Avoid the Pitfalls: Navigating the Top 10 Interviewer Traps
Interviews are stressful and exhausting for both the interviewees and the interviewers. Today I want to discuss a few traps interviewers could easily fall into and how we can make it a better experience for both the interviewing team as well as the candidates.
1. Interview Bias
Whether you admit it or not, everyone has some kind of unconscious bias. The more we learn about them, the more we can identify them and we can do something to eliminate or reduce them. Numerous articles have extensively covered the different manifestations of interview bias. The most common interview biases can be summed up in this graphic:
The first step in mitigating some of those biases is to ensure that the interviewers learn about them and understand them. Proper interview training would help. Also, some of the following ways can help:
Interview biases itself can be a separate blog post. More thoughtfulness in the interview process and asking better questions would eliminate some of the biases.
2. The interviewing team does not understand the needs of the open role.
As a Hiring Manager, you play a crucial role in shaping the job description and the interview process. You have a good idea of what kind of candidates would be a great fit for your team and what you want each interview panel to evaluate the candidates upon. When the interviews come, you probably don’t realize that some great candidates are being filtered out because they are not what the interviewers expected of the role. Every interviewer is evaluating the candidates based on what they think the candidate should have in the role, instead of what qualities the role is needed for. A good example would be when engineers evaluate candidates for an Engineering Manager role. Even the Hiring Manager might not need a manager who can do hands-on coding, the engineers interviewed the candidates based on the strength of their technical skills just because their current manager has hands-on coding experience and has been helping the team whenever the team is too “busy”. They believe that this is a must-have quality for the role. Is that a fair evaluation of the candidate?
A good way to counter that is to provide a clear understanding of the role to all the interviewers and a space for the interviewers to ask questions before the interview starts. A good document of the job description, what kind of qualities you are looking for in a great candidate, what are the areas you are hoping to gain insights in each interview and examples of must-have/nice-to-have and potentially provide counter-examples of what you are not looking for in a certain interview. Allow your interviewing team to ask questions. Ensure that the interviewing team provides specific examples to back up their “feelings” and “thoughts” instead of just giving a score on the scorecard. Every company/team’s need could be a bit different. A good understanding of what is needed by the Hiring Manager would provide a fair judgement to the candidates.
3. A debrief session for the Hiring Manager to understand interviewers' comments/rankings is missing.
Sometimes interviewers are busy and sometimes we want a fast hiring process so we would skip the debriefing sessions. Once the interviewers put a certain ranking/rubix based on the interview result, the Hiring Manager or the Recruiter immediately decides on the next step without understanding its reasoning. Sometimes candidates got rejected because of that. Sometimes mediocre candidates got hired because of that too.
With many years of experience in interviewing as a Hiring Manager, I often learn something new during a debrief session. I started to realize the importance of having a debrief session, even in the case of everyone’s evaluation leaning towards one side. There was a time I learned about a discrimination behaviour of a candidate and the interviewer didn’t think it was good to write that down on the evaluation form. There was another time that a lot of interviewers gave a “no” to a candidate and during the debrief session, the Hiring Manager learned that what the interviewers were concerned about was related to the company/environment the candidate was in, but not related to the quality of the candidate if they could make decisions differently. After clarifying with the Hiring Manager, all the interviewers decided to give it “yes” and the candidate turned out to be a great hire.
A piece of advice to the Recruiter and Hiring Manager: always schedule a debrief session with the interviewers after the interviews before proceeding to the next step. It’s also a good step for the Hiring Manager to clarify signals from the interviewers and it could be a good touch point with the Recruiter to discuss the next step and potentially give feedback to the candidates.
4. The interview process is too long and contains unnecessary steps for the role.
This is very common nowadays. We often see that a candidate requires 6-10 interviews before they would get an offer. While I can’t comment on whether those interviews are necessary for the role, I would like the Recruiter and the Hiring Manager to ask themselves the following questions:
Interviews are very expensive for both the company and the candidates. Every interviewer needs to spend time preparing for each interview and they will need to take time to write an evaluation and attend the debrief session afterwards. On average, companies interview 6-10 candidates before offering someone a job. Considering the salary of all the interviewers and all the roles the company needs to hire for, can we make our hiring process more efficient? On the candidate side, some said that interviewing is like a full-time job. Imagine that a candidate is interviewing 2-4 companies at the same time, how mentally exhausting they could get if each company requires 6-8 interviews? It’s even worse if they already have a full-time job while interviewing for another company.
