Interviewing takes a lot of time on top of your high workload and it might even be high BECAUSE you need additional team members. Not to mention that the process can be quite stressful as hiring poorly will make your situation worse, not better.
I heard this question about what my ideal hiring process would look like and it really got me thinking. There will be constraints on your hiring process from your situation, your culture and company policies, but here’s my answer.
Ideally I would do as follows:
- Ahead of the interview, send a video recording of the background to the role, intro to the team etc. so the candidate can view it ahead of time. This part of the process eats up a lot of precious discussion time if done in the first meeting and the candidates sit there just blankly listening anyway. Have this be you – the hiring manager – in the video.
- Send some of the key questions ahead of time to let them prepare good answers.
- One intro call combined with a behavioural interview (what do you like to do, not like, what did you do in XYZ situation, tell us about a time you did XYZ),
- One technical interview (tell us about these tools, your experience etc) combined with a review of a take home exercise that they have already done elsewhere.
I think this would be an efficient use of everyone’s time, maintains good energy for the discussion and maximizes the chance of a good candidate succeeding.
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