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I wish there was some lip-service to the actual interviewing process. The interviewing process seems to be the pain point in recruiting with the vast majority o

I wish there was some lip-service to the actual interviewing process. The interviewing process seems to be the pain point in recruiting with the vast majority of startups I've been to. Nothing telegraph's a company's poor management like a silly interview process. Make sure there's a purpose to each stage of your interview process, don't just throw your whole team, one by one, into a conference room with a candidate with no direction.

rdl 12y ago
I understand how to do a good, structured interview process for a role like engineer or tech ops. (Work sample, chronological walkthrough of history and "why did you do that vs. this" at each step, etc.; ideally aptitude tests and existing work samples as screeners.) How do you run a structured process for roles like sales, PM, GM, etc.? I guess with sales, depending on the model, you have a much lower bar (easy to hire, easy to fire), but that's not the case for long-sales-cycle enterprise products. A bad GM/COO will almost certainly sink an an otherwise-strong company. The best I've ever come up with is just agreeing on criteria beforehand and having people score those, and then also having people who have done the role involved in both creating criteria and evaluating candidates (e.g. having lots of engineers engineer sales = probably a waste of everyone's time). In a large company, you can test the interview process itself by seeing how candidates who are accepted under different processes perform, but in a smaller company, a bad string of sales hires means the company is probably not going to need to worry about making more hires -- and even if you do have time to correct, hiring/firing to the point where it is obviously a high churn environment deters good candidates and may cause good current employees to leave as well.
withdavidli 12y ago
Interview process at startups, never had the pleasure, but keep in mind that they are new by definition. It's arguable that many large corporations don't have a good interview process. Imagine a limited funded startup. The amount of time to train a person to be a good interviewer, coming up with relavent questions, calibrating what a typical answer actually is vs. the answers you think you'll get. If the company is rapidly growing then they may require employees who never been an interviewer to become interviewers (hopefully some shadowing and training is involved).

rdl 12y ago

I understand how to do a good, structured interview process for a role like engineer or tech ops. (Work sample, chronological walkthrough of history and "why did you do that vs. this" at each step, etc.; ideally aptitude tests and existing work samples as screeners.) How do you run a structured process for roles like sales, PM, GM, etc.? I guess with sales, depending on the model, you have a much lower bar (easy to hire, easy to fire), but that's not the case for long-sales-cycle enterprise products. A bad GM/COO will almost certainly sink an an otherwise-strong company. The best I've ever come up with is just agreeing on criteria beforehand and having people score those, and then also having people who have done the role involved in both creating criteria and evaluating candidates (e.g. having lots of engineers engineer sales = probably a waste of everyone's time). In a large company, you can test the interview process itself by seeing how candidates who are accepted under different processes perform, but in a smaller company, a bad string of sales hires means the company is probably not going to need to worry about making more hires -- and even if you do have time to correct, hiring/firing to the point where it is obviously a high churn environment deters good candidates and may cause good current employees to leave as well.

withdavidli 12y ago

Interview process at startups, never had the pleasure, but keep in mind that they are new by definition. It's arguable that many large corporations don't have a good interview process. Imagine a limited funded startup. The amount of time to train a person to be a good interviewer, coming up with relavent questions, calibrating what a typical answer actually is vs. the answers you think you'll get. If the company is rapidly growing then they may require employees who never been an interviewer to become interviewers (hopefully some shadowing and training is involved).