Deeper dive: interviews
Talk talk
Before I get started, I want to be clear on one thing: this is not a comprehensive guide to doing interviews! That topic is pretty fully covered in many, many other places. Instead, I want to focus on some of the specific considerations of interviewing candidates for technical support roles, and what those considerations imply about how you should be conducting those interviews.
What’s the goal of live interviews anyway?
The hiring process is an attempt to effectively select candidates who are likely to perform well in the role. Not to get too deep into epistemology, but I do want to point out that this process is inherently flawed: there is literally no way to emerge from the hiring process with no remaining questions and 100% confidence that the selected candidate will be a good fit. To do that would require infinite time, infinite interviews, infinite steps. The best we can do is to come to a good approximation, and a good level of confidence that we have made the right choice. At the same time, there are many motivations to make the process as short and quick as possible: limited time on the part of the hiring team, limited patience on the part of the candidate, and in hiring booms, a strong desire to present an offer to our favorite candidate before they accept another one. With those restrictions in mind, we must make the best of each of our limited opportunities to learn more about the candidate.
This brings us to interviews. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll define an interview as a live conversation between a candidate and an evaluator, with the goal of assessing fitness for a particular role. Even that short definition has any number of ramifications, but I’ll focus on just a few of the words and concepts above:
- Live: an interview is a synchronous conversation, in-person or remote, not an emailed list of questions with written responses. But too many folks treat interviews as just that: a series of questions and answers, with no space for nuance or going off-script. If your interviews are going to be like that, save everyone’s time and just send a questionnaire. This leads to…
- Conversation: an interview should be a conversation, not an interrogation. There needs to be room for the candidate to ask questions, even outside the traditional ‘any questions for me?’ section at the end. If the interviewer can ask follow-up questions, or go off on interesting tangents, there’s a lot more room for the candidate to show their personality and expertise and start building rapport with the evaluator.
- Evaluator: There should be at least two different interviews: the hiring manager and a peer. The hiring manager interview is to allow the candidate and the manager to start to assess whether they could effectively build a working and reporting relationship. The peer interview is to ensure that there’s another set of eyes on the candidate, and to provide the candidate another perspective on what it’s like to work in this particular role with this particular manager. Speaking of assessment…
- Assessing fitness: Going back up to my point above, these conversations aren’t just for everyone’s health. You only have a few chances to speak with each candidate, so you need to make the most of those times. Go in with a plan, and expect to come out with answers to several specific questions. For example, the hiring manager might be specifically looking for an answer to, among other things, ‘Is this person manageable?’ The peer might be looking for ‘What’s the size of the knowledge gap that we’ll need to fill during onboarding?’ It’s also important to ask the same questions—at least, mostly the same, allowing for conversational flow—of every candidate so you can have a valid basis for comparison afterwards.
Synthesis and preparation
Synthesizing the above points into a coherent whole, your interview progression should be:
- A live conversation, with
- Two or more evaluators, including at a minimum the hiring manager and one peer, covering
- Specific conversational topics but containing room for a natural conversational back-and-forth, with the goal of
- Learning specific, predefined things about each candidate, whether that is technical acumen, team fit, or the more nebulous ‘troubleshooting mindset’.
What do all these points have in common? Well, leaving aside the first as a gimme, points two through four require advanced preparation. Don’t wing it, and don’t go into each interview with nothing particular in mind. Two kinds of preparation are necessary:
- Overall preparation of the interview process for this specific role: what do you want each interviewer to focus on? What questions do you want answered, and what’s the best way of asking those questions?
- Preparation for this specific interview: have you learned about the candidate in advance? Have you read her résumé and/or LinkedIn page? Have you read the notes from previous interviewers or technical exercise reviewers? All of this information is vital to ensure you’re prepared to have this conversation with this candidate.
Obviously you are going to build your own interviews to your own specific needs, but if you can ensure that all four points are effectively covered, that will get you a long way towards a good interviewing process.
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