Interviewing is fundamentally a data gathering exercise to help teams make decisions. As an interviewer, you need to capture this data and share a perspective on it to determine if the candidate should be hired.
If we are interviewing effectively and have a plan in place, it means each interviewer is responsible for assessing specific areas that other interviewers are not directly looking into. This means the interviewer will have a unique perspective and cover facets of the candidate's experience and skillset that others will not.
Of course, not every interviewer will participate in every interview. It's thus important for each interviewer to draft clear and concise notes that share both what was said in the interview and commentary from the interviewer.
We need clear notes, cleaned up and summarized, so that the rest of the group can evaluate the conversation, while the interviewer's color provides their own perspective as the person who was in the room engaged with the candidate.
When drafting interview notes, you want to have multiple sections that cover different questions or areas you evaluated (like values and skills) and an all up summary that provides readers with the TLDR.
It should look something like this
Summary [Insert details on whether you are inclined or not inclined to hire. Summarize the overall conversation, areas you want additional insight into, and why or why not the hire should be made. This should be fairly short and high level]
Value/Skill 1 [Details on how the candidate's answers show indicators that they have certain attributes]
Value/Skill 2 [Same as the above]
Within the value/skill section, I recommend a clear structure that provides a short summary of where the candidate showed up or didn't show up well, followed by the specific question that was asked, and a summary of the candidate's response. This could be broken down into multiple paragraphs pending how many discrete questions are asking to assess the candidate's behavior.
At the bottom, share commentary on how you felt about the answer, what data points you gathered, and why or why not it was a strong answer.
Example
Let's do an example to illustrate what this means in practice.
In the below, let's pretend we interviewed candidate for a role as a sales development representative (SDR) for a technology company. In this interview, I was assigned the company value of "We Are All Interns" (from my previous post on this)[https://conifer.mataroa.blog/blog/lets-make-interview-questions/] and the skill "prospecting".
For those unfamiliar, prospecting is a sales term for researching the company to understand potential pain points and how they could benefit from what the company is offering, as well as identifying the prospective buyers and decision makers at the organization. It is a critical component of most SDR jobs and informs how the company will attempt to engage with and sell to its prospective clients.
You may notice that these areas are complementary: someone who is curious also is likely to excel in a skill like prospecting that requires digging in and researching. Having interviews assess complementary values and skills helps get the data we need to make a decision, and also means we're likely to get more signals for both areas because they are similar over the course of an hour. It may be tough to go deep on two distinct areas in one conversation, but covering complementary topics together usually is easier on interviewers and provides more opportunities to collect relevant data.
Let's say I interviewed the candidate. After sixty minutes of discussion, I draft up my notes for the hiring manager and the rest of the interview team.
Summary Inclined for the candidate for the role. Throughout the conversation, the candidate demonstrated strength in both areas assess: curiosity and prospecting.
Why hire? The candidate has relevant experience in sales and came up with creative ways to learn about prospective clients and identify ways to engage with them. In one example, the candidate shared how they purchased a product from an ecommerce prospect and documented their experience buying from them in order to highlight how their solution could help make purchasing easier for the client.
Why not hire? The candidate has been in SDR roles before and is clearly excelling. Do we think this candidate will be motivated to do a similar role again in a new industry? Would like to see if anyone else picked up on the candidate's motivations and what they'd like to get out of a new job.
Value 1: We Are All Interns
- Willing to change mind when presented with new data
- Seeks out ways to improve their skillsets
- Unafraid to dive into new areas or take on tasks they haven't done before.
I asked the candidate: "Tell me about a time when you needed to do something new to complete a goal."
The candidate shared an example from their current company. The candidate shared that in their current role, they were primarily responsible for finding new business opportunities and finding ways to break into these new accounts. This typical approach involved online research, emails, and cold calls. The candidate shared one particular account, Big Retailer You've Heard Of (BRYHO), was particularly hard to break into using their conventional methods. The candidate shared that this account was a priority and huge opportunity for their business given their revenue and potential deal size for their company. The candidate recognized a need to try something different. They learned that the company was sponsoring an upcoming industry event. They had never gone to an event or met with customers in-person, and were not sure how to do this. They did research on best practices and spoke with senior people at the company who had attended the event before. The candidate convinced leadership to get tickets for themselves and others on their team to attend. The candidate shared they felt that the company wouldn't respond well to being sold to in-person after ignoring their emails. Instead, the candidate came up with a new approach: engaging them at their booth to ask about their services and speak to them from the perspective of their customer. The candidate met a director at the company and later shared they were in sales at their organization. The director highlighted that they've been having a problem that the candidate's company could solve. From building this relationship in-person and not trying to directly sell, the candidate was able to book a meeting. The deal would go on to close and the client is among the biggest deals landed in the history of the company.
