Hiring great people — A small toolkit to lead effective Job Interviews
By: Andreas Kleofas
Tags: Startup, Recruitment, Hiring, Startup Lessons, Interview Questions

I am a resident at Wayra Germany in Munich with my start-up emax.digital for one year now. I have not always been an entrepreneur though. I started my career in corporates such as Microsoft and Amazon, where I spent 7 ½ years. In 2018, I decided to start my own business which aims to help brand manufacturers be more successful in e-commerce through digitalization. I became a resident at Wayra soon after and quickly realized that most start-us struggle with the same issues: financing, finding clients and digesting their (hopefully fast) growth.

Most start-up hubs such as Wayra consult their founders on first finance rounds and adjacent networks often help to close the first client projects. But what I found peculiar was the lack of support in coping with company growth, and especially with interviewing.

At Amazon, I was a so-called Bar Raiser, which is a group of Amazonians specially trained to ensure all candidates meet the high hiring bar for each job. It should be evident that hiring is a crucial success factor for every company. And even more so, it is critical for start-ups because wrong hiring decisions can lead to the death of the company. Thus, I decided to share my experience with interviewing to help founders at Wayra use the same tools corporates apply to hire the best candidates. This article is an excerpt of the workshops I have held at Wayra. You will see it will only take three steps to prepare for effective job interviews and with some practice using these tools will become easier.

Think about what it really needs

Effective job interviews start when you write your job posting. The job posting is the first communication to your potential candidates about the requirements to be successful in the job. It is the most important source of information for external readers to learn about the competencies required. And those competencies are the first thing you should spend some time thinking about in advance. But what exactly are these competencies? Basically, they are skills that help employees work effectively in a job and can be a lot of different things.

In the job description, you obviously need to include the must-haves like languages and Excel skills. And, of course, you also need to include the tasks that future employees are supposed to take over, such as “Planning and executing multiple high performing Social Media Campaigns” or “Building the sales strategy for different verticals and customer groups”. The tasks are a good starting point to think about the real competencies that are necessary to be a strong performer in the job. What does it take to manage multiple campaigns at once or come up with a strong strategy? Ask yourself, what would the perfect employee bring to the table to be successful in carrying out those tasks. Let’s have a look at those two examples:

a) “Planning and executing multiple high performing Social Media Campaigns” may require several competencies. It is probably good if the candidate is very detail oriented and focused on not missing deadlines (start and end dates of campaigns can be crucial to their success). Also, it would be helpful if the candidate were good with numbers since it would be important to read and compare campaign reports on a regular basis. Depending on the job set-up, it would also be helpful if the candidate were not bored too easily with routinely tasks like downloading and formatting campaign reports.

b) “Building the sales strategy for different verticals and customer groups” will probably require a different skill set. First, you want to have a candidate who is able to think beyond the actual day-to-day tasks by painting a larger picture (e.g. the ideal candidate would seek more information before taking a decision, the candidate would also be able to deep dive into customer data to build the groundwork for a strong strategic decision). Moreover, the candidate would also have to be empathetic to the needs of your customers to judge whether the new sales strategy has a chance in the market.

You realize, thinking about competencies is highly dependent on the job opening you are trying to fill. It is great if you can summarize the desired competencies in one or two words (Analytical Mindset, Detail Oriented), but it is also important to be clear about the actual meaning in the context of your specific job need. To communicate effectively what you need and to conduct effective job interviews, it is better to describe the desired competencies in detail rather than pasting only generic high-level words.

Include as many competencies as you need, but make sure the competencies are specific to the job to not overload yourself and subsequently the candidate with expectations that are too high (Less but more focused competencies are often better than too many).

Behavioral Questions

Once you are clear about the set of competencies you require for a job, you can post your job offer and start recruiting. When you start inviting your first candidates to job interviews, you should start with planning your interview questions. I recommend focusing on “Behavioral Questions” to understand whether a candidate displayed a desired competency in contrast to e.g. Functional Questions or questions aiming for Situational Thinking.

