A well-designed interview loop serves two purposes: (1) it gives you a clean signal on the candidate’s skill and values, and (2) it provides the candidate confidence in your team and approach to team building.

Below are a few best practices to help you design a thoughtful interview loop specific to your team. These best practices are from Viet Nguyen, our first Head of Customer Talent Advisory. His team advises hundreds of Gem customers on how to recruit effectively. Before Gem, Viet spent the past five years recruiting leadership at several great startups, including One Medical, where he led tech recruiting.

High-level best practices

• Do the research and define what you need - It’s difficult to make a hiring decision if you don’t know what you’re looking for. It’s even harder for others to help you evaluate candidates if you can’t articulate what you’re looking for. If you don’t take the time to document what you’re looking for, you’ll be shooting for a constantly moving target.
• Design an interview loop representative of your team’s values - If your team is practical, creative, and/or collaborative, make sure you use your interview loop to highlight that for candidates.
• Evaluate the whole person - As you’re defining what you’re looking for, make sure to include all the skills and personality traits required to be successful—an interview loop incorporates ways to assess these qualifications.
• Know how you’re going to evaluate the results - Similar to designing an experiment, you need key performance indicators (“KPIs”) to measure successes and failures objectively.

Define what you need

It’s important to take the time to define what you’re looking for before you start recruiting for many reasons:

• You need to know what you’re looking for when 2a. Sourcing 1st-degree connections from your network.
• You’ll be able to articulate the role to prospects in the 3. The initial sell conversation.
• The 2b. Referrals from your network will be more targeted.
• You’ll need to know what you’re looking for to design a proper interview loop

If you’ve never hired for a role or hired in-general before, the best way to develop the necessary context is to leverage your network. We suggest identifying 5-10 experts — people who have hired for the role before or people who are currently/previously in the role and learn as much as you can from them. Another option is leveraging your investors to make introductions to experts from their networks.

Your interview loop will say something about you

We’ve all been through interviews where the interview has nothing to do with the job. This is often the by-product of either (1) not knowing any better or (2) not having the time to do better.

Design the interview loop to sell candidates on your team’s culture and values. At Gem, we care deeply about practicality and collaboration. So rather than doing a standard set of whiteboarding engineering interviews, we decided to go with something more bespoke to Gem.

Our onsite interview is a one to two day event where engineering candidates spend time working on a project with another engineer on the team. When we were building the founding team, candidates did this interview with the founders.

This interview structure allows us to evaluate and showcase what we care about — practicality and collaboration. To see exactly how we did this, check out 5e. How Gem interviewed our founding engineering team.

Know what you’re looking for