Building the Interview Plan

Published on January 12, 2025

This post follows a previous post here.

In the previous post, we break down what you need to align on before you start actively searching for candidates. It is critical to know who you are looking to hire before you invest in the search. From here, we can focus on evaluation. We do this by building an interview plan.

The interview plan is the blueprint we use for designing the evaluation parts of the interview. Now that we know who we are looking for, the interview plan tells us how we will evaluate the candidate. The candidate's background and experience only tell us so much, and interviews help us assess their suitability for the specific challenges and culture of the organization.

Interview plans should include details on:

The number of steps in the process; including the flow of interviews and expected time commitment from the candidate and the interview team. This sets expectations with the team and interviewers, and helps hedge against adding more steps to the process -- if there is alignment upfront, slowing down by adding "just one more interview" is much harder to get away with. This can derail a process, so lay it out and align with the group upfront.
What we evaluate in each interview. Every conversation with the candidate should have specific objectives, with questions designed to help us get the data we need to make an informed decision.
Guidance for interviewers to effectively conduct the interview. This should include a number of resources for them to use to help them prepare for the conversation. Beyond knowing the process and what we are evaluating, we should provide interviewers with guidance on how to do this well and build skills as interviewers.

Not having a structured interview plan is risky. Lacking structure makes decisions harder for the team and creates a poorer candidate experience. If I'm a candidate evaluating two similar companies, I am likely going to be more inclined to join the organization that has a rigorous, structured interview process and appears to take candidate evaluation seriously (all things equal, of course).

I often hear horror stories of people interviewing at companies where there are no clear next steps, gaps in communication, or take home projects that are essentially free consulting work. Many companies still see interviewing as a one-way street, acting as though candidates should be begging to work there.

The best candidates have options, and as such are discerning. The interview is unique in that it's both an exercise for the company to evaluate the candidate and their suitability, but it's also an opportunity to make an impression: this is the chance to sell the candidate on the company, the opportunity, the role, and the mission. Good interviewing should also kick off the onboarding process for a candidate, where they have clear understanding of what to expect and start to think through how they would approach the role if hired.

At minimum, you want to ensure the process is consistent and clear so that recruiting teams can articulate expectations that enable the candidate to prepare and show up in the best way possible. While some may feel that making the interview appear too "easy" for the candidate will make it difficult to hire, to me, an interview isn't a test to pass. The goal is to ensure that both sides can identify suitability for the role and job responsibilities. Candidates should know what to expect so they can be prepared to speak to their experience and present information in a way that will be understood by the interview team.

The interview is the way for the company to gather data to make an informed decision in the debrief, while also the opportunity for the company to sell the candidate on the job.

Think of interviews like corporate events – similar to how we build relationships with prospects at conferences, but for potential hires. A well-executed interview process, like a premium conference, allows mutual evaluation while building candidate interest and confidence. Few companies take this approach, making it an easy way to stand out.

So let's start by thinking through how we want to interview.

Interview Plan

There are a lot of ways you can design an interview process. You want to ensure the process is thorough, yet efficient. There is only so much depth an interviewee will stomach, and interview time can get expensive for everyone if you ask for too much of it.

Thus, we want to find an acceptable number of steps and interviews to ensure the experience gives the company what they need to make a decision, while also ensuring that the process is not overly burdensome for everyone involved.

Risk averse companies may be inclined to go around and around in the interview, stringing candidates along while fence-sitting, unable to commit to a decision, wasting time until someone's nephew gets the role without an interview or we get notice that "the role was filled internally". This wastes everyone's time.

You have to trust your process and commit to the decision after evaluating a candidate. To trust the process, it needs to be built well and iterated upon as you learn more. You should be constantly evaluating how you're interviewing, what you're learning, and how the process works for you, the interview team, and candidates, to help drive improvement.

Some considerations:

Don't have the candidate meet too many people until we have strong enough indicators to think that the candidate could be a hire. The last thing we want is for the candidate to meet with the full team and have it be a resounding no over a gap that we could've identified earlier.
Don't have too many gates or decision points. There should be only a few steps, I lean towards three, with four as an absolute maximum.
Remember that the process will serve as a filter for candidates. While people who have fewer responsibilities or are more desperate may be willing to do a full take home assignment, busy professionals or those with responsibilities at home likely won't be able to commit to extra work. Consider how your process will impact your ability to attract diverse candidates, and see if you can find more efficient ways to get the data you need without requiring as much homework on the part of the candidate.
Be clear in what the goals are for each step and know what you plan to evaluate in each to ensure that each stage is unique.

Here is how I might structure an interview process.

