On Hiring: some lessons

I don’t have an expertise in Hiring or HR, but I’ve had the opportunity to interview and hire many people throughout my career.

I possibly don’t follow many of the industry’s best practices, but I ended developing my own system and spider sense which, at least looking at the great people I’ve worked with, I think I can say it performed quite well.

Hiring is a position of power

Hiring and interviewing candidates is a position of power. It’s a situation where you have absolute and asymmetrical control.

A place where you are evaluating a person, making a decision that will have great impact in their lives, and to which they’re totally vulnerable.

And as the saying tells, with that power you have great responsibility as well:

Make candidates comfortable

The candidate may be nervous and uncomfortable, and it’s your responsibility to help them relax. Maybe you’ll ask them about the weather, where they are from, or pick a current trending topic.

What’s important it’s to project the idea that you’re both at the same level (more or less at least), and that you’re not the big boss from a Nintendo game.

It’s your responsibility to help them ease: this is important not only for the sake of helping them, but also because, to properly evaluate candidates, you need them to be themselves and at normal stress levels. It’s a win-win.

We’re not as good at hiring as we think

This position of power blinds us: we have total control, and in some situations we’re possibly the only interviewer. So our opinion is all that counts for the decision.

This makes it way easy for us to judge, but we need to be aware when we’re judging people “just because we can”.

Sometimes our judgement will be based on concrete facts (e.g.: not enough years of experience), others on intuition (e.g.: I don’t feel I can trust this person).

Both are valid, but we need to be aware of each and balance everything, trying to understand why we’re having this reasoning.

A good practice is to doubt of yourself for a few seconds during the interviews, and use this to try to dig further, ensuring your current judgement is correct.

As a fact, many times I started an interview with the sensation that it wasn’t the right person for the role… then ending it with the opposite opinion — always remain open throughout the entire interview!

Know what you’re looking for

For many years I’ve interviewed people mostly using a list of questions and my intuition. That, with the help of other colleagues also doing follow-up interviews, worked quite well.

But I don’t believe this should be the process anymore — i.e., to be solely based on a vague idea of what type of person we need. Specially as company’s grow behind a “10 people company”.

Instead, we need to start by understanding specifically what we’re looking for in this position — which goes deeper than what’s written in the job post — and, how to evaluate them during an interview.

For example, we may be looking for someone that is proficient in JavaScript and English, that also has a strong motivation to learn, good product thinking, and culture-fit.

But first note that a few of these characteristics are probably not even mentioned in the job description (ex: culture-fit). So we need to specify this internally before the interview process.

And second, for each of them, we need to know how to perform the evaluation.

For example, proficiency in English and JavaScript is relatively easy to evaluate during interviews and by analysing their code — it’s more concrete and tangible.

But how do you evaluate their motivation to learn? How do you evaluate their level of product thinking and culture-fit? How do you evaluate these more abstract characteristics?

For example, when it comes to motivation, good hints are the existence of any side-projects or Open Source contributions involving a tech they wanted to learn.

But some characteristics can be even more nuanced (as culture-fit), and need to be discussed and defined internally before you start the interview process.

Otherwise, you risk having an amateur process where everyone believes they found the right qualities, but the right qualities mean a different thing for each interviewer.

You risk having a team that it’s not in sync about what should be expected from a candidate, and unable to identify these qualities (or issues) in the interviews they perform.

Give feedback

Candidates usually like to know the reason behind your decision. So always when possible, try to explain them why.

This is not easy of course, specially when denying someone from the next step: nobody likes to be rejected.

If I’m honest, I’ve sometimes been vague on purpose, since I didn’t know a good way write this in an email without hurting that person — even if there’s no major weakness, it’s always difficult to communicate that. But it’s important to make an effort to do this.

More recently, I’ve been experimenting with giving feedback right at the end of the interview: it seems that speaking face to face, and using the right intonation, helps to give constructive feedback without sounding harsh. It has been interesting to watch the candidates happily surprised, since they’re not used to getting clear feedback at this stage.

Plot twist: We’re also being interviewed

The interviewing process is a reflection of the company’s culture: how you treat candidates, how clear is the process, and how fast you move.

And even if you believe it doesn’t realistically reflect your company, that’s the impression the candidates will have either way, you want it or not.

This means that, if your company respects their employees, then you should, from day 0, respect your interviewing candidates as well: possibly by answering to all their applications, by answering within a short period of time, by being nice and clear in all communications, etc.

Since this entire process — pre, during and post interview — will create a strong impression of your company, this will have all sorts of 2nd order effects: a good interview process can result in good word-of-mouth, which can bring the next hire (or customer).

Besides this, and equally important: as an interviewer you should use interviews opportunities to “sell” your organization — explain how it is to work there, what you value, what you expect from a candidate and what they can expect from the company.

Not only this will help you not let great candidates escape, but also instigate word-of-mouth about how incredible your company is to work and do business with.

There are surely many other aspects about hiring which are important that I didn’t remember for this post, or don’t know at all. But If I wanted to share some notes with my team, this is where I would start.

What about you? Based on your experience, what do you believe everyone hiring should know?

I’m Daniel, Product manager with 8 years of experience — from working on MVPs to mature businesses -, and in building a great company (Whitesmith) from the start.

Paper Planes is the place where I reflect on my experiences and lessons on the craft of Product Management.