earlier in any given selection process.
In contrast, the primacy bias error occurs when an assessor’s selection is made based on information that was presented earlier (primary information) rather than later in a process. And although the effects appear symmetrically opposing, the research shows that they occur because of different reasons, and that their implications can differ drastically. They are not equal but opposite.” – Joe Shaheen, Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership
Schedule aggressively
To make sure you avoid the two pitfalls above, you need to make sure you schedule aggressively. Don’t let the hiring process drag on if it can be avoided.
- We recommend using a tool like Calendly to schedule interviews via email. A lot of annoying back-and-forth goes on when trying to find a suitable time to chat, and these tools help reduce this significantly by providing a list of available times your applicant can choose from. (Just make sure to keep your availabilities updated!)
- If none of the proposed times work, urge them to propose their own times and then you choose from what’s available.
An interview-scheduling email template
Here’s a rough email template you can use to schedule interview times with your most promising applicants.
——————–
Hey,
I liked your application and I’d love to schedule an interview so we can chat about the position a bit more.
Here’s a link to my Calendly where you can book a time to chat. If none of these times work, let me know what times you’re available and we’ll sort something out via email.
Looking forward to it!
Your Name.
——————–
By sending an email like this to all your top applicants, you’ll be saving a lot of back-and-forth emails and time wasting that usually comes with setting up meetings or interviews with a lot of people at once.
The next step after you’ve got a block of interviews scheduled is preparing for the actual interview.
Preparation
Once you’re ready for your first interview, it’s time to take stock and do a quick review of the applicant before you meet them face to face. This is important, as the interview is your opportunity to ask questions about their experience, to put them on the spot as much as you need to, and to uncover aspects of their personality and skillset you think will be vital to your company’s needs.
Watch the candidate’s application video again.
As part of the hiring process at GetApprenticeship, we get our applicants to record a short 1-2 minute introduction video that introduces them answering a few key questions provided by the employer.
This video submission was originally necessitated by the fact that we place apprentices in remote-only positions in startups or online businesses, but we actually think it’s good practice for any company. Having an applicant supply a video will help you sort your initial applicants more easily and will give you a gut-sense of what the applicant is about, much more than reading answers on a survey or skills listed on a resume.
In any case, try to get a video as part of your initial hiring process, and if you have one, make sure you watch over it again before the interview to get a feel for the candidate. Take notes of any specific questions you may have for them.
If you ‘smell fish,’ go after it.
As above, run through the answers supplied by your candidate and go after anything that doesn’t immediately make sense or isn’t as clear as you’d like. Does something seem off or out of the ordinary? The interview is your chance to dig into this with them and figure out what is really going on.
Dig into past experience.
Past success is the greatest predictor of future success. Make sure you understand the projects your candidate has previously worked on and make sure you ask them about any side projects (which are a great sign of entrepreneurial ability).
Once you have a few notes and you feel like you know which angle you’d like to approach the interview from, it’s time to meet the candidate.
The Interview: Questions to Ask and Tips and How to Start and Interview.
Now that you’re ready to meet your candidate, here are some of the questions we recommend you should cover, as well as some tips for how to make sure it all runs smoothly:
Make sure you request a video interview.
First up, if you’re not doing this in-person, make sure you request a video interview rather than audio. A lot is communicated via body language and nonverbal cues, so you’ll really miss out a lot about who the candidate is by not being able to see them as you speak to them.
How to start an interview: start with three to five minutes of small talk to get comfortable and build rapport.
You don’t want to start immediately grilling the person with questions like a psycho. We’re trying to save time here, but take a few minutes out and you’ll probably uncover a lot of things about them just through making small talk and finding out a little about them nonprofessionally.
Primary Questions.
After easing the tension and having a bit of a chat, it’s time to jump into the main questions of the interview. We’ve provided a list of what we feel are common or necessary interview questions that will help cover the broad strokes of what you might be looking for in an applicant. Feel free to use as many or as little of these as you wish.
