Team Building: The Interview Process
Last week I published an article about the first hires to make when building a marketing a team. This week I'll take the next step and talk about the interview process once you've defined these roles. While many of these articles are more specific to B2B startup marketing, I think this one really applies more broadly to most roles in any company. But please let me know your thoughts and what key aspects you include in your interviewing process.
Own the Process
Before I get into some best practices for the interview process itself, let me start by what I think is the most important takeaway: you need to own the interview process.
Hiring is one of the most important roles of any manager. Get all the help you can - but you need to own the process from start to finish.
If you are lucky enough to work at a company that has a great talent management team - as I recently did at Formlabs - then you should absolutely work with them. And, as I'll come to later on, you should involve multiple people in the process. But at the end of the day, you are the hiring manager, and the difference between a great hire and a mediocre hire will have big impact on your success. You will be the person who is ultimately measured on their success, and as such, you need to own the process.
Take the time to not only carefully define who you are looking for, but also the process you will lead candidates through to find the perfect match. Commit time to the process, don't try to short cut it or take the easy way out, and stick to your standards. Hiring can be very time consuming - as I commented in a previous post, I conducted more than 500 interviews during my Formlabs tenure, often having 3-4 interviews in a day. But this investment is needed if you want to build a great team. Like the adage says: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." The hours or days you spend in the interview process are worth months and years of downstream benefit.
Interviewing Process Best Practices
This will not be an exhaustive guide or playbook for the interview process. Instead, I'm going to focus on what I think are the four most important best practices I've employed in my interviewing processes. I'm curious to get your feedback on whether these resonate with you - and what best practices you employ.
My interview process best practices:
Active Sourcing
In theory, once you have your job spec written, you can just post it to a bunch of job boards and your corporate website, and wait for the candidates to roll in, right? Or just wait for your recruiter to bring you the perfect candidate? Not quite... Yes, if you've written a good spec with compelling company and role descriptions, you should see resumes flow in. And hopefully that influx of candidates includes some people who truly match what you are looking for. But I've found that some of the best people I've hired have come through my own prospecting work.
I typically start by taking the job spec and sharing it with my network. I share it on LinkedIn, send it to relevant industry contacts asking for referrals, and share it with any relevant networking groups I'm part of. Here in Boston, I'm part of a great CMO networking group (ironically called "Any Excuse for a Drink"...), I'm on a few VC slack groups, and a couple former employer alumni groups. It is always amazing to me how many great candidates I get just by sharing job descriptions with these groups and asking my friends and former colleagues if they know anyone who fits what I'm looking for. And personal referrals are often great as you can get honest assessments on what they are like to work with (see the note on backdoor reference checks below).
I then typically spend some time - anywhere from a few minutes, to several hours for more senior roles - prospecting on LinkedIn. As I pointed out in a previous post, this is one of my main uses of LinkedIn. I type in a few keywords, potentially filter by location or industry, and then filter by connections.
I start with the 1st degree connections to see if anyone I directly know could be a fit. If so, I drop them a quick LinkedIn message or email to gauge their interest. I then move on to 2nd degree connections, which is often fertile sourcing ground (if you maintain a tightly coupled LinkedIn network...). If I see someone who looks like they may be a fit, I can then reach out to our connection in common to validate the potential fit and ask for an introduction. Even if they aren't looking, these personal introductions can go a long way towards initiating a conversation with passive candidates, or having them recommend other potential candidates they know. I've gotten some of my best hires this way.
I then remove the connection filter and spend some time looking through the more general search results. I'll cherry pick the best candidates and send them simple LinkedIn messages. I often get a pretty low hit rate, but from speaking with my talent management team, having the hiring manager reach out directly usually yields better results than just delegating this to the recruiting team. I know some hiring managers turn over their LinkedIn credentials to their recruiting partner so they can send messages on their behalf. Being the control freak that I am, I've never done that - but I'm also happy to put in the work to send those messages myself.
Don't just rely on inbound candidates or your recruiting team - even an hour of active sourcing on LinkedIn can reap great results.
Involve Diverse Perspectives
While you ultimately need to make the final decision on who you hire, getting a diverse set of perspectives is really important. It helps you overcome your own blind spots, and I've frequently found that candidates behave differently in peer interviews than they do with the hiring manager.
