A Guide to Interview Process Perfection

What is the best interview process?

It’s a hotly debated topic, and in a constantly shifting market, it’s unlikely that there will ever be a definitive answer to that question.

The truth is, many people have forgotten the purpose of an interview process - and I’ll include myself in that at times as well.

It’s not a box ticking exercise, or a race to see who can rush through that exercise the fastest.

But, quicker = better, right?

Not always…

Let me explain.

I believe there are 4 key metrics when it comes to running a ‘good’ interview process:

- Candidate Efficiency (the time and effort for the candidate)

- Company Efficiency (the time and effort for the employer)

- Effectiveness (the ability to accurately rank candidate suitability and skill)

- Brand Impact (the positive or negative impact on your employer brand)

Think of them as spinning plates. As long as all 4 of those plates keep spinning, you’ll be in a pretty good spot, but leave any one of those unattended for a little too long, and your process starts to fall and smash into tiny pieces.

Candidate Efficiency

This refers to the overall time and effort that is required on the candidate’s part to complete an interview process with your business.

As candidate efficiency decreases (i.e - more time and effort is required), so does candidate quality.

In other words, the better the candidate, the less hoops they are willing to jump through.

Excessive interview stages, lengthy technical challenges, and multiple in person interviews all have a noticeable negative impact on ‘candidate efficiency’, which in turn, has a similar negative impact on candidate quality.

Pro Tip: Candidate efficiency can hinge quite heavily on a candidate’s perception, and that perception can be easily influenced. For example, a tech test can be fine, when prefaced by the fact that it is used to make the remainder of the process quicker, less intense, and more relevant - although, no test will always be better.

Company Efficiency

Perhaps somewhat obviously, this is the overall time and effort required on the employer’s part throughout an interview process.

And as expected, Candidate and Company efficiency are very closely related.

For example, having an excessive amount of interview stages will also negatively impact company efficiency - it’s a time sink for you and your staff.

However, the inclusion of a take home tech test can allow you to either significantly shorten, or completely remove a technical interview stage, potentially saving your staff hours/candidate. Good for the candidate efficiency? No. But efficient for you? Yes.

Pro Tip: As your business grows, this metric becomes more important. However, as an early stage start-up of <50 people, it should be the lowest priority of the 4 metrics. A non-scalable approach to hiring has such a massive impact in this early stage - take advantage whilst you can.

Effectiveness

An interview process needs to be effective - otherwise, it’s entirely useless. And in simple terms, the more thorough a process is, the more effective it’ll be.

Trouble is, this decreases candidate efficiency, which decreases candidate quality, which often leads to comments such as “nobody is good enough to pass our interview process”.

In reality, it’s quite likely that those who are good enough aren’t interested in going through the process in the first place, or are removing themselves before completing it.

It’s a very fine balance between extracting the information and detail that you need to screen and rank ability effectively, whilst keeping the very best candidates engaged until the end.

Pro Tip: Consider combining interviews (two 45 minutes interviews into one 90 minute interview, for example). This is less effort for the candidate (big tick for candidate efficiency), will help you streamline the process with less stages, and gives you a bigger block of uninterrupted time to dig deeper on suitability.

Brand Impact

Your employer brand can do some seriously heavy lifting, but it can also ruin any hope of hiring good people without immense costs and effort.

A positive employer brand is what allows Canva and Atlassian to drag candidates through every hoop imaginable.

But the negative employer brand of another Sydney unicorn forces them to pay Senior Engineers $50K above market, only to still find hiring immensely difficult.

No matter where you land with any of the other metrics, you can not neglect your employer brand, as words spreads extremely quickly in the start-up space, and negative word is heard far more clearly than positive.

Pro Tip: AI, most automation, clunky application processes, low interview efficiency, robotic interviews and lack of feedback all contribute negatively to your employer brand.

A human touch, consistent communication and updates, constructive feedback, and a process that keeps candidate efficiency and experience front and centre will contribute positively.

So where does that leave you?

Well, it sort of depends.

What do you value, what does your business value?

If you want the best people, you’ll need to rank highly when it comes to both candidate efficiency & effectiveness, and whilst your brand may not need to be world beating, it certainly can’t be bad.

But this likely means you’ll have to let company efficiency take a back seat. It takes a lot of time and effort to hire very good people, you can’t take shortcuts here.

On the other hand, many roles don’t require the best person available. They require solid people, with the right attitudes, and a willingness to get the job done in a professional and reliable manner.

Often times, there are a lot of those candidates available, and in those scenarios, candidate efficiency isn’t as important (just don’t neglect it so much that it starts to tank your employer brand).

During a hypergrowth phase, it’s impossible to hire the very best 20 times over, and so at some stage you may need to dial back the ‘effectiveness’ metric to allow slightly weaker (but still strong enough) candidates through.

It’s a balancing act, and one that each individual business and hiring manager needs to figure out for themselves.

But now you know where to begin, and what needs to be considered before attempting to get anywhere close to that ‘perfect’ interview process.

And finally, what CAN’T you get away with?

These are those non-negotiable rules that you just need to accept.

Imagine you’re spinning your plates, all is going well, and then an earthquake strikes.

• You can not ask anyone to do any kind of form, test, survey or question without having a conversation with them first. Candidate quality falls off a cliff, and your employer brand will take a huge hit.
• Speed is still very important. No more than 4 stages including a test (4 is still not ideal, but not unmanageable either), and no longer than 2 weeks from application to offer.
• Feedback = must. If you speak with a candidate, you have a responsibility to get back to them with the outcome, and some feedback they can take with them.

Thanks for reading!

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