The ABCs of interviews (and the DEFs)
To grow a successful company, you have to be able to find, attract and develop great people. Finding candidates is hard. Figuring out who’s good is even harder. And hardest of all is convincing someone to enlist. The most important tool in accomplishing both of these goals is a substantive interview. 
If done right, a great startup interview will serve two purposes. First, it gives insight into what kind of employee the candidate might be. But it’s also your first chance to impress them with your company’s values. This second objective is critical to hiring the cream of the crop.
When I train someone to conduct a technical interview, the primary topic is what to look for in a good candidate. The six key attributes, in a convenient-yet-gimmicky mnemonic, spell ABCDEF.
While I’m focusing somewhat on technical employees here, the fundamentals of this philosophy will apply to any potential employee:
Agility. By far the most important thing you want to hire for in a startup is the ability to handle the unexpected. Most normal people have a fairly narrow comfort zone, where they excel in their trained specialty. Those people tend to go crazy in a startup.You’re not looking for people who thrive on chaos (or, worse, cause chaos). Instead, you want someone who is a strong lateral thinker – someone who can apply what they’ve learned to new situations and who can un-learn skills that were useful before – but can be damaging in a new context.
When talking about their past experience, candidates with agility will know why they did what they did in a given situation. Beware anyone who talks too much about “best practices”. If they believe there are practices that are ideally suited to all situations, they may lack adaptability. People with agility are key to creating companies that are built to learn.
Brains. There’s no getting around the fact that at least part of what you should screen for is raw intelligence. Smart people tend to want to work with smart people, so it has become almost a cliché that you want to keep the bar as high as you can for as long as you can.
Microsoft famously used brainteasers and puzzles as a sort of quasi-IQ test, but I find this technique difficult to train people in and apply consistently. I much prefer a hands-on problem-solving exercise, in a related discipline to the job they are applying for.
For software engineers, this means a programming problem solved on a whiteboard. You learn so much about how someone thinks by looking at code you know they’ve written, that it’s worth all the inconvenience of having to write, analyze and debug it by hand.
I prefer to test this with a question about the fundamentals. The best candidates have managed to teach me something about a topic I thought I already knew a lot about.
Communication. The “lone wolf” superstar is usually a disaster in a team context, and startups are all about teams. You have to find candidates that can engage in dialog, learning from the people around them and helping find solutions to tricky problems.Everything you do in an interview will tell you something about how the candidate communicates. To probe this deeply, ask them a question in their area of expertise. See if they can explain complex concepts to a novice. If they can’t, how is the company going to benefit from their brilliance?
Drive. I have been burned in the past by hiring candidates with incredible talents, but who lacked the passion to bring them to work every day. It’s critical to ask: 1) does the person care about what they work on? and 2) can they get excited about what your company does?For a marketing job, for example, it’s reasonable to expect that a candidate will have done their homework and used your product (maybe even talked to your customers) before coming in. This is quite rare in engineers, though.
At IMVU, most of the people we spoke with thought our product was ridiculous at best; hopeless at worst. That’s fine for the start of their interview process. But if we haven’t managed to get them fired up about our mission by the end of the day, it’s unlikely they are going to make a meaningful contribution.
To test for drive, ask about something extreme, like a past failure or a peak experience. They should be able to tell a good story about what went wrong and why.
Alternately, ask about something controversial. I remember once being asked in a Microsoft group interview about the ActiveX security model. At the time, I was a die-heard Java zealot. I remember answering “What security model?” and going into a long diatribe about how insecure the ActiveX architecture was compared to Java’s pristine sandbox.
The other candidates at the table were aghast. It turned out I had been lecturing the creator of the ActiveX security model. Later, I was surprised to be offered the job. Turns out, he didn’t care that I disagreed with him, only that I had an opinion and wasn’t afraid to defend it.
Empathy. Just as you need to know a candidate’s IQ, you also have to know their EQ. Many engineers are strong introverts, without fantastic people skills.That’s OK, we’re not trying to hire a therapist. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. We’re there to serve customers directly – internal as well as external. This is impossible if our technologists consider the other types of people in the company idiots or simply make them feel that way. That makes cross-functional teamwork nearly impossible.
To test for empathy, I always make sure that candidates have one or two interviews with people of wildly different background. Perhaps an engineer will interview with a member of our production art department. If they can treat them with respect, it’s that much less likely they’ll be tempted to work in silos.
Fit. The last and most elusive quality is how well the candidate fits in with the team you’re hiring them into. There are a lot of misunderstandings about this term, though. Fit can wind up being an excuse for homogeneity, which is lethal. When everyone in the room thinks the same way and has the same background, teams tend to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid. The best teams have just the right balance of common interests and diverse opinions. Everyone has an opinion about fit, but this responsibility falls squarely to the hiring manager. Not all teams react well to an insider who brings a different – but challenging – perspective. A leader needs to have a point of view about how to put together a coherent team, and how a potential candidate fits into that plan.
Does the candidate have enough of a common language with the existing team (and with you) that you’ll be able to learn from each other? Do they have a background that provides some novel approaches? Does their personality bring something new?
It’s nearly impossible to get a good read on all six of these attributes in a single interview, so it’s important to design an interview process that will give you a good sampling of data to look at. We’ll take a closer look at that tomorrow.
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