Interviews: Reinforcing the Relationship as you Recruit

In a previous article we discussed some techniques we, at Castelo Green, use to kick off the recruitment process as we mean to continue it. By building good relationships with prospective candidates right at the start of the process – when sourcing, selling and screening, we set the tone for how an organisation treats people, turns prospective candidates into actual candidates and helps ensure those entering the expensive parts of the process – interviews – are positive about the company and keen for the recruitment process to succeed. 

Next up: how to sustain and reinforce this emphasis on relationships through the next phase of the process: interviewing / evaluation. For many, this IS the recruitment process but for us, it is part 2 of a 3 step process … critical of course but only one piece of the puzzle.

Step 5: Technical interviews

Technical interviews continue to be a key step for both the hiring team and the candidate. This is where the hiring team is most likely to uncover the ‘reject’ signal and candidates know this. There is therefore considerable stress for the candidate at this stage – even if they are confident in their ability. 

This isn’t an article on how to run technical interviews. Rather, how can you, as the interviewer, continue to build the relationship that results in a great hire. How do you go about evaluating technical ability in a way that will also deliver information to your candidate on what you are like as a team. Whether the candidate feels they would fit in, enjoy working with the team and grow professionally in the way they want to?

The value of empathy

A key attribute is empathy. This is a particularly stressful part of the process. It gets to the heart of how the candidate self-perceives as a professional.

There is still a school of thought that placing the candidate in an uncomfortable position and putting them under considerable pressure is important. See how the candidate thinks under pressure. Will they crack? 

As with all things, there is a balance to be struck here and I feel it is valuable to tailor your approach to the needs and culture of your organisation. If high levels of time pressure, limited support from teammates, hyper-critical standards conformity or whatever, are your daily reality, expose the candidate to this – you do need signal on how they will cope and they need to know what they are walking into.

I’d argue, however, that this working environment is very much the exception. Most teams foster high standards through a supportive team working environment where considerable effort is made to create highly productive, sustainable work conditions. Reflect this in how you run your technical assessment. 

What do you do when a candidate struggles with something? How quickly do you step in? Do you give them the answer, nudge them with a tip, move on to the next question? The art of helping the candidate get the best signal on the reality of working with you is responding honestly to these questions. There isn’t a wrong answer apart from reacting in an inauthentic, ’interview scenario’ way. We know that our team members will do dumb things, forget things, have knowledge gaps. What is your actual response to these issues on a typical working day? Reflect them in the interview process. Even explain that this is how you tend to do things in your team.

The car crash interview

What if the candidate is hopeless … the whole exercise is a car crash. It happens and especially if you’ve ducked a technical assessment step. If the interview is turning into a car crash, the candidate will almost certainly be feeling it too. It is ok and humane to pause, acknowledge things are going badly and ask the candidate if there is a reason. Do they feel they aren’t doing justice to their ability? They may be unwell, may have stepped straight out of a high stress work meeting in their day job, have personal problems that are distracting them. Or, of course, they just might not have the skills you need or be out of their depth. 

What you can do though is use the disaster as a way to gather more signal and, simultaneously, have them see you and your team as emotionally intelligent – a good place to work. In my experience, 9 times out of 10, a rejection is the right call here… but not always… you’ve got this far, you may as well spend 15 minutes reflecting and seeing whether you buy the rationale for under-performance and give the candidate another crack. 

NB: and another contentious point for debate, and something we will write more on another time, but you may find candidates with atypical backgrounds benefit from this sort of reflection. Maybe our standard evaluation mechanisms benefit some types of candidates at the expense of others?

You’re still selling

Despite the technical interview being a key evaluation step for the hiring team and the most likely point of rejection, it is still part of a selling process. Good candidates will be drawing their own signal from technical interviews. How well are they run? How technical were the interviewers? What was their ‘style’? How rigorous or demanding were they? Great engineers want to work with other great engineers and a robust technical assessment helps give those candidates confidence that the team will be strong.

Bear this in mind when deciding how to structure your technical interviews. What does the interview signal about you? Is that what you intend?

Step 6: Behavioural interviews

The behavioural interview is probably the most straightforward vehicle for building and reinforcing a relationship with your candidate. It is also one of the most important indicators of long-term success for candidates. The behavioural interview, done well, is explicit about an exchange of perspective and point of view to give the hiring manager and the candidate insight on the goodness of fit of the candidate and the company. It should not be a grilling by the interviewer to see if the candidate demonstrates any ‘red flag’ behaviours: selfishness, lack of drive, guardedness, untrustworthiness, arrogance, anger, greed or a multitude of other ‘sins’.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of these traits may be red flags if they manifest in negative ways and the behavioural component of interviews should absolutely be seeking signal on them. But what else should the behavioural interview be doing? 