Recruiter phone screen
Hiring manager phone screen
Series of interviews with hiring manager and interview team. In addition to more traditional interviews, this step could include other exercises: a live case study, code exercise, presentation, or portfolio review -- some sort of exercise that shows the candidate in action.

This template can be adjusted based on your needs – you might prefer having candidates demonstrate their skills earlier in the process. The key benefit of this structure is efficiency: it uses low-investment screening steps early when the candidate pool is largest, ensuring that by the time you involve the broader team, candidates are both qualified and interested. By the end of the third step, you should have enough data to make a decision. The candidate, too, should have enough exposure to the team and company to determine if they're ready to sign on as well.

Let's walk through what we want to get out of each step.

1. Recruiter Phone Screen

The recruiter phone screen is a brief initial conversation to verify resume details and assess basic fit based on experience, career goals, and salary expectations. Rather than a deep evaluation, it serves as an efficient filtering step after resume review. Recruiters should use this stage to screen out clear mismatches while advancing promising candidates to hiring managers for more thorough discussions.

At minimum, even if the candidate has strong experience on paper, we want to take this step to validate key points and ensure they're interested in the role, have relevant experience that could make them a fit, are aligned to the proposed salary for the job, and are interested in moving at a timetable that suits both parties.

Here are some questions I would ask and why I would ask them:

Tell me about yourself: This opener reveals how candidates present their experience and future goals. I typically narrow the scope to recent work history or a two-minute limit. While it serves as an ice breaker and sets up the conversation, keep it brief – some candidates can get too detailed, and it's important to stay on track. This question is an ice breaker and tees up the rest of the conversation, so it should be brisk. Don't be afraid to cut the candidate off if they are veering off here. You have more questions to ask!
What are you looking to do next? This reveals why they're interested enough to take the call or submit an application. I look for three things: their company research, their motivation for changing roles (industry pivot? new function? company issues?), and what truly matters to them. The first two points help assess fit and seriousness, while understanding their priorities helps determine if the role aligns with their goals. I particularly value candidates who may lack "perfect" experience but have done their homework and can articulate why this role fits their career path. These candidates often show the strongest motivation – they're running toward this opportunity rather than away from their current situation. Getting to the truth early will help ensure the candidate is not sold the wrong role and that they have a positive experience if they join.
Questions about technical qualifications and experience: These vary by role but ensure basic fit. For sales roles, I explore deal sizes, industries, and their specific responsibilities to gauge transferability. For example, enterprise SaaS sales differs greatly from retail sales. While I might not consider a retail salesperson for a senior enterprise role, they could be perfect for an entry-level position. For engineers, I assess their language proficiency and project experience against the team's critical requirements. Regardless of role, these questions help me find follow-up questions to ask to ensure they know what they're getting into, and to ask if they have relevant experience in the specific areas we need. Sometimes this is a deal breaker, other times it is non-essential. Regardless, it's good to get this kind of data early. Your job scope document should provide guidance here.
Provide more detail to the candidate on the company and opportunity. Once I've gathered enough information to gauge potential fit, I share more about our company context, why the role exists, and what we need this person to accomplish. I also outline next steps and follow up by email to reinforce these details.
Questions from candidate. This final segment not only helps candidates get clarity but reveals their priorities. This is critical to make sure you save time for. Their questions often help me make close calls – I tend to favor candidates who ask about the role, culture, and challenges over those focused primarily on logistics like remote work and hours (which should be clear from the job description).

Post-screen, document detailed notes and feedback for the hiring manager, highlighting areas that warrant deeper exploration.

An important note: a "no" for this role doesn't mean "never." When I encounter promising candidates who simply lack certain experience, I provide guidance and maintain contact. I've seen candidates like this join companies years later! Recruiters should build long-term networks rather than focusing solely on immediate openings. Many companies fail here – ghosting candidates creates negative impressions that complicate future hiring. Give the candidate closure, be polite, and they'll respect you for it. It's important to treat candidates well, especially if they get this far. Saving time by avoiding rejection emails can slow down hiring later if the company has a poor reputation.

This presents a challenge for organizations: Most recruiters aren't incentivized to take the "long term view" of the candidate. The incentive to fill roles quickly often overshadows finding the best people. This is why measuring and rewarding recruiters based on quality outcomes, not just speed of placement, is crucial.

2. Hiring Manager Phone Screen

I call this stage the hiring manager phone screen, but in truth, you could have someone else who would be working closely with the candidate conduct the screens as well. Hiring managers should be best equipped to do this effectively and tend to be better calibrated for their own teams' needs than others. If the hiring manager isn't available, see who is the top performer on their team with a knack for interviewing or ask a peer or skip level of the hiring manager to help. In most cases, this should be the hiring manager's to own. Push for this.

