Why

You want the best talent working with you. Period. That's the whole point.

Whether you're a founder, hiring manager, or individual contributor, you can improve your ability to hire incredible people by leveling up your skills as an interviewer. The best ways to do this are to:

• reduce the candidate's nerves
• reduce implicit bias
• and demonstrate leadership in the interview

Reduce the candidate's nerves

Nervousness is poison in recruiting ☠️. A nervous candidate will act completely differently when asked a question or faced with a challenge. You'll have amazing people fall through the cracks if they're nervous. And nerves often snowball into more nerves.

The goal of an interview is to see how the candidate would do if you were collaborating with them at work. The goal is NOT to see how they handle massive stress and nervousness. Unless your industry requires employees to stay cool as a cucumber under pressure at all times (most don't) then you need to do everything in your power to reduce the candidate's nervousness.

Tips to reduce nervousness

Reduce your own nerves

• Practice interviewing, have someone shadow you and give you feedback, and be prepared.

Make them laugh early in the day

• For our onsite at BuildingConnected, we would invite the candidate to breakfast beforehand. Jesse (one of my giants), used to say that if you didn't get the candidate to laugh by the end of breakfast, you failed. The point of breakfast was to reduce the candidate's nerves before the actual sessions started (and to get some extra signal).

Ensure they're comfortable and drop the formality

• Start every interview with intros and discuss the agenda. This reminds the candidate of your name (even if you've already met) and lets them know what's coming up.
• Between onsite interviews, ask if they need to use the restroom or would like some water or a snack. They'd have those luxuries when working! So try to simulate that. The candidate might be feeling too nervous to ask.
• For many of us (especially in tech), our workplace and the way we collaborate on our team aren't formal. So why would we make the interview super formal? Drop the formality, reduce the nerves, and watch them start to excel.

Reduce your bias

We all have a picture in our minds of the perfect candidate for a role. Some of the qualities in that mental image are useful ("great communicator", "strong technical skills", etc.).

Unfortunately, we subconsciously have other biases attached to that image too (like "looks like me", or "Indian male", or "young and would be fun to have a drink with", etc.).

Implicit bias is a natural response we've all evolved to help us pattern-match and quickly evaluate humans and possible threats around us. You're not a bad person if you have subconscious biases, you're normal. So please don't skip this section and get defensive.

However, it's important to talk about implicit bias because acting on biases in recruiting can lead to:

• Missing out on amazing candidates
• Lack of diversity on your team (which hurts your team, culture, product, reputation, community, and industry)
• Potentially even discrimination - which is unfair (and unlawful) for candidates

Tips for reducing bias

The goal of addressing biases isn't to become a perfect, unbiased, other-worldly being. The goal is to become aware of your individual biases, do your best to notice them as they influence you, and incorporate processes into your recruiting systems to reduce biased decision-making.

Here's how you can address bias on your team and become great interviewers.

Learn about implicit biases and accept that you have them

Take an implicit bias test (like the Gender-Career and Gender-Science tests from Harvard) and discuss the results as a team.

• This is what Ashu (another giant) did with our team at BuildingConnected and it really opened our eyes.

Read articles available online (like this one and this one) and be brutally honest with yourself. Do you remember seeing or acting on any of these?

Accept that you (yes you), have biases and start trying to listen for them.

Create systems to reduce bias

Define your interview process beforehand

• Train all interviewers on the specific questions they should ask in each interview along with ideal answers.
• Define a rubric with the specific qualities you're looking for ("communication", "autonomy", "curiosity", "code fluency", etc.).

Document what you observed and reduce bias after the interview

• When the interview ends, ask each interviewer to fill out the rubric from above before they discuss how it went. Ask them to provide specific examples for each signal that they perceived.
  • For example, instead of saying "Good collaborator" write "Good collaborator - they asked what I thought of their proposed system design and responded to my feedback".
  • Another example: instead of saying "Bad culture fit" write "Poor collaborator. Was defensive when we asked them to elaborate on their solution. Plus, they never interacted with [female interviewer] and only talked with [male interviewer]".
    • If you end up writing "Bad culture fit" but can't point to a specific example or explain further, it's probably bias talking 😉.
  • Note that you will need to train your team what not to write down as well. Even if well-intended, interviewers should never write down anything related to topics covered by discrimination laws. For one, those topics shouldn't have anything to do with your criteria anyway and two, they can be misinterpreted.
• After writing feedback, host a debrief with all interviewers involved and talk about your conclusions
  • Discussing the feedback can reveal accidental bias and lead to better decision-making.

Demonstrate leadership in the interview

Why? The candidate's ability to succeed in an interview is contingent on your ability to lead the interview well.

Tips for leading an interview

Start on time and don't let time wander

• When you defined the interview questions, you most likely also defined a quality bar like "the candidate must finish all three sections in time". If you start the interview late or chit-chat too much in the intros, then you're starting the candidate already behind.

Be prepared. Rehearse the questions and jump in to clarify if they're confused.

• Misphrasing a question can lead a candidate down a frustrating and time-consuming dead end. Great candidates will ask clarifying questions but some might not feel comfortable enough doing so (especially if they're more junior or are very nervous).

Detect nerves and reduce nervous snowballing

• I already harped on the need to reduce nerves, but you should look out for nerve snowballing. When candidates get nervous, they might blank and start getting frustrated. This can make them more nervous which leads to more blanking and frustration! This cycle can completely disable someone who would be phenomenal to work with outside of this stressful interview setting.

• If you see them snowballing for more than a few minutes, jump in and stop them! See if they have questions. Ask them to take a few steps back and ask them at a high level what they're looking to accomplish with the challenge.

  • If they're completely stuck, talk them through with a hint. Yes, it's ok to dock them a bit for not knowing something or not being able to get themselves unstuck but it's better to have a candidate get through a challenge (and demonstrate all of their other qualities) than to have them get stuck on one small thing and then snowball into total failure.

Make the interview enjoyable and always be selling

• You are the first impression for the candidate of your company. Your interaction with a candidate will sink in 100x deeper than a trendy careers page or company vision.
• Always leave time for Q&A.
  • While you're interviewing them, they're also interviewing the company trying to see if it's a good fit. Leave time at the end of each session for Q&A so that they can learn more about the team/culture/company/etc.
• Making the interview enjoyable and simulating a real day-in-the-life of an employee will set you apart from the massive companies that have huge budgets luring your top candidates away.
• Be excited about where you work! Get to know what your colleagues are working on and share their success stories if the candidate asks. In 9 out of 10 interviews, you will be asked "What's your favorite part about working here?". Have a great pitch ready because if you extend an offer to them, you want them picking YOU over the company down the street.