If you reflect upon your job right now, how many of those interviews or questions in the interviews are relevant to find the right person for your job? Can you pass your own interview process? Don’t be lazy copying other companies’ interview processes. Revisit your interview process and the must-have requirements of the role to simplify your interview process. Eliminate all the unnecessary steps and focus on the quality and signals of each step. Sometimes less is more. That would make both the hiring side as well as the candidates much happier.
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5. Interviewers want the perfect candidate.
Most companies are not perfect. When candidates share examples of their past projects or experience, they usually reveal the imperfect situations that happened at their workplaces. Oftentimes, due to some uncontrollable circumstances, the candidate might not be able to change the situation. Some interviewers expect a perfect answer and they judge the candidates based on what they did in a certain situation. Instead of judging the candidate based on the situation they were in, try to ask more about what they would do if they can change the control. You’ll be able to gain much better insights and opinions on how the candidates think and react to events.
One of the signals we often look out for is the candidate’s skill set. Hard skills can be learned. Most people can learn at their jobs. However, soft skills and leadership skills are harder to learn and some behaviours are hard to change especially when those are tied to personality traits. It might be a better measurement to look for signals for adaptability, leadership and a growth mindset instead of having specific technical/domain skills in a candidate unless you need the candidate to be able to do the job on their first day and you have no time to train them. Evaluate the qualities you are looking for in a role and ensure that all the interviewers are trained to have that mindset. As interviewers, if we aim to look for the perfect example with the perfect answers, we are not evaluating the candidates based on their qualities and we are only looking for people who got to work in a perfect environment or those who can sell themselves better at the interviews. Having a perfect candidate at interviews that check all the boxes might not necessarily be a great hire for the company in the long run.
6. Interviewers see interviews as a chore.
Interviewing others can be a daunting task, especially if you need to interview a lot of people to fill a lot of roles during the company’s hyper-growth phase. Interview fatigue is something we should watch out for. The interviewer needs to spend time preparing for the interview, doing the interview, writing up an evaluation and attending debrief sessions after the interview. That’s a lot of time taken away from their day-to-day tasks. Engineers need a lot of continuous focus time to get their work done so having interviews in the middle of the day would affect their productivity a lot. When the interviewer is experiencing interview burnout, they start treating each interview as a chore rather than an engaging process. Sometimes they might just want to rush through all the questions to get it done. They would not spend time trying to dive deeper into the candidate’s answers or get to know them better. That would easily lead to some interview bias. That creates a bad interview experience for both the interviewers and the interviewees.
My general advice for managers is that every interviewer should not have more than 3 interviews a week if possible. The recruiter and the Hiring Manager should have a big enough pool of experienced interviewers that you can rotate them. They should also watch out for interview burnout. If they notice an interviewer starts having an interview burnout, try to give them a break from interviews. That would help both the interviewers and the candidates' experience. A great interview experience requires the interviewers to enjoy the interview process themselves so that they can be kind to the candidates as well as to themselves.
7. Managers expect interviewers to maintain productivity while conducting interviews.
Related to the point above, sometimes managers expect interviewers to be as productive on their tasks while needing to do interviews. Since performing interviews are very time-consuming, sometimes interviewers end up spending a lot of extra time making up their “work” time and over time, that leads to burnout. The amount of time invested in interviews should be factored into the person’s day-to-day work. I would suggest managers communicate clear expectations with the interviewers and other stakeholders. While interviews are part of everyone’s job, Engineers should be able to discuss with their managers and say no to interviews if the team is rushing for deadlines or interviews are greatly impacting their day-to-day work. Never assume that Engineers can magically be extra productive in handling both the delivery work and interviews at the same time. Do proper prioritization and tradeoffs for your team. Managers should also watch out for the burnout of their teammates who need to do interviews. Train more people to be interviewers so that you don’t need to rely on certain people on certain teams to do all the interviews. That would also spread out the impact on the delivery of work and the impact of the interviewers.