The goal of the hiring manager is to do their own screen of the candidate. Recruiting has done their initial job of sourcing and filtering candidates. Anyone that makes it to the hiring manager screen should be interesting, with a potential to fit for the role based on the initial requirements and understanding of the job. The hiring manager should now go a level deeper and gauge if this person was correctly identified as a potential fit by recruiting. This provides an opportunity for the hiring manager to get a first pass at overall fit, qualifications, and experience, as well as sell them on the position, before we get the entire team involved.

Hiring managers often hold a lot of power in the hiring decisions for their teams. In some companies, this is unilateral. Having the hiring manager filter candidates out first before they go to the broader team ensures that obvious "no" candidates to the hiring manager are filtered out before the rest of the team makes the investment in interviewing.

I usually coach hiring managers to use this phone screen to focus on functional skills. Recruiters will likely not be as adept as hiring managers in knowledge of the function they're hiring for, so it's good for hiring managers to probe here before the next stage. If it is a no, the feedback from hiring managers back to recruiting is valuable.

There are a lot of ways this type of conversation can go, but let's draft up some ideas for how we might coach a hiring manager to conduct this.

Tell me about yourself. Same as previous interview. This should open things up and give the candidate a chance to introduce themselves to the hiring manager.
Pointed follow ups on skills and experience. The hiring manager needs to gauge if the person is proficient in the function at the level that's needed for the role. This will include their ability to answer in-depth questions as well as how they present and prepare their answers. An entry level engineer and a staff engineer may both know how to use JavaScript, but there is a lot of nuance in this. Years of experience is one proxy, but that's lazy -- good questioning and how the candidate responds will help provide more details into their level of depth, how they think about problems, the scale of the problems they solved, and how they present their work. These are good indicators for proficiency and seniority, which will be important in triangulating the candidate's experience to the requirements of the role. Typically, you wouldn't get to this stage without first validating salary requirements, so for now, we can focus instead on fit and mutual interest.

Here are a few open-ended examples:

Engineer: Tell me about a time where you needed to use [programming language] in a project. What was the project, your role, and how did you complete it?

Sales: Walk me through the best deal you closed. Talk me through each of the steps and what you did end-to-end.

These types of questions are designed to gauge functional expertise. You'll get some indicators through them if the candidate also exhibits indicators of your values based on how they speak about what they did and what they say in these answers. If the candidate speaks at too high a level or isn't able to describe the steps in detail, probe. Candidates who do the work can provide a lot of details. I'm always hesitant of an interviewee isn't able to speak to the specifics of the work they did.

3. Series of interviews with hiring manager and interview team

This stage could be the "on-site" portion of the interview where you meet with the candidate in-person, or it could be the "final" round interview where at the conclusion, a decision is made.

In summary here, each interview should focus on 2-3 values and skills. Only give your most tenured interviewers 3 areas, since it's hard to go deep in so many spaces.

It's critical that teams are briefed on what they are covering, have access to a question bank, and are trained on how to interview, capture notes, and debrief effectively.

3 part 2: Projects

You may see projects, presentations, code exercises, and other such "skill demonstrations" for the candidate to complete with a panel of interviewers at once. This can be done as a final stage after the candidate completes the rounds of interviews above successfully. However, I recommend including this as part of a final round interview stage versus staggering this out. You can even include these kinds of exercises to assess your "Skill" competencies we call out for the role. For example, having engineering skills tested through live coding challenges or scenarios versus behavioral "tell me about a time when" questions.

There are a few reasons I prefer combining this to create three distinct stages for the interview process.

First, hearing the candidate interview and show off their skills directly in a single, in-depth stage will provide the team with a well-rounded view to make a decision.

Second, it extends the process. This means longer time to fill, but also more decision points. The extra time spent reviewing feedback, coordinating schedules, and preparing candidates for a fourth stage can feel onerous at this stage. Knowing that the candidate will likely need to present to a group that's already involved in the panel anyway, doing this all as part of the same stage helps with scheduling and keeps things moving faster. Time kills deals, and we don't want to make recruiters do the extra legwork for another stage when we can cover it all at once.

Third, a candidate may be a middling interviewer, but have an excellent portfolio or presentation that shows they are adept at the job -- even if they struggle to articulate it. This can help provide a fuller picture of the candidate and help the team make a better hiring decision while reducing the number of rounds for the candidate.

Interview projects should be handled with great care -- a poorly crafted prompt or homework requirements for the candidate could cause the team to miss on otherwise strong candidates, who either "miss" the ask of the project or drop out because they don't have time to dedicate to doing what's being asked. Some may say "the candidate really needs to show they want the job", but I'd challenge this to ask if this is the best way to have the candidate show them that, and what candidates they're missing out on because of it.