- Why do you want this job? What’s most valuable and exciting to you about this opportunity?
Evaluating for: Long-term focus? Business focus? What do you know about our company? Are our values the
same?
- What motivates you? What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Evaluating for: You want to figure out their “Why.” Watch out for folks who are running away from their
problems; look for people pursuing opportunities.
- Where do you see yourself in five years? What are your long-term goals and objectives?
Evaluating for: How well does their career trajectory match up with your company’s needs?
- What experience do you have relevant to this position?
Evaluating for: A better feel for their industry expertise.
- What’s the most difficult thing you think you’ve ever accomplished? What are you most proud of?
Evaluating for: How they actually interacted in a real-world situation and what they consider difficult. Look for
people that have done stuff rather than are just able to talk a big game.
- How long are you planning to stay with our company?
Evaluation for: No one stays at a job for their whole life anymore. That’s fine as long as everyone is on the
same page in terms of expectations. We think two to four years is typically a good timeline for an apprentice.
- Do you have any questions for me? Any questions about the position?
Evaluating for: They should take an interest and show they’ve actually thought about the position and how it
matches up with their skillset and trajectory.
Secondary Questions.
After you’ve asked the main questions above, it’s time to go back to your notes you made in the interview preparation stage and get down into the nitty-gritty. If you “smelled fish” for any of their answers in their application, now is the time to go after it. Now is also the time to talk a bit more about their past experience (if it hasn’t already been covered).
Post-Interview
Congrats! If you’ve followed the instructions up to this point, you’ll have conducted a successful interview. At the end of the interview, once they leave the room or you get off the call, it’s time to write down some additional notes and thoughts on the candidate.
Grade the candidates.
If you grade every candidate you interview, you’ll have some good subjective, qualitative data to help inform your final decision once all the interviews are wrapped up. Doing this soon after the interview will also help ameliorate recency and primacy effects to some degree.
Regrade each person you interviewed on a scale of one to five on the following four criteria:
- Value Match – Do their core values align with ours? (Very important)
- Past Work – What have they done?
It doesn’t even necessarily need to be domain specific in most cases—look for motivation and work ethic. Again, the best predictor of future success is past success.
- Trajectory – Personal and Business
Where are they going? What are their stated plans? Do they align with where the company and position are going?
- Domain Experience – Do they have relevant domain experience?
Discuss the candidates.
If applicable, discuss the candidates with your company’s management team or with a trusted advisor.
What if I Can’t Decide On a Candidate?
At the end of the day, hiring is a complex decision and research suggests that complex decisions are best made at an intuitive, gut level.
If you’re having trouble choosing between candidates, get a good night’s sleep, think about it some more from a rational/objective point a view, and if you still can’t decide then the best decision is then to go with your gut.
Action Steps
By going through this guide, you should have a good, high-level understanding of how to conduct a successful interview for your next hire. To recap, the key takeaways are:
- Make sure you schedule aggressively and get all your interviews done in as small a block of time as possible. Set up a tool like Calendly to help with scheduling interviews and meetings.
- Make sure you prepare for each candidate you interview by reviewing their application thoroughly beforehand. Make sure if you “smell fish” that you go after it. Plan any specific questions you might have.
- During the interview, body language and nonverbal cues are important. If you’re interviewing online, make sure you have video enabled. How to start an interview: ease into the interview questions, and use our suggested list as a starting point to supplement any more specific questions you prepared earlier.
- Post-interview, make sure you add notes and impressions while they are still fresh. Grade each candidate on value match, past work, trajectory, and domain experience, in that order of importance.
- Don’t stress! While hiring and interviewing can have big ramifications on your business if done incorrectly, the best thing to ensure success is to have a laid-back attitude and try to enjoy the process as much as possible. If you feel at ease, others will feel that way too, and you’ll get the purest picture of their personality that way.
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