No ‘ifs’ or ‘buts’, ‘ands’ or ‘maybes’, your team will make or break your startup.
Hiring the right people into the right roles at the right time is central to your company’s success.
And it doesn’t matter how you’ve discovered the candidate – your friend, your college acquaintance, a former colleague – interviewing them and understanding their capacity to undertake the role effectively and take a coveted place in your startup team is a core part of your hiring decision.
Interviews are your chance to understand candidates' qualifications, skills, and cultural fit. No two interviews are necessarily the same and the hiring process will vary by role and seniority, but there are certainly some central techniques that can be applied across the board to help you build high-performing teams.
We prepared this guide to help you do just that: conduct successful interviews. It assumes that you have already created an accurate, compelling job description.
1. Preparing for the interview
Role Familiarisation: Ensure interviewers are well-versed in the role's requirements, responsibilities, and desired qualifications.
Top Tip: Sometimes you won’t have a perfect understanding of the role as it’s the first time hiring into said role. You could evolve ‘role familiarisation’ to ‘needs familiarisation’ so you make sure the candidate can help you meet your org-wide objectives.
Reviewing Candidate Profiles: Familiarise interviewers with candidates' resumes and application materials to tailor questions and discussion points.
Establishing Evaluation Criteria: Define key competencies and attributes relevant to the role, forming a matrix of sorts against which you can assess and compare candidates. Align your priority interview questions accordingly.
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer at Commercetools and Brighteye mentor, provided insights on her best practice:
"Your interview process should match the skills base required for the role.
When you’re preparing for interviews, you should have perfect clarity on who is going to ask which questions and how they will probe to gain the information and insights needed to make a progression decision."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
2. Structuring the Interview process
"In a standard process, there are typically 3-4 stages - you clearly can’t have 3-4 identical stages so you need to think about how you structure the process. Each interviewer should know where to go deep into the candidate’s profile.
Our process usually looks a little like the following:
We have recruiters, specifically looking at crosschecking skills, salary and motivations
Then the hiring manager for the role will look at team dynamics and technical skills in the specific role
After this, we’d have a peer or expert attending the interview and really zero in on critical skills and competencies. This external view should be a ‘bar raiser’, ensuring the new person would add meaningfully to the quality of the teams
The final stage is typically more business-focused and will involve a task that is reviewed by a panel.
Throughout the process, we ensure a diverse panel considers the applicant."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
Introduction: Begin the interview with a warm welcome and introduction to create a comfortable atmosphere for candidates.
Behavioural Interviewing: Employ behavioural interview techniques to assess candidates' past experiences and behaviours as indicators of future performance. You will want to simulate the relationship(s) you would likely have in the organisation to better understand how this suits the candidates. Top tip: Pose situational or behavioural questions to gauge candidates' problem-solving abilities, interpersonal skills, and decision-making processes.
Technical Assessments: Incorporate technical assessments or exercises to evaluate candidates' skills and competencies relevant to the role.
Culture Fit Questions: Assess candidates' alignment with the startup's culture and values through questions that explore their work preferences, collaboration styles, and motivations.
3. Assessing Cultural Fit and Values Alignment
Culture Probing: Probe candidates' values, attitudes, and work preferences to assess their compatibility with the startup's culture and team dynamics.
Behavioural Alignment: Look for evidence of behaviours and attitudes that align with the startup's core values and cultural norms during the interview process.
Scenario-based Assessments: Present candidates with hypothetical scenarios or challenges to gauge their approach, mindset, and fit within the startup's culture.
4. Providing Feedback and Evaluation
Post-Interview Debrief: Conduct a post-interview debrief session to gather feedback from interviewers and evaluate candidates' performance against predetermined criteria.
Candidate Rating and Ranking: Rate candidates based on predefined evaluation criteria and rank them according to their suitability for the role and cultural fit.
Constructive Feedback: Provide candidates with constructive feedback on their performance and areas for improvement to support their professional development and enhance candidate experience.
"Scorecards within processes are severely underrated.
In many cases, the people interviewing will be slack-ing informally to approve or reject the candidate rather than undertaking a proper review of the candidate. This is not the way to create behaviours or skills that raise the bar in your organisation. In my opinion, high performance starts from scorecards that are independently and thoroughly filled In. Hiring managers and others need to be trained in how to do this properly. Only once this is done should you be in a position to make a call, which is typically from: no / yes / strong yes. Someone has to be a ‘strong yes’ across the board to be approved and hired."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
5. Continuous Improvement
Feedback Loop: Solicit feedback from interviewers, candidates, and hiring managers to identify strengths and areas for improvement in the interview process.
Training and Development: Provide ongoing training and development opportunities for interviewers to enhance their interviewing skills, techniques, and cultural competency.
Iterative Refinement: Continuously refine and iterate interviewing techniques based on feedback, best practices, and evolving organisational needs to optimise the talent acquisition process.
"The debrief within the hiring team is an important element of the process. It’s an important coaching and training moment for the People team members, diving into what skills actually look like, expectations in the organisation, what good and great looks like, etc. We are also focused on NPS from candidates, including those we turn down.
We do quarterly hiring manager surveys to measure NPS of the hiring manager. This enables us to understand whether hiring managers are fast enough, if there are any issues, and informs how we can streamline and improve the process in future.
Candidate experience is crucial. In our case, as part of interview prep, we share a candidate prep pack with people that pass the first talent acquisition check. The pack includes a deck that introduces the company, explains our process, introduces our values, provides central advice on preparing for the interview stages, informs them of what to research with possible resources. We see it as coaching them before they enter our process, so they know we are trying to set them up for success. It also means that our interviews tend be high quality with well-prepped candidates."
Roxana Dobrescu, Chief People Officer
at Commercetools, Brighteye Mentor
Mastering interviewing techniques is essential for startups to identify, attract, and retain top talent that aligns with the organisation's goals, culture, and values. By preparing thoroughly, structuring the interview process effectively, asking insightful questions, and assessing cultural fit and values alignment, startups can make informed hiring decisions and build high-performing teams.
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