How you design projects or live, functional assessments will vary pending the role and what you intend to get out of it. The first thing I ask: What will we get out of this that we won't be able to get from an interview?

Interviews are great for showing the candidate's thought process, how they articulate their work, how they evaluate success, and how they reflect and learn on what they've achieved (or didn't!). A project, portfolio review, code exercise, or other skill demonstration will help you see the actual output of their work. Pending the role, how they present or facilitate a session like this is also important: can they command a room, ask good questions, and speak to the most important parts of what they're sharing? These are the types of things we want to understand.

Let's walk through a few specific examples.

Sales For sales teams, conduct mock pitches or roleplays to evaluate how candidates facilitate sales meetings. Assess their presentation skills, questioning techniques, ability to handle unknown information, and meeting closure. This reveals their selling capabilities and identifies potential coaching needs

For entry-level candidates, you may want to have them do an exercise that simulates a real-world scenario, but with a topic that is relevant to them. If you're hiring junior candidates, you should have capacity to train them on your industry and product. Here is an opportunity to get a glimpse of their approach and if you feel you would buy from them. In the past, I've done mock calls where the candidate role plays as a travel agent trying to pitch me on a location they're excited about.

In other cases, you could provide them with some details about the company (beyond what's available on your website) to give them enough context about the customer and scenario to have them prepare. This will also require an interviewer to be trained to conduct the exercise as a mock customer, too. Create a scoring rubric that evaluates against criteria that highlights how the candidate approached different topics and how successful the mock call was. Ideally, it's good to end early so the interviewer can provide feedback and coaching for the candidate to see how they'd respond and reflect -- this may be even more important for a candidate than the skills on their own.

For more tenured candidates, you may have them do something more detailed, such as doing a mock discovery meeting as a representative of your company. For more tenured candidates with experience selling in your space, it is important to see how much research they've done into your customer, problem space, and solution, to see how they would approach this with no training at all. This can be a good way not only to gauge their experience as a salesperson, but also if the candidate did adequate research to show their seriousness about the job. Similar to the above, have a rubric and leave room for coaching at the end to see how they would respond.

Engineering Code exercises are common for engineers. In the age of ChatGPT and other AI tools, I am hesitant to recommend take home assignments that can be easily gamed and not show their thinking or expertise. Similarly, while coding challenges like Leetcode are popular, they are not usually seen as a great way to gauge the candidate's abilities outside of pure coding capabilities. These are no doubt important, but not a substitute for other facets of the engineer skillset.

There are many other aspects to success in a software engineering role too, such as how they think through design or how they pair up with an engineer to solve a problem. Doing some type of interactive exercise where the candidate and the interviewer work together, simulating a real-world work environment, will give you indicators how this candidate may be to actually work alongside day-to-day.

Design For roles that design, such as UX designers, learning experience designers, or business analysts, you could do a portfolio review with the candidate where they show off their work, sharing the context behind their decision making that informs their design. The benefit is twofold: it gives you a sense of how they think through problems and shows you the actual output of their work.

For a UX or product designer, perhaps they can walk through their process that led them to make a specific type of design or decision. For learning experience designers, see how they break down problems and the extend of their skills as adult learning specialists to develop educational content that meets company objectives. Doing a portfolio review for a business analyst, to see how they approach dashboard design and data visualization could also be telling and give you insight into their skills.

Like interviews, you will get insight into their overall thought process and decision making skills. However, now you can pair this with the output and ask targeted questions about specific design choices. How the candidate responds to this can be telling.

There are plenty of ways you can gauge candidate experiences and skillset. The important thing is to make sure that the expectations and guidance is clear. The last thing you want is for a candidate to mess up at this crucial stage because they misunderstood the assignment and expectations. Similarly, you don't want to make this onerous for them to participate in. While we expect quality candidates to prepare to meet with the organization, we should not expect them to come to the interview with fully baked plans and strategic guidance to solve specific issues. We need to see if the candidate has the capability to do this and do it well, versus asking for their expertise without payment.

Debrief

Interviewers should be trained to take detailed notes. This will help the rest of the team get a gist of the conversation and make a judgment call on the candidate's suitability for hiring. I'll cover more on the art of interview feedback and facilitating the debrief later on.

Putting this all together

There are a lot of ways you can interview, but the most important step is to build a proper plan and stick to it. With clear steps and evaluation criteria, you'll be able to build a scalable machine that enables you to quickly, fairly, and thoroughly assess candidates for fit while presenting your organization as professional and thoughtful about candidate experience and job expectations.