Everything I've learned about recruiting and interviewing

https://kellblog.com/2022/02/16/everything-ive-learned-about-recruiting-and-interviewing/

Thoughts on The Recruiting Process

• Know what you’re looking for. Most troubles begin here because people fail to ponder and debate what they are actually looking for, so you do the equivalent of walking into Costco without a shopping list. You should know the answers to these questions; keep yourself honest by documenting them in a must-have / nice-to-have document.
• Remember it’s a mutual sales process. Unless you’re blessed to be at the hottest company in town, always remember that recruiting is a mutual sales process. That means you need to be selling and filtering at the same time.
• Follow some methodology or book. I’m not particularly religious about which one, but I think a common framework helps to ensure completeness and improve communication during the recruiting process. My private equity friends at ParkerGale, who do a great job of methodology selection, swear by Lou Alder so I’ll plug Hire With Your Head here. ParkerGale has their own hiring playbook available as well.
• Use work test samples. While I’m not big into puzzles with prisoners and lightbulbs, I am a huge believer in having candidates do anything that approximates the work they’ll be doing if they take the job. … The two were neck-and-neck on paper and in the interviews, but the exercise revealed a massive difference between them. (We hired the one whose work stood out and were happy we did.)
• Check references. While I suppose the standard process of checking candidate-supplied references is still de rigeur, my favorite reference checks are backchannel and framed not in a binary hire-or-not light, but instead in the light of: if I were to hire them, what strengths and weaknesses should I expect to see and how should I work with them to get the best results? This framing tends to produce a better conversation.
• Consider a try-and-buy. One way to remove enormous risk from the recruiting process is a try-and-buy: hire the person as a contractor or consultant, try working together for 3 to 6 months, and if both sides are happy at the end of that period, then convert the candidate to regular employment.

Thoughts on the Interview

• After chit-chat, ask for a N-minute life story with an emphasis on the why, not the what (i.e., why did you major in X, take first job Y, or move to job Z, as opposed to what you did in each). For math types, I call this the first derivative of your resume. I like to time-bound it, typically to 5 or 10 minutes, to see if the candidate has the ability to manage time and summarize accordingly. I like the first derivative because it provides more information: I already (largely) know what a PMM or VP of Finance does at a software company. I’d much prefer to hear why someone chose to work (or stop work) at company X.

• I decided to never ask for philosophies of any type, ever again. Instead, think about situations that are encountered on the job and ask for relevant stories: tell me about a time your fired someone, tell me about a time you launched a product, tell me about a time you ran the planning and budgeting process. The experts call this behavioral interviewing, and it works.

• Drill, baby, drill. While I first learned this technique as a way to catch liars and exaggerators (who are frequently ensnared by the details), drill-down questions make fantastic follow-ups to behavioral “tell me about a time” questions. … I’ve literally started down this path and had people say, “uh, I didn’t actually run the process in that job, but I was part of it” — an important distinction. Whether to catch embellishment or to better understand candidates, drill-down questions work. It’s more effective to go ten feet deep on one situation than one foot deep across ten.

• Consider a panel interview. I’ve become a huge fan of properly conducted panel interviews. But first, what a panel interview is not: it’s not randomly throwing 2-3 interviewers into a room with a candidate with no structure or preparation.

  What I’ve seen work is the following: after a screening process that results in three candidates who meet all must-have criteria, you appoint a lead interviewer to create 5 behavioral questions (based on expected job duties in the first 12 to 18 months), share those questions with the candidate in advance, and then run a 90-minute live interview with a panel of 3-5 members who largely listen and ask follow-up questions only. You create a scoring rubric, have all interviewers complete it, and then conduct a live discussion to compare the candidates.

  The panelists listen intently because they’re not worried about running the interview, the remaining time, or their next question. All candidates are asked the same questions. And then you debrief via a live discussion which, as much as I love technology, is far higher bandwidth than any collaboration mechanism. And you avoid groupthink because the rubric has been completed in advance. Fire. I thank ParkerGale for teaching this technique to me; they have a Private Equity Funcast episode on how they approach hiring here.