In contrast to Behavioral Questions, Functional Questions are helpful to assess technical skills, such as “Solve this problem with Python” and should be used to determine functional skills. But you will not learn about the desired competencies through Functional Questions alone “Do you have an analytical mindset?” Typical other interview questions are “What did you do at this company”, “What are your strengths” and “Why are you applying to our company”. These are quite common and not necessarily bad questions. At the same time, the answers to those questions are difficult to assess objectively and are subject to larger interpretations.

With Behavioral Questions, you will ask for specific examples from the candidate’s career in order to investigate how they behaved back in that situation. The idea behind Behavioral Questions is to identify how candidates reacted in past business situations. Studies have shown that it is very likely that you can learn from past behavior about how a candidate will potentially behave in the future. If the candidate missed campaign or project deadlines in the past, it is very likely that this will happen again. If the candidate was eager to understand a market segment in detail in the past, it is very likely that a similar task will motivate the candidate the same way in the future.

Additionally, Behavioral Questions help to engage the candidate in a much deeper way than through anything else. This line of questioning does not judge candidates’ experiences but tries to understand what happened in the past. Most candidates are thankful to have a conversation during which they share and explain past examples of their successes and their learnings.

So, how do you ask a behavioral question? Don’t worry, you do not have to write all the questions in advance. Using behavioral questions is more about the whole set-up. But you should think about your opening question to set the scene with the candidate. It is quite simple.

First, take one of the competencies that you defined upfront. A good opening question for the example “detail oriented” could be “Give me an example where you had to work with many different factors/details in a campaign”. That would be the easiest way to start a conversation about a past example.

A little bit more sophisticated would be to add additional information about the desired example to your question like “I would like to learn about a situation in which you had to stay close to details without losing track of the bigger picture.”

Again, the first question is only to open the stage and help the candidate find an example that warrants a discussion. If the candidate has a hard time finding an example, you can also take a step back and explain what you are trying to learn to smoothen the process (for e.g. “I would like to learn about handling situations with conflicting information and many details, because that is a crucial success factor in this job”). I recommend writing down 1–2 opening questions for each of your competencies so that you can customize your questions along the way.

As discussed above, Behavioral Questions allow a more objective assessment of the answers, especially if you focus on relevant competencies and if you conduct the interview through the STAR-interview framework.

STAR-Principle

Awesome! You have an interview scheduled, have a prepared set of competencies that you would like to find in the candidate and you also put some thoughts into the opening questions. The biggest chunk of your work is done and all you must do now is to have an engaging conversation. To get the most information out of a candidate, I recommend a structured approach for investigating the examples brought forward by your candidate: the STAR principle.

STAR is an acronym for Situation Task Action Result and describes the flow of your investigation into the given example. You can imagine your interview process as on resembling the peeling of an onion — you start with the outer layer and dig deeper into the core:

1) Understand the SITUATON the candidate is referring to and decide whether it is worth it to further investigate or whether to move on to another example. You want to understand the context and scope of the example in order to assess the relevance for your interview.

2) After that, you focus on the TASK. What was the candidate tasked to do and what has been the expectation?

3) During the ACTION phase you are trying to assess what the candidate actually did. There is an important difference between Task and Action since it tells you how the candidate tackles challenges and business problems.

4) After you know what the candidate did, you check for RESULTS. Did the candidate measure success of their actions and the achieved outcome? How does that outcome benchmark against the candidate’s peers?

You probably understand the pattern by now. In each step of the STAR structure, you should try to get a clear picture. Do not be shy to investigate further in case anything is unclear (e.g. “Why is that important?”, “Which unique value did you add?”, “Why did you focus on those results?”). And also challenge the candidate where necessary to get a better understanding of the candidate’s role in the example (“Why did you choose this example?”, “What did you do versus the team?”, “What did you learn from it”).

With the STAR principle it is easy to get relevant insights into how successfully the candidate resolved problems in the past that are linked to your specific job positing. I recommend spending 10–20 minutes investigating each example and discussing 2–3 examples at most per interview. The STAR structure in combination with a focus on Behavioral Questions will give you answers that are much more objective than standard questions and will help you hire great people.