The First Interview

This stage is where you begin to spend some real-time with the candidate. If the candidate is located within commuting distance to your office and you are not a remote company, it’s good to meet them in person because it’s easier to make a more human connection that way. A first interview can be done in an hour, and it should ideally consist of the hiring manager (that’s you!) and somebody else who will be working with them on the team. Don’t have more than two people in the interview as more can be intimidating.

Guidelines for the candidate

Before the candidate is invited, make it clear what they should expect from the interview, so they feel as comfortable as possible. Tell them what to wear. For example, candidates turning up in a suit to a casual-clothes company will make them feel embarrassed. Also, tell them roughly what you’re going to go through. For example, you could tell them that:

• The interview will be one hour.

• It will be with the hiring manager and one current employee on the team.

• It will consist of some conversation for each party to get to know the other and to find out more about their past roles and experience.

• There will be some technical exercises that will be done collaboratively.

• There will be plenty of opportunities for them to ask questions about the company, the team, and the role.

The more transparent you are, the more you put the candidate at ease and the more you’re implicitly saying to the candidate that you want them to have the best opportunity to succeed.

Preparation

Once the candidate has been booked into the interview, do your preparation. Both you and the other interviewer should take the time to read the candidate’s application with the following questions in mind:

• What are the candidate’s main strengths?

• How many years of experience do they have and where have they gained them?

• Do they have any unique skills and knowledge that will be valuable to the team?

• Have they worked anywhere that may have solved similar problems to the ones that you work on? For example, are they also working at a SaaS company on their data ingestion and storage, or were they working on something entirely different?

• Do they have experience working in a manner similar to you, for example, in a cross-functional agile team?

Think about the sorts of questions that you want to ask them in the interview after ...