Swipe Right. How A Dating Mentality Helps You Hire High-Potential Employees

Over 10,000 applications were submitted to ThirdLove last year, and I personally interviewed 130 people.

At some point along the way, I came to a realization.

Hiring is a lot like dating.

When you go on a first date, you know pretty quickly if the person sitting across from you has potential. Within 30 seconds of talking to them, you probably know if there’s a connection.

It’s the same when you sit down to interview someone.

Within the first 30 seconds, you’ve likely identified whether or not this person has a chance of being successful on your team.

So, why do you continue on with the next 29 minutes and 30 seconds of the interview? Because you’re trying to prove otherwise.

You look at their resume and ask questions to prove the candidate actually won’t be successful at your company.

If you can’t, they’re the one.

Here’s how to do it.

Take Time To Understand The Role

Either my co-founder, Dave, or I interview every single person we hire at ThirdLove.

The team interviews between 30–50 people for every role, so it’s a huge time investment for the recruiting team and for us.

With so many people to interview, it pays to be efficient. And the only way to do that is by taking time to understand the role you’re filling.

Sometimes, you might not know off the top of your head what each role requires day-to-day. So, make a point to speak with your hiring manager and ask about where to focus.

See what’s been discussed and what needs to be figured out. This helps you make the best use of the time you have with every candidate.

Know Where To Push

When you screen people on the phone, it’s like a first date. You know immediately if there’s chemistry.

But in final round interviews, things get more serious. You want to know specifics and address hesitations. You’re still searching for a reason to believe they aren’t the one.

The hiring manager may say they love a candidate, but there are some areas where you need to spend time pushing a little more. That’s your job.

Focus on filling in information or addressing the hiring manager’s concerns with every candidate.

You spend a massive amount of time on these decisions, so be serious about making sure it works—both for the candidate and for everyone in the company.

Know Your Style

Even if you have core guiding principles about how to interview as a company, everyone has their own interview style.

People have different ways of interacting and extracting information from a candidate. Use that to your advantage.

My co-founder and I have very different interview styles, but it’s great because we have unique interactions in interviews. We get different information from candidates based on our approaches, and that gives us more to work with.

Make sure your candidates aren’t interviewed by one senior member of the team. Have them meet with multiple people so you get a wealth of information and several perspectives.

Learn From Mistakes

Once someone starts, we really want it to work out.

Inevitably, there are times it doesn’t.

Try doing a recap of all your hires in the past year, and look at anyone who didn’t work out. Maybe they chose to leave, or you asked them to leave. But for whatever reason, they aren’t with you now.

When we did this, each situation had a similarity.

I can remember one thing in the interview that should have tipped us off, or the question that went unanswered. And those are learning opportunities. When someone doesn’t work out — or you don’t close on a candidate you want — ask why.

Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t we close on them? What did we learn? What could we have done differently?

It’s just like any other part of your business. When a mistake is made, you want to learn from it, and avoid it in the future.

Leave A Positive Impression

Regardless of whether things work out with a candidate, really strive to make sure that anyone who interviews walks away with positive things to say.

Even if they’re not the right fit, you want them to feel like you’ve been considerate of their time.

You want them to leave with a good impression.

Actually, we give everyone who comes in for an interview a free product to take home. If it’s a guy, we ask if they want a bra for their girlfriend, wife, sister, mom, or friend. If it’s a woman, we give them a bra to thank them for coming in.

Because it never pays to be rude, whether or not the date went as well as you’d hoped.