Is there a pearl in this oyster?
“Choice, not chance, determines your destiny” ― Aristotle
Hiring - one of the hardest tasks of a manager. And it’s inevitable. And you better choose the best produce on the market! There are many aspects of hiring and a lot of literature on what should and shouldn't be criteria for selecting a new employee. But it is always up to you to build a hiring process that gives you high confidence that whoever passes all the stages will be a “successful hire”.
In my view, interviewing is like dating. We meet a couple of times and get to know each other enough so that we can decide if we want to get into a relationship or not. Yes, it’s bidirectional. For me, even when I’m on the hiring end, it is important to share enough information about the company, the team, the job itself, and the culture so that the candidate can decide how they’d feel if they decide to join the company, what are the expectations, what is the environment that awaits them. On the other hand, I want to make sure I’m getting all the information I need to choose the one with a pearl between the oysters.
First of all - how many rounds?
This depends on how your team is organized, and the exact role you’re hiring for, but there are many aspects you want to cover in the complete process. So in my opinion, one round never suffices. Depending on how deep you want to dig, 3-4 rounds might be necessary to get all the insights on both ends to make an educated decision. If you go too long, you surely will lose candidates along the way, especially if the market is super competitive.
Hard skills and qualifications
Does the candidate have the necessary knowledge and qualifications to do the work? Assess their educational background, certifications, and any specialized training related to the position.
Hard skills are relatively easy to measure, tests and tasks can give you a pretty good overview of the professional capabilities of the candidate. In computer science, you can test for coding skills, systems design thinking, statistical knowledge, knowledge about machine learning approaches, and whatever hard skill is necessary for the role you’re hiring for. Here, if you’re not too technical, rely on your technical people to come up with the right tools and tasks.
Work experience and accomplishments
Dive into the candidate's work history, accomplishments, and specific contributions in previous roles to check what experience they bring to the team. Ask about projects they managed, challenges they faced, and the outcomes they achieved.
Cultural fit and values alignment
Extremely important for a long-term collaboration (aka. beginning of a beautiful friendship): Assess the candidate's alignment with the organization's culture, values, and mission. Ask questions to understand how they handle situations that align with the company's values. Evaluate if their work style, communication, and approach fit well within the existing team dynamics. We’re not looking for new members of the Chinese terracotta army, we want to achieve a healthy diversity. But some values are unquestionable for your organization - make sure you’re filtering for those and only for those.
Here you don’t have many options, ask the right (behavioral) questions in an interview. Using these questions and learning about their past experiences, you can evaluate their ability to adapt to change, handle conflict, and demonstrate leadership qualities.
Standard disclaimer: Educate yourself thoroughly on what you can ask about in an interview and what not. Some topics are clearly out of question, in most countries it is forbidden to discriminate against someone based on race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability, or genetic information.
Soft skills evaluation
If not listed explicitly in the job posting, gather all the soft skills that are essential or nice to have for the job. Assess these skills during the interview: communication, teamwork, leadership, adaptability, time management, ability to work under pressure, handle stress, and maintain professionalism. Behavioral questions will come in handy for these assessments as well. Consider involving the candidate's potential team members and the future manager in the interview process to assess compatibility and team fit. You can get useful insight from these team members and the managers on the candidate's potential fit within the team dynamics.
Motivation and career goals
This is also an important aspect of building a long-term relationship. If you understand the candidate's motivations for applying to the role and the company, discuss their career aspirations, long-term goals, and how they see themselves contributing to the organization's growth, you can assess if the role aligns with the candidate’s career trajectory and if they will be able to work towards their growth and development goals at the company.
Be agile
Your interview process and tooling should never be a rigid setup. Regularly take a step back, evaluate, and feel free to iterate:
You can get valuable feedback from the candidates about the tasks they got during the process, if they were interesting, or too exhausting, or if there were some rounds they didn’t understand.
I always ask the candidates we hire after a couple of months if the picture we painted during the interview conforms with reality. To set the right expectations on the candidate’s end, you need to be honest about the job.
You can also see how many candidates you lose along the way. This will be a sign that you have to speed up things, eliminate some rounds, or reorganize a couple of steps.
You will also see how well all these steps in the process serve your goals. Are you getting the right information about the candidates that support your decision?
Food for thought: What are the most important aspects of hiring in your view? How can you effectively assess soft skills? What do you think is a “good cultural fit”? What is your favorite interview question and what info does it give to you? Have you ever had a hire where everything went very well but still, in the end, it was a failure? Do you think you could’ve avoided it with a different process? Did you maybe change your process as a result? I would love to hear from your personal experiences.