I liked this example -- it showed creativity and willingness to try something different outside of the established playbook, responding to customer needs. The candidate followed through beyond the scope of their role to see the deal through because of the relationship they built with the director at the event.
Skill 1: Prospecting
- Knows best practices in prospecting within relevant industries
- Partners with account executives to prioritize time effectively
I asked the candidate "Walk me through a recent deal you helped to close. How did you prospect the account and set up the deal?"
The candidate shared a recent deal they supported. The candidate shared they were targeting biotech companies on the east coast to try and pitch them a new product that would better address their needs than existing solutions. The candidate started by identifying all biotech companies in the northeast US, stack ranking them by revenue. The candidate presented this list of 37 companies to their account executive. They shared their focus on revenue and recommended starting based on this. The account executive agreed revenue was a useful heuristic for prioritization, but also encouraged the candidate to look at historic data in Salesforce to see if there were any organizations that were previously engaged, and to prioritize those that had not been engaged in the past six months. The candidate agreed and rewrote the prioritized list with this in mind. They did agree that the most critical account was Large BioTech Company, who the candidate's predecessor had never engaged. The candidate shared the steps they took, which aspects of the account that they mapped out and why, and how they packaged and presented this information to their account executive to collaborate on a strategic plan to engage. After engaging on their LinkedIn posts and sending cold emails to different stakeholders, they were able to book a meeting with the relevant director to kickstart the process. When asked if they'd do anything differently, the candidate shared that they would likely look at their internal salesforce data before putting together a list, which is something they now incorporate as part of their process whenever tasked with a new industry or territory to target.
This example showed thoughtfulness in approach. I like how the candidate articulated specific steps, responded to feedback, and had rationale for why they did things a certain way versus doing it "because it's what they were told"
Does this paint a clear picture to you of how the conversation went? Do you feel, as a hiring manager or interviewer, that you have a decent picture of how the candidate rates in these areas?
If yes, then I did my job as an interviewer. Providing both a summary of what was said and commentary on why it was good is important. I tend to include details on why I wouldn't hire or areas I want to explore more to help guide the discussion towards these areas that may be contentious or that need to be parsed out more from other interviews to help make a decision.
As an interviewer, you want the rest of the people you're interviewing with to feel like they got the gist of the conversation you had so they can get a more complete picture of the candidate and make hiring decisions with confidence.
What to avoid
Beyond showing what good looks like, it's also important to understand what needs to be avoided.
Hiring, like any other discipline involving people, can be a minefield for litigation and other legal risk to the company. It's important to ensure that our evaluations are written to focus on the candidate's suitability for the job based on the data we collect versus any other items that may color our expectations.
For example, we should avoid using terms like "young" or "old", even "overqualified" or "too senior" could denote that we are discriminating against the candidate on the basis of age. Even if the candidate has more experience than we expect, we need to understand the context as to why they're interviewing. I've been in situations where a senior leader wanted to move to an individual contributor role to get time back to spend with children or another person who made a career change and wanted to start over in a new space -- we shouldn't be writing about these things in the interview feedback, but rather if we think based on what's shared if they can do the job.
We also want to avoid discussing other protected characteristics or using language that can be perceived as discriminatory. You may notice that in the example above, I never use the candidate's name or their pronouns, instead opting for "they" and referring to this individual as "the candidate". This is really, again, to mitigate any risks of bias being introduced to the process. Unless the example specifically mentions things like race or gender, we should probably avoid mentioning it unless it is crucial for the role. For example, I once had a candidate that shared examples from their work managing an African-American employee resources group -- this is okay to write about.
Getting the reps in
This, like anything else, is a skill you can cultivate. You shouldn't take what's here and slap it in directly, instead using it as a template and cultivating your own sense of style that helps you express your thoughts in a way that is easy for others to understand. I've gotten positive feedback on this approach, and want to share with others to bring to their hiring practices.
How do you do this? Feel free to email me: coniferblog@proton.me