Recommended by LinkedIn
As part of the interview process, I always try to line up a good group of interviewers. I don't think this needs to be a huge group - typically even just 3-4 other people can be sufficient. But try to bring in diverse perspectives. Think about who this person will be interacting with in their new role, and try to pick people from different groups. In addition to people from different teams, try to have both men and women involved in the interviewing process, and ideally different cultural background and tenures with the company. The goal here is to gather input from people who bring different perspectives to the interviewing process. If 3-4 people from different teams and backgrounds all agree on a candidate, chances are that candidate will fit well with the team! And giving the candidate a diverse group of interviewers to speak with can also reflect well on your company. Remember - this is a two-way street and they are evaluating you and the interviewing team just as much as you are evaluating them.
Best practices say you should also arm each interviewer with key areas you want them to look at - but I also recommend leaving some of this open ended for the interviewers to think about what they want to see in this role. More importantly though, make sure you empower each interviewer with a sense of ownership in the process. I recently interviewed with a company where several of the interviewers told me point blank they were instructed to just let me ask questions and that they didn't have any questions for me. While I appreciate the need to have interviewers sell the company, I think every interviewer should also be assessing the candidate and that just having them there to answer candidate questions is not a good use of their time.
Include key stakeholders in the interview process, and solicit their honest feedback about how they would feel if you hired a given candidate.
Just as you need to invest time and energy into the interview process, you should involve people who will take this process seriously. Pick people who can not only ask good questions and test for key skills, and represent the company well, but who will also share their thoughts about how they think this candidate will more holistically fit into this role. Getting more people bought into the process and the ultimate hiring decision will also help with onboarding and making that new hire successful.
Interview Project
One of the best practices we had at Formlabs for any position was the interview project. While I'd used interview projects before, the process was more standardized at Formlabs and I grew to really like it. We would give candidates a prompt relevant to the role they were interviewing for: write a blog post, define the launch process for an upcoming product, develop a trade show plan, assess our website, etc. We typically gave them a few days to work on it, with the expectation that it shouldn't be more than a few hours of work.
We would then invite the candidate to present their project to a small panel - often some of the people they had also interviewed with one-on-one. Much like my comments above, I would always pick panel members based on their diverse perspectives and relevance to the position, and their ability to critically assess the project, engage the candidate, and share candid feedback. We also asked candidates to provide their project (be it a writing sample, presentation, etc.) ahead of time so the panel could review it and be ready for an engaging discussion instead of just listening to a presentation.
This part of the interview process can be a little daunting for candidates - especially for more junior roles. But if you are working in a startup where everyone frequently needs to get out of their comfort zone, this can be a great test of how they work under pressure. If you've designed the prompt in the right way, you can get a little glimpse into how they would actually be in this role, and how they will work in a team project situation.
The goal of the project isn't to get the answer "right" - it is to see how they would tackle a representative task and how they would work with your team.
Three final notes on the interview project.
Backdoor Reference Checks
My final tip is one that a few people I've worked with have found surprising or even controversial: I always do backdoor reference checks, especially for more senior hires. This gets back to one of my key uses for LinkedIn and why I maintain a tightly coupled network. Late in the interview process, but before the offer stage, I'll try to find one or two people who know the candidate from a previous job and I'll reach out to get candid feedback without the candidate knowing.
Standard reference checks are an important part of the interview process, but backdoor reference checks can often reveal much better insights about the candidate
I start by looking to see if we have any LinkedIn connections in common, and I'll ask other people involved in the interview process to check their networks as well. If the candidate is currently working, I will obviously make sure not to reach out to anyone who would put their current employment in jeopardy. I will also typically only reach out if I (or someone I work with) knows and trusts that person. I'm looking for honest, candid feedback - and again, I don't want to put the candidate's current job at risk - so I only reach out if I feel confident I'll get good insights.
Summary: Always Be Hiring!
Those are my top four interview process tips - what do you think? Do you employ similar practices, or do you have other key interview process tips?
A final note: as you start managing a larger and larger team, I have found that it is good to essentially always be hiring. Even when you don't have a specific open role, it is still good to talk to interesting candidates and keep them warm. New roles may be coming open soon - either due to growth, or due to the inevitable churn. One way we did this at Formlabs was to always have a few "honey pot" roles posted - very general roles that we weren't actually hiring for, but that would attract interesting candidates. We often found great candidates this way - candidates that applied for one of these "honey pot" roles but ended up getting routed to a different actual role we had open, or roles we were about to open but hadn't posted yet. And in more than one instance in my past, I've actually created a role based on a great candidate. Keeping a pipeline of potential future hires can help speed up the actual recruiting process when those roles do open up!
