The ABCs of interviews (and the DEFs)
http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2009/07/22/the-abcs-of-interviews-and-the-defs/
July 22, 2009 | Eric Ries
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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