Be the Interviewer You Wished You'd Talked to Way Back When

In 2022 I was laid off from a tech job just before layoffs became the cool thing to do. What followed was a year of job-searching hell that showed me that both traditional and trendy recruiting practices are as well suited to the current tech landscape as a cheap pool floatie is to river rapids.

It sucks for everyone and it doesn't have to. Join me for a boots-on-the-ground guide to navigating this mess.

I remember hanging up the phone after a particularly strange and offputting interview very early in my job search and thinking that surely that was going to be the weirdest interview I experienced in my life.

Unfortunately not.

In the months between that interview and now, I've sat through the motherlode of terrible tactics. Interviews that were 30 minutes and should have been an hour. 20 minute screenings that could have been five. I considered creating a bad interview bingo card with items such as “late” or “very late” “didn't look at my application” and “insulted me” or my personal favorite, “didn't show up.”

Compared to those interviews, it's very easy to be attractive at the interview stage. But even so, folks are losing good candidates in the interview stage despite the fact that (I think) that most companies are making a huge effort to create a fair, effective interview. But companies are getting bad return on their investment. Why? I think too many companies are trying to come up with a perfect interview system, or they are relying on old, gimmicky advice. A full year of experiencing interviewing “systems” and “gimmicks” has convinced me that the best approach is being the nice, normal, empathetic human you, yourself, would want to interview with, were you searching. Prepare thoughtfully, schedule smartly, and (this will sound familiar) don't be unattractive.

Thoughtful Preparation

Preparation need not be a daunting affair. In fact, I think it should be pretty simple. The same team that sorted your mountain should create 5-10 screening questions for the first round of interviews. At least two people should do a roleplay to see how long successfully answering those questions takes. It's better if the roleplay is repeated again with different participants to make sure the result makes sense. (Sanity checks in your own process are always attractive, and will show through the process to the candidate!) Generally a screening interview takes between twenty and forty minutes.

Hot tips on day-of interview prep:

• Shortly before the interview, schedule some time to review the candidate application materials. If there is more than one interviewer, review it together. If the candidate has already answered some of your bog-standard questions (and most candidates will have done so) don't ask those questions. Just make notes from their materials.
• While reading candidate materials, it's a great idea to get your phone, earbuds, or headset all charged up. Surprisingly, I've been in quite a few interviews where there was an equipment failure due to dead batteries.
• Make sure that you have a nice, private area to interview that is reasonably quiet and free of distractions.

Smart Scheduling

Teams often make the unattractive mistake of scheduling the interview for exactly the length of time they practiced during the roleplay. The trouble with doing so is this; your team knows what kind of answers they want. The candidate doesn't, and it might take a little time to get synced up and on the same level, so to speak. An interview that is a tight fit will feel rushed. To be most attractive, the interview itself should be scheduled for about half again as long as it was estimated to take. (It's my opinions that if that causes it to run over an hour, some questions should be trimmed to make it fit the hour slot. Any longer than that and it may be hard to get it scheduled.)

Hot tips for scheduling:

• Have the first interview by phone. It's much easier to schedule a phone call than a video interview.
• Make sure you have buffer time on either side of the interview. Rushing in late or rushing off to the next appointment isn't a good look. Having enough time for someone is attractive because it conveys that the candidate is valued.
• At the beginning of the interview, please make sure you understand if the candidate has only the scheduled time available to them, or if they can run over. Be respectful of their time. Respect is attractive.

Attractive Interviewing

A truly astonishing quantity of literature has been written on this exact topic. Again, it's been packaged and sold to companies, and people have really thrown their all into learning methods and tricks to not much avail. As stated earlier, my counsel is to ignore systems and gimmicks, and be the polished version of yourself. That said, there's five common experiences I've had that make an otherwise attractive company unattractive during the screening call. I think these situations are easily avoided if you give them a minute or two of thought, so let's do that now.

Hot Tips for Interviewing

• Don't eat up the interview time with a sales pitch about the company. The candidate is already interested in working there. Instead, have 2-4 sentences prepared about unique benefits and compensation, and have culture comments woven throughout the process.
• Where possible, ask versions of your questions that are specific to the candidate. For instance, perhaps one question your team wants to answer is how familiar the candidate is with relational databases. You see that the candidate worked for Oracle. Even just adjusting your question to “Did your time at Oracle change how you thought about databases?” will feel more personal and engaged. Personal and engaged is attractive.
• Let the interview be a little organic. Some people are more focused on culture, some more on skills. Let a candidate show you who they are. Sometimes knowing that a candidate can't stay on track is important. Sometimes what you find out when you go off plan is what absolutely sells you on them. So be flexible.
• There's an old bit of wisdom that you should be fairly non-responsive to a candidate. Very calm faced and not showing engagement or disengagement. It had its time, but that time is gone. In my own experience, and having spoken to other candidates, at best more nervous candidates will talk too much and feel horrendously awkward, and less nervous candidates will think that the company had someone else in mind. At worst, people will select out of the process because “no one seemed happy to be there.” Humanity and warmth is attractive. Grey rocking is an established method for shutting people out. Don't grey rock the people you want to bring aboard.
• Practice a neat, tidy closing. The best elements are timeline, next steps, and contact information for any lingering questions that the candidate may have, or for checking in if they haven't heard from you by the time you state. (So be honest with yourself and candidates about the timeline!) The Minnesota goodbye on the phone is painfully awkward with a power differential.

This isn't a definitive, exhaustive guide to interviewing, and it's not meant to be. It's meant to help a company that is doing pretty well take a few more of the right steps. Toss the books, be human, is really all most good companies need to do. (Consider this the professional equivalent of kitting out your buddy with some breath mints for that awesome date night. It's the little boost that makes all the difference.) If this seems like advice that is impossible to implement or worlds away from what you are doing, lets chat and get things turned around.??Or stick around, I'm thinking about doing a troubleshooting series next.