EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 28Interviewing

To continue with our series on staffing, in this chapter I discuss the interview process.

As with recruiting, the hiring manager needs to take responsibility for the interview effectiveness of the interview team, and the interview experience for the candidate.

The hiring manager may have some administrative help and/or some HR help, but the hiring manager needs to own and actively manage this process.

Your overarching goal is to ensure you hire competent people of character, and that every hire—at least for product managers, product designers, and tech leads—should raise the average.

Note that since we have more than one engineer on a product team, it is not a problem to have a range of experience and capability levels in our engineers. However, for product managers, product designers, and tech leads—since there is just one each per team—it's critical to ensure a high standard of competence. Those are not “junior” roles.

The most common problem I see is in determining the interview team. Too often the primary concern is to be inclusive, and make sure everyone who wants to has a say. But this approach will rarely raise the bar, and often leads to a consistent, gradual decline in the average capability level.

So instead, the hiring manager should very carefully select and curate the interview team. Each person should be selected both for her competence and for her character. These should be people that a strong candidate would be proud to work with and ...