Step into the candidate’s shoes

What does the thoughtful candidate get from this exercise? What uncertainties and anxieties do they want to gather signal on. 

• Is this an honourable company? 
• Do they treat people with respect? 
• Do employees look happy, confident, empowered? 
• Are they honest, can they be trusted? 
• Are they enthusiastic, energetic, fired up? 
• Do they encourage debate and disagreement? 
• Do I like them?

So… go on the red flag hunt with searching questions but remember that your questions, how you phrase them, how you respond to answers will be absorbed by the candidate who is trying to get answers to their own questions. The questions you choose to ask will send a signal – think about your questions in this context as well as whether they will simply tell you what you want to know. 

Your questions and what they say about you

This is not a piece on how to run the perfect behavioural interview – another task for another day but reflect for a moment on what these question choices might say about you. Here’s a few classic questions randomly selected from the internet:

• Tell me about a time you had a conflict with another team member 
• What frustrates you? 
• What does your best day of work look like? 
• What aspects of your work are most criticised? 
• How do you deal with a failed deadline? 
• Tell me about a time when your work got overwhelming. What did you do? 

What does the fact you’ve chosen to ask these particular questions tell the candidate? Is this something you want them to pick up? Be active in your choice of questions. There are lots of angles to pursue in a behavioural interview and limited time. 

How do you ask the questions? I tend to ‘dress’ the question in an anecdote about my team, to give the question a context. Yes, this may steer the candidate a little and help them provide the answer they think I am looking for but that also gives me signal (this person is not being honest, they are trying to impress). To be fair to them, I say this to them in advance. ‘Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear ‘. 

So I get to develop the relationship by selecting the right questions, presenting them with context and signalling my candour by being upfront about how I expect the answer to be honest. Lastly, after the candidate has provided the answer, there is an opportunity to reinforce desired traits. Reflect their experience back to them to demonstrate empathy. Take an aspect of their answer to explore another anecdote from your team – a true exchange of experience. Usually you end up with a short, honest, revealing chat. 

But … time constraints?

Of course, this all takes time and you will struggle to get through a long checklist of behavioural questions if you take the information share approach throughout. A few responses to this:

• quality trumps quantity
• force rank your questions so you get the signal on the most important things first
• accept that a short, transactional response to some questions is fine
• Keep control over how long you spend talking. You do want to ‘give’ but it is easy, with this approach to fill the interview with your own voice. 

Lastly, of course, as with all candidate interactions, ask the candidate if they have additional questions, need for clarification, things they think you should hear and didn’t get the opportunity. Reinforce that this is a two way dialogue. And just as with your choice of questions, the candidate’s choice of what questions and how many questions to ask, is revealing.

Step 7: Other Interviews

Every organisation will take its own view on who else may be included in an interview process. A small organisation may always include someone from the senior leadership team or executive – effectively another behavioural touch point but with a focus on wider culture. Other teams may want a perspective from teams that engineers will often work with. I have often included a product team interview or customer success interview in the process as strong relationships across these teams were vital for success. I’ve also run two-hander behavioural interviews with a colleague from one of these teams. This gives the candidate even more signal, demonstrating to the candidate how we work together – hopefully respectfully 😅 (as well as saving the candidate some time).

Whichever you do, the key thing is to ensure it is joined up, whomever is conducting this interview knows what their objective is and they are comfortable in the role. This step is often valuable as a sell to the candidate. But not always. Sometimes if I have enough signal and the candidate expresses no interest in meeting e.g. a product manager – I will skip this step. But … a candidate choosing not to want to meet the people that develop their roadmap and give them their priorities is an interesting piece of signal. Why do they not care? What does this mean about how they value the product role? What might this break in your product building machine?

Trying to brief your CEO, CTO or other senior leadership team member to stay on message is harder. Here, the candidate may pick up signal that will reinforce what they’ve heard so far: the CEO exhibits the same cultural traits as everyone else met in the process. The culture is probably genuine. Or they pick up a clash: the hiring team talks about work / life balance and being given the space to be creative and high quality. The CEO talks about customers, urgency, time to market. A good recruitment process will have reconciled these perspectives before you reach this point by knowing ahead of time what the senior team narrative is and seeding that into prior discussions with the candidate.

Wrapping up

If you’ve read this far and chosen to put some of our ideas into action, you will be getting well motivated, well fitting people coming into the top of your recruitment funnel, you will have reinforced your cultural norms, learned a lot about who the candidate really is and whether they have the skills and ‘fit’ for your team … now you want to hire them and make them a productive member of your team: phase 3 of the 3 step recruitment process. This is the topic of the last piece in our mini series.

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