Self-selection can potentially be powerful for a startup (although maybe less so recently), meaning that it may be possible to spend significantly more time con

Self-selection can potentially be powerful for a startup (although maybe less so recently), meaning that it may be possible to spend significantly more time considering each candidate. Skipping initial recruiter calls for at least a subset of candidates, for example, and having a hiring manager reach out and work on expectations setting and sell is something that might happen less often in a larger company. Similarly, self-deselection is something you want to avoid - ie, you need to prove yourself to them a lot more. Making sure people you are interested in see the sorts of information they might need to consider working for you is important - maybe it's talking about your product/opportunity, your development/product/management/business philosophy, or even just mentioning who works with you and what they've done (although focusing on the VC team, or just saying "A bunch of former employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, ..." is probably not enough). One thing I've found is that certain people are better at asking certain types of questions. I love "exploring" conversational-style interviews that are highly interactive and where not knowing something is an opportunity for the candidate to figure it out themselves or to learn a new thing. One colleague does an awesome debugging scenario that I sometimes think could continue for hours if he wanted to. I assume that certain candidates like particular interview styles - finding some way to match those two together would be great. (A recent Facebook start and I spent an additional half-hour during his interview because we both enjoyed the subject we were discussing. Making each interview that enjoyable...) I'm not entirely sure what you mean by challenge problems - is this a technical phone interview with a specific set of broader topics/challenges, or is this something that gets sent to the candidate and they get some time to return a result? I prefer the term "phone interview" when a non-recruiter/sourcer is evaluating the quality of the response to some question or challenge, and "phone screen" for the initial recruiting discussions where wholly unsuitable candidates are weeded out due to skill or experience mismatch to the role based more on treating commentary provided by the candidate as fact (although it does go a lot further than that).