Signal vs noise: Interviews

Signal vs noise: Interviews

I often hear interviewers say things like, "I don't know, I just didn't get a good feeling about the candidate." But what does that actually mean? Did the candidate lack the skills to do the job? Were they not aligned with your company's values? Or did the interviewer simply not like them? An interview should be designed to answer specific questions about a candidate, not to confirm an interviewer's gut feelings.

In my last post I talked about getting signal from reference checks after you’ve already interviewed a candidate and want to move forward with them. In this week’s article I want to focus on that interview process. How can you conduct an interview that avoids bias, ensures you get the signal you need to confidently move forward, and sets the interviewer up for success? To start, there are two types of interviews you should be conducting: technical interviews and values-based interviews. 

Technical interviews: Do they have the required skills?

Technical interviews focus on the skills required for the job itself. Can a sales person sell, can a programmer program, can a project manager build consensus and manage stakeholders? The vast majority of your interview time should be spent here. After all, you're hiring someone to do a job, and you need to know if they can do it well. You need to answer the question, “Does this person have the skills required to succeed in the role?” My suggestion to figure this out is a series of interviews with subject matter experts who conduct practical interviews. A practical interview is one where the interviewee uses or demonstrates the skill you’re evaluating via real-life examples that they would encounter during the real job. Instead of asking a sales person to sell you “this pen”, instead equip them with facts about your product the week beforehand and ask them to pitch the actual product with the knowledge they have. Instead of asking an engineer to solve an esoteric algorithm problem, ask them to debug a real bug you’ve had in the past and see if they can fix it. The goal is not to trick the interviewee into giving a poor response. You want to set them up to show off their best abilities. Remember, you're hiring someone for their exceptional strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. A great interview should give candidates the opportunity to show you what makes them exceptional, rather than simply trying to catch them making a mistake. 

Setting your interviewers up for success

You need to set your technical interviewers up for success as well. They should know the rubric they will be grading on beforehand. Show them the actual score sheet they will be filling out so they know what to focus on during the interview. And very importantly, remind them that they should not be trying to interview for “vibes”, “culture” or values. That’s a different part of the interview and they need to focus on the skills only. By giving interviewers specific skills to evaluate and a clear rubric to grade against, you reduce the opportunity for personal bias to influence their decisions. Instead of asking whether they liked the candidate, you're asking them to show evidence that the candidate can do the job.

Values interviews: Will they thrive here?

The second type of interview you’ll be conducting is what I call a “values” interview. In the past you would interview for culture or vibes. In the early days at Stripe they had a rule of “if you came in on the weekend hoping for the office to be empty and you saw this person, would you be happy to see them or disappointed” to determine if that person is a culture fit or not. But the problem with these sorts of rubrics is that they’re rife with bias. Often the person you want to see in the office on the weekend is someone that looks and sounds a lot like yourself. But if you keep hiring people like that eventually you’ll have a culture where everyone looks and thinks the same way. This kind of monoculture may be easy to build in the beginning, but it will hurt your product and service in the long run. You need people with different personalities and perspectives to build a product that will appeal to the most people out there. Those that come from a different background can see gaps that others would miss. So what is a values interview, and how do you conduct one? Well, if you read my article on company values, you’ll know how important I find them to be. In that article I state, “Company values are who you hire, reward, and fire.” They are a reflection of the baseline values you want all of your employees to share. While you do want people from many different backgrounds, you also want them to share some baseline values with one another. This is where you find that out. And the way you find that out is using another technique I’ve already brought up in my references article, asking for stories. The best way to know if someone will act a certain way is to find out if they’ve already been acting that way. If you want to know if someone has the value of “Ship, shipmate, self” (one of Lattice’s values) you would ask a question like, “Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision between what was best for yourself, your team, and your company. What did you decide to do, and why? What was the context and what was the outcome of that action?” Of course, candidates can exaggerate or fabricate stories. But the more you ask about the details, context, and outcomes, the harder it becomes to give convincing answers without real experience to draw on. You’ll quickly get a sense how genuine their answers are and if they are “values aligned” with your organization.

Keep improving your interviews

Practical interviews tell you whether a candidate can do the job. Values interviews tell you whether they'll be successful within your organization. Together, they should give you the evidence you need to make a confident hiring decision. If you still feel uneasy, do a retrospective. What parts of the interview are still not getting you the signal you need? Designing your interviews should be an iterative process. Keep changing it until you have the signal you need. And if you haven’t already read my last article on reference checks, read that next! A series of reference checks after a good interview gives you that extra bit of confidence needed to extend an offer.

Thanks for reading,

Eric