8. The talent team fails to provide candidates with accurate expectations for the interviews.
Every company’s interview process is different and every role could be different in terms of what the company is looking for. Sometimes some companies expect the candidates to be able to handle all types of interviews and they purposely make the content of the interviews very secretive and they thought that it’s a fair assessment. In reality, candidates might have gone through a similar process before but they would not know what your company values more at each interview step for your opening role. Therefore, it is very important to ensure that the Talent team is fully aware of the interview process and content and can prepare the candidates for that.
If the Talent team can give the right expectations to the candidates, the candidates can prepare accordingly and there’s a higher rate of success. It’s a win-win situation in the end. However, on the flip side, if the Talent team themselves are not even aware of the interview format/content, they will give wrong information or give a negative impression to the candidate about the company. The candidate might prepare for the wrong materials or they would be so surprised at the interviews. Interviews are stressful and having surprises at interviews is not fun. Giving a bad experience to the candidate would make them think that the company is not professional in terms of the interview process. If the recruiter can share details and expectations to prepare the candidates for each interview, that would make the interview process much more enjoyable for both the interviews and the interviewees and it turns out to be a fairer assessment for all the candidates.
9. The interviewing panel suffers from a lack of diversity.
Diversity is a strange thing. When you put diversity in place during the interview process, you attract diversity to the company. A diversified interview panel allows us to provide a fairer evaluation of the candidates because different perspectives were put in to ensure that we completely understand the candidate and we are not pigeonholing ourselves into hiring someone who talks/thinks similarly to us.
A good example would be having women in the interview panel for an engineering position would likely provide different perspectives toward the candidates than an interview panel with all men. Throughout the years, I have heard many female candidates telling me how happy and thankful they were to know that the Hiring Manager is a woman or there is a woman in the Engineering leadership role as part of the interviewers. I didn’t know that my presence made a difference in their interview experience. Women express themselves differently than men. Women are often evaluated based on a perceived lack of confidence in their communication style. Having someone who understands the way they behave would make a fairer evaluation. This also applies to any type of diversity - age, experience, region, race etc. I have seen some companies require interviewers on the panel to be the same or above the level of the role the company is hiring for to allow a fairer assessment. The candidate’s experience and their impressions of the company can change a lot just by seeing a diverse interview panel. Having a diverse interview panel would also give the company a higher chance of finding great-quality candidates with diversified backgrounds.
10. Interviewers neglect to seek feedback or engage in reflection to improve the interview process.
It’s ok if the company’s interview process is not good at the moment as long as they are willing to change to make it better. Whether the interviews turn out to be great or not, often depends on how the company runs the process as well as how the interviewers perform at the interviews. Yes, it’s not a typo - I am talking about the interviewer’s performance. For interviewers to be better interviewers, they need to receive feedback so it’s super important for companies to ask for feedback from the candidates about their experience and revise the interview process to make it better. It’s also great practice for the interviewers to give each other feedback after the debriefing session to ensure that they can do a better interview next time. The trap people easily fall into is that they don’t think they need to change or they don’t proactively look for feedback to make changes on the interview process. Some suggestions on what companies can do include:
A lot of the suggestions are owned by the Talent team but it’s also the responsibility of everyone who is involved in the interviewing process. When the hiring becomes slower, it’s the perfect timing to revise the interview process. When the candidates experience a great interview process, they would likely recommend others to apply for the company even though they might not pass all the interviews.
Those are the 10 traps you can all watch out for to ensure that you have a successful hiring process. For those of you who are hiring, hope it helps you to provide a better interviewing experience for the candidates as well as allow you to hire the right candidates to join your company. For those of you who are interviewing, if you do notice that the hiring company is showing signs that they have fallen into some of the traps above, try to gently give them feedback so that they can improve. I wish everyone can have a great interviewing experience.?