Earned Lessons

Twitter Summary: A great hire will often generate lots of energy during a hiring meeting and some of it negative.

Once you have established whether a candidate passed your interview,  the final step is to have a hiring meeting where all the interviewers provide their assessment of the candidate.  The hiring meeting is important to attend in-person for multiple reasons: a) You are compelled to make a decision as you have a scheduled time and duration to decide on a candidate, b) You can confirm or provide counter-evidence for skills or behaviors people saw during their interviews, and c)  You can calibrate with your team whether you are all asking the right questions with the right degree of difficulty.  Email doesn’t work in this context as in-person dialogue allows the team to quickly clarify questions among all interviewers.

How do you decide if you are going to hire someone? The best technique I have seen to date has been requiring unanimous consensus by all the interviewers that the candidate should be hired. The tremendous flaw of this style of decision making is that it will reject candidates who could have done well at the company, but because of a sub-par interview, they are eliminated from consideration. The incredible advantage of consensus driven hiring is that everyone who is hired has had at least six people say “Yes” to hiring the candidate. If all of your colleagues have gone through the same process to join the company you should have more confidence that they are doing the right thing. If  a co-worker begins having difficulties, there should be a sense of ownership by the team that they picked the candidate for a reason and they can help them work through those issues.

It is important to note, that consensus means that everyone agrees the candidate should be hired. It does not mean that everyone likes the candidate. Some of the best employees I have ever hired had at least one or two other interviewers indicate they were not inclined to hire. There have been cases where a college intern was determined to be a great hire by two of their interviewers, and a strong no-hire, by their other two interviewers. This intern was fortunately hired and ended up being an exemplary hire for the company as the advanced and took on more projects quickly. It was fortunate that in these cases the candidate was able to express a deep technical capability and being a “superstar” in some fashion that an interviewer was willing to champion them  in the hiring meeting to take a chance on a hire. The dissenting interviewers shouldn’t ever be bullied into hiring a poor candidate, but they should be open to listening to the interviews of others and decide if it is worth the risk of sharing a payroll with the new hire.

Some of the most questionable hires have been hiring meetings where the candidate did well enough that everyone was inclined to hire, but no interviewer was able to figure out where the candidate was great.  The problem with hiring these candidates is that they frequently have a similar career within the company of doing good but not great. Finding a passion or the superlative associated with each candidate means that if they decide to join the company you will increase the overall depth of your company’s employees and the probability that something great will emerge.

Twitter Summary:  The questions you pose to interviewing candidates reveals if your job is interesting or boring.

The questions you ask and your assessment of the candidates answers comprise the core of the interview.  More importantly, excellent candidates will be paying attention to you and will be assessing you just as much as you are assessing them. If the questions you ask are the same the candidate has heard in other interviews, seen in interviewing  manuals, or from another interviewer that day, they will have a clue that your interviews are not organized, your questions aren’t relevant, and that you may not be capable of capturing the depth and breadth of their capabilities.

Great interview questions have the following qualities:

Relevant.

• The problems you ask them to solve should either be ones that you are familiar with or are currently trying to solve yourself. This gives the candidate a clear indication of the type of work they will be asked to perform.  This also gives the interviewer the ability to assess how the candidate would solve a problem that is pressing for the organization right now.
• If you are interviewing a software engineer for a kernel development position, ask them to code a scheduler and talk about memory allocation.
• If the candidate is interviewing for a social networking site, ask the candidate to generate  code to generate a user to user similarity score.
• If the candidate is interviewing for a marketing position, ask them how they would evaluate marketing options for your current product.
• Don’t ask a “textbook” questions. — For software engineers, this means asking them to implement “atoi()”. For anyone it would mean questions like: “What is your greatest strength?” Your questions should be open enough that the candidate reveals their strengths in the process of describing another problem they solved.

Expandable in depth and breadth

• The questions you ask should be expandable in either breadth or depth. For software engineers, this would mean asking them to take their solution and and scaling to handle millions of users or machines, or alternately asking them to change their solution to handle multiple, media and content data types. For product or marketing candidates, you could ask them how they would modify the programs or projects to deal with if you wanted to handle a larger diversity of customer groups or a broader product line.
• Don’t ask questions with only one right/wrong answer. Asking questions that have only one correct answer is problematic as it doesn’t give the candidate the opportunity to discuss trade offs in choosing and decision making. In the end, you are hiring people to make judgment calls, and are not hiring a computer to give you a rote answer

Concise

• Present only the basics of the problem.  The interview should be a dialogue,  and interviewers should intentionally give less information then the candidate needs to solve the problem. This will get require them to ask you clarifying questions and give you insight as to how they approach their problem solving.
• Don’t spend all your time talking. If you spend most of the time talking you are not getting the information from the candidate you need to make your decision. You can spend more time talking with the candidate after they have answered your question, and especially if they are hired.

Great inteview questions make your job as an interviewer easier . A great set of interview questions will allow you to understand how the candidate would solve the problems you need to solve in your company, how the candidate deals with challenges as the problem expands, and how they communicate and ask for more information in answering the question.  It also tells the candidate about what problems they can expect to be solving and if the role is a match for what they want to do.