How to leverage your best interviewers

A brilliant candidate experience doesn’t just appear out of thin air – it’s a consequence of thoughtful processes and putting your most committed people in the hot seat. Make yourself a brew and scroll down for some handy tips on developing a best-in-class interview strategy.

Podcast: Lessons from an Attentive visionary

For our latest Scaling Stories podcast, it was a great pleasure to catch up with Cierra Tavarez, the Chief of Staff to the SVP of Recruiting at Attentive, an SMS software platform and leader in conversational commerce.

Chicago-based Cierra has worked in sourcing roles for the likes of Capital One, Facebook and Uber Freight, and as our discussion demonstrates, she’s a big thinker with profound insights on everything from big tech recruitment formulas to the way we conduct interviews.

At Attentive, Cierra has developed an “interviewer training and calibration program”, and one recurring theme in our chat was Cierra’s laser-focused approach to making sure interviewers live up to their responsibilities. For Cierra, that means gathering intel – “part data and part anecdote” – on key questions, such as:

• Which interviewers are showing up?
• Do they cancel at the last minute?
• Are they making their calendars available?
• How do they conduct themselves in the interview?
• What are the debriefs like?

“A poor candidate experience really spreads like wildfire and becomes a company’s reputation,” Cierra warns.

Specifically, here’s how Cierra helped to transform the candidate experience at Uber Freight:

• Cierra found that many of the interviewers were “overworked and stressed and not well trained or calibrated in the interview process”. Sounds familiar? To remedy this, Cierra “pitched a program wherein we would incentivise interviewers to perform better in their interview responsibilities by making it part of their performance reviews”.
• Additionally, Cierra “kept a docket of people who [were] not performing up to par”, but also, made a note of those dependable interviewers “who I could always rely on to fill in for a no-show interviewer”.
• Finally, Cierra would collect feedback from candidates on whether they liked the interviewer, and then pass on this feedback to the interviewers’ managers. This meant she was able to “lift those interviewers to a more visible position” and “develop a layer of trust between myself and my stakeholders that hadn't been there before”.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Cierra also touched on the differences between ‘sourcing’ and ‘recruiting’.

“I’ve found that number one – the most important key component of a strong sourcing function is specialised sourcing leadership,” she says.

Cierra also expresses skepticism towards culture efforts that “ring a little bit hollow” – for example: “spending money to decorate an employee’s desk for their birthday… and yet that person’s executives don’t know their name”.

According to Cierra, a good approach to culture is to “source organic ideas from people who want to be involved in architecting a culture from the start”.

We also covered some big ideas on the nature of ‘loyalty’ among employees, and how this is often misunderstood.

“A company cannot be loyal to you because a company isn’t a person,” Cierra says. “The loyalty, the obligation, the altruism that people are prone to feeling towards their company should be reserved exclusively for their human relationships.”

As you can tell from these extracts, Cierra is a fountain of knowledge and committed to better hiring practices. And beyond the trappings of work life, she’s a fan of the This Is Love podcast and learning how to crochet!

We hope you enjoy our chat as much as we did. For more insights on some of these themes, check out our blogs on the candidate experience and creating a great work culture.

The Amazon flywheel effect

Every now and then, we like dipping into the Intrro library to absorb some words of wisdom. Here’s an insight on how raising the talent bar can exponentially bear fruit for hiring teams.

“The Amazon hiring process has a flywheel effect that pays greater dividends the longer it is used. The bar gets higher, such that, eventually, employees say to themselves, “I’m glad I joined when I did. If I interviewed today, I’m not sure I’d be hired!”

– Colin Bryar, author of Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

Things you might have missed

• Are the floodgates on VC investment about to open? In America, VC investors are sitting on $290 billion of “dry powder” cash reserves that could be splurged on startups in 2023, reports The Information.
• India has a long-established reputation as a hotbed of developer talent, but a new study claims that “95 percent of engineers in the country are not fit to take up software development jobs”, reports the Economic Times.
• The frosty economic news continues, as ride-sharing app Lyft has announced a hiring freeze which is set to last until the end of 2022, according to the New York Post.
• But we’ll end on a high note – the Battery 2022 Cloud Software Spending Survey has dropped, and shows that more than half (54%) of tech startups expect their budgets to increase in the next 12 months. As you can see (below), enterprise security, data spend and automation (with a tangible ROI) are some of the biggest priorities.

Recruiting fail

This week we’ve got a special WFH fail. This Reddit post tells the story of an over-zealous senior admin official who’s insisted that employees must work from their HR-registered address. Why??

‘In the zoom meeting, one of the participants was apparently at the beach participating in the meeting remotely. Except, she wasn’t. She had her Zoom background set to the ‘tropic’ theme with the palm trees and ocean in the background. The moron thought she was participating remotely from Aruba or some shit.’

Read our guide on managing remote employees for some ideas on how to embed WFH without your people saying “WTF”.

Until next time

Thanks for reading Intrro #35. We’ll be back with more recruitment wisdom next week. Until then, spread the word and have a good one!