Building Engineering Teams → Interviewing

Building teams is hard. Building engineering teams is harder. Building engineering teams for a startup is the hardest. There are many pieces to this puzzle of building engineering teams. I hope to cover some of these in the upcoming months. This post is about one of the many pieces – interviewing. Having varying degrees of interviewer experience on my team, we laid out some guidelines on interviewing at Quizizz, so we can all learn together and do our part to ensure we are able to share our journey with high-quality talent. We went over this post as a team (some parts that may not be relevant are redacted). 

Interviewing is a two-way street. We want to provide the best candidate experience to every person who walks through our doors. We want to be consistent and thorough in evaluating our candidates. And we want to make candidates comfortable, so they can ask us questions too. As much as we evaluate candidates, candidates are evaluating us with every interaction. Interviews form everlasting memories of such interactions and come up while talking to their friends; friends who could be potential candidates in the future. As someone famous once said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel!”  Remember the times when you were a candidate and had a pleasant interview experience? Remember to consciously pay it forward! 

Expectations

Whether you are a candidate, interviewer or recruiter, interviews are stressful. Our goal is to make it as stress-free as possible, so we can get the candidate to showcase the best version of themselves and for interviewers to make the best decisions, all within a short time frame.

 
What are our expectations from you as an interviewer?

• Treat candidates with respect. Be on time. 100% attention, nothing less. Don’t code, don’t respond to Slack messages, or WhatsApp. Don’t multitask. People can tell when you get distracted and feel let down. Ensure to turn off your notifications. 
  
• Make candidates feel comfortable: You will be able to bring the best out of them. The goal is not to create pressure situations and stump them with our questions, the goal is to encourage them to feel supported –  treat an interview as a working session with a co-worker. 
  
• Let candidates impress you.  Talk less and listen more. Listen and ask insightful questions with genuine curiosity and ensure to not come across as judgmental. A good rule of thumb for a great interview is when a candidate talks > 70% of the time. 
  
• Answer questions candidly. Leave time at the end of an interview to answer questions. Interviewing is a two-way street. Candidates are evaluating us as much as we are. Do not provide answers if you are not sure and do not overcommit in order to come across as knowing something.  
  
• Provide next steps to candidates before wrapping up the call. Do not give out the result of the interview. Leave that to the Recruiting team. 
  
• Make clear decisions. A candidate is one of 3 – Strong Yes, Yes, No. There are no Maybes. Gather enough information and signals to make your decision. If you are in doubt, talk to your peers or leads, and convert the maybe to either Yes or No.
  
• Leave thorough feedback in Workable (our ATS). There’s no expectation to write essays. Write down key talking points that are essential to discuss during the debrief. 
  
• Attend Debriefs. Notes are sometimes not sufficient. Providing context can help us better understand feedback and make good decisions collectively. 

What should you expect as an interviewer?

• A clear description of role and level. Candidates will be considered for a certain level based on past experience. Treat this as a starting point, not the final one.
• Competencies and skills to evaluate. There is no expectation on you to evaluate all aspects. Every member in the panel will have primary areas to cover during the interview. 

What should you expect from candidates?

These will evolve over time and that’s natural. At this time, here’s what matters:

• Coding and Problem-Solving. Are candidates strong with reasoning skills about their solutions and are they competent in converting their ideas to code? 
• System Design / Domain Knowledge. Are candidates able to articulate high-level designs and are they able to deep-dive in explaining trade-offs?
• Effective Communication.  Are candidates able to share ideas, explain technical topics effectively, listen, answer and ask questions? 
• Growth Mindset. Given that technologies are evolving at a fast rate and problems can be solved in more than one way, are candidates able to consistently learn, relearn and unlearn? 
• No “brilliant” jerks. Regardless of how skilled they are, we do not want jerks.
• Integrity. Last but not least – Do what you say and say what you do. This will help us build trust.

What should you expect from our recruiting team?

• Integrity. We say things the way they are, whether it is with candidates or interviewers. No false promises.
• Communicate decisions with respect. We let candidates know about our decision, regardless of what it is. Rejections are as important as acceptances in our books.
• Responsive. Candidates are anxious. We respond to all candidate communications as quickly as possible.
• Set clear expectations with candidates and interviewers. About the candidates’ role, level, and other relevant information. 
• Track performance, analyze, and report numbers. Sourcing and Conversions are our friends. We continue to improve when we find out what works and what does not.  Data is king.

