Interviews are tricky. You're supposed to spend a few hours with someone, and determine how they're going to do for the next several years of their professional life. Getting that process to be successful can be pretty tough to get right.

Luckily, humans have been doing it for a long time. As the hiring manager, you know a lot about what you expect someone in this role to do and to be good at. This guide will cover some do's and don'ts to make your interview process rival the very best.

Keep in mind that an interview is a balancing act. You want to be slow enough to get a good profile of the candidate, fast enough to capture good candidates before the competition: inviting, but thorough. Exciting, but honest.

This is a process that requires experimentation and iteration, so don't be afraid to try new things. We have a few tips and ToDos we cross off our list when it comes to interviews — check them out!

1️⃣ Use the vision of a successful hire as your guide

2️⃣ Communicate with candidates early and often

3️⃣ Interviews, but make it fashion

1️⃣ Build your interview steps and process

2️⃣ Structure a fair and relevant assessment

3️⃣ Create relevant and comprehensive interview scorecards for each interviewer

It may be tempting to use existing playbooks or recall interview processes you've been a part of to structure the interviews you'll run. We recommend starting with a blank slate — the interview process' most important input should be your vision of this new hire's contributions to the company. This will require you to do some measure of job analysis upfront: Who will this person report to? Which stakeholders will they be working with most closely? What projects or KPIs will they have ownership over? What skills will benefit them? What are we willing to train on, and what should this person be knowledgeable about from the jump?

Each skill or competency should have a corresponding set of questions that get at whether or not the candidate demonstrates competency in it - here are a few examples of competencies and corresponding questions.

This helps frame your hiring strategy in a way that helps ensure you've been thinking about how this individual will add value to your team, which makes it easy for them to speak to their strengths and relevant experiences or skills throughout the interview process — a win-win. It also helps you avoid having a candidate spend a ton of time with the wrong set of folks, which may be more costly than it looks at first glance: you may end up hiring someone based on impartial or incorrect information or may be missing out on the right person because the right questions weren't asked.

It may take some trial and error and some time on the job for your recent hires for you to be sure of how well your interview processes map to your desired results, but it's a safe bet to start with the end goal in mind.

Being able to communicate expectations to a candidate early and often presupposes that you'll know what the process is upfront — this is exactly the ideal state you want to be in! Few things create more frustration and hesitation for a candidate during interviews than a sense that the process is unclear or being made up on the spot.

Once a candidate has entered the interview loop, try to set them up for success — reiterate the next steps in the process, timelines, and send the names and positions of interviewers they will be speaking to ahead of time. Communicate with them as soon as you can about any changes that need to be made.

Always let candidates know where they stand — ghosting should be especially avoided after an onsite. Some hiring managers or talent teams may avoid conversations with candidates because they're afraid their feedback will go awry. Even if the outcome is a no, be thankful for candidate's time and share the good feedback the team had for them — this can go a long way, especially if you think you'll ramp up hiring again or across other functions down the line.

You and your team have fun — feel free to let that shine through your interview process, as well! Candidates are looking for signals on what it would be like to work with you and your team, and what the culture is like. Remember to bake in time for socialization (i.e. lunch/coffee breaks) into the process.

My colleague, Brittany, sent me this note after we discussed opera recommendations over a lunch break during my onsite.

Many people think the best way to reach the requisite level of confidence for a candidate is to add in interview slots with additional teammates "just to be on the safe side." If you've made an investment in your job analysis and interview process design upfront, you should be able to design a process that is fairly quick — Google researched their interview processes and found that 4 interviews was the magic number. Additional interviews didn't amount to better signal.

Here's how Dover limits our interview process to 4 discrete phases:

Check out one of our blog posts on interviews for tips to reduce your time-to-onsite in half.

If you choose to include an assessment in your interview loop, it's important that it wouldn't require an unreasonable amount of time and effort (more than ~2 hours of a candidate's time) and that it doesn't come off as "free work" the candidate is doing on your company's behalf. If the work does fall into these traps, you're likely to see a large amount of candidate drop-off at this point in time.

Here are some tips we consider when creating the assessment portion of our interview loops:

Technical assessments:

Based on the job analysis you've done and the questions you've identified, it's time to document the questions asked, responses given, as well as the observable candidate actions gave during an interview.

Your scorecard helps you score the candidate for your need-to-haves. You'll probably test and align on a method after a few interviews, which is to be expected — what's important is that you make sure your scorecard method is applied consistently.

Scoring can be done in a few ways:

Greenhouse outlines a leveling score method - using an OPM interview as an example:

LinkedIn's product team produces the following scorecard to assess whether or not a candidate performed well in an interview:

Encourage hiring managers to keep their thoughts on candidates and their feedback confidential until your scheduled debrief session (tip: schedule the debrief session while you are scheduling the actual onsite. This way, you don't delay extending an offer because of internal scheduling difficulties after the onsite).

Phase 1: Phone Screen (30 minutes)

Phase 2: Live technical assessment (30 minutes)

Phase 3: Virtual Onsite (4 hours)

Additional resource - our guide to Product/PM interviews