Feedback

The last 5 mins after every interview should be used to write feedback in Workable. This not only helps us go fast, but also allows you to capture thorough feedback as the conversation will be fresh in your mind. 

• Capture important points about your conversation. You won’t remember the conversation in a few days when we do the debrief. Do not overestimate what you can remember.
• Paste the code/link in Workable. This is important for 2 reasons a) we don’t repeat questions b) helpful during debriefs for others to see. 
• Leave notes for subsequent interviews. We don’t want everyone asking candidates the same questions. It is boring and a loss of signal.

Becoming an Interviewer

As an interviewer, that seems like a lot of effort. I’d rather build products. Why do it?

The biggest reason → You are learning! Interviews teach you a lot about yourself. Some concrete ones:   

• Interviews help improve communication skills. Communication is not only about speaking, but also listening.
• Interviews help you understand the business, product, and technology better. Answering candidate questions requires a deeper understanding. 
• You will get help when the candidate joins! They’ll remember how you made them feel, and pay it back. 
• You are likely to spend more time with your co-workers than with your friends and family. You might as well have a say in the decision. 🙂 

How do I become one?

1. Shadow interviews. Shadow experienced interviewers to learn the art of interviewing. At the end of the interview, spend 5 mins with the interviewer to discuss the candidate’s performance. 

2. Reverse Shadow Interviews. Take the lead after you’ve shadowed 3 interviews. The interview will still have the experienced interviewer, but they will shadow you. After the interview, discuss the observations of a candidate’s performance with the experienced interviewer. They will provide feedback and approve you to lead interviews independently. 

3. Go solo! 

Take ownership when there is a conflict of schedules. Be proactive about asking for feedback, and discussing candidates. Stalk people’s calendars for interviews and ask to shadow. Be creative! 

FAQs

When do I have to submit feedback? 

Hiring is competitive. We need to move fast so we can land the best candidates. In most cases, you are able to submit feedback within 5 mins after the interview. Stuff happens and we are overbooked sometimes. In such cases, ensure to submit feedback within 24 hours of the completion of the interview, at the latest. 

Do I need to attend Interview Debriefs?

Yes, it is mandatory for every interviewer to attend the debrief session. We are all interviewing different facets and it is important to provide all the information/context so we can arrive at a good decision with high confidence. 

How many interviews should I do in a week? 

In an ideal situation, an interviewer would cap the number of interviews at 5 per week. There will be weeks when we will do more given our ambitious goals. Please pay attention to how you feel about taking more interviews and let us know – Interview burnout is real. 

Some interviewers prefer batching all of them in 1 day, others prefer 1-2 a day. Priorities will be captured and scheduling will take into account interviewer preferences. But remember, the schedule has too many variables. As we know, scheduling is an NP-hard problem :-). 

Will it look bad on me as an interviewer if I said yes, and everyone else says no, or vice versa? 

No. We are all evaluating different skills for candidates as a panel. It is reasonable for candidates to be strong in some areas and weak in others. Every interviewer can probe different facets. 

Can I give a strong YES when I have not evaluated all skills of a candidate?

Absolutely. Your strong yes is for areas that you have evaluated. For example, you will find a candidate who is strong at system design and you should give a strong yes despite not knowing their strength in coding. Bring all interviewers together in a debrief and discuss all aspects. 

Should we have candidates work on home assignments / multi-day projects?

Projects can be a good idea for interviews. They provide a window into the thought process, execution, and communication of a candidate. Home assignments are more realistic when compared to operating under the gun in an hour-long conversation. However, candidates may not be able to afford the time to complete projects when juggling jobs, families, etc.,  

Too many interviews will burn me out. What can we do?

In addition to capping the number of interviews/week, as an organization, we practice NO-interview days on Wednesdays.  

Conclusion

Interviewing is both an art and science. It is important to be yourself, throughout. It may be challenging to trust your process as you start and it will be tempting to follow these steps to the T. However, over time, you will rely a lot more on your own than the guidelines provided. And that’s a natural evolution! 

Happy interviewing.