Remember to always be closing — your interview loop is a great opportunity for your candidate to continue to learn more about your startup.

If you have other co-founders or a founding team involved in the hiring loop, we recommend you walk your team through best practices on interviewing (takes approx. 20 minutes). Share these best practices with new hires as you build your team. A little bit of context can go a long way towards making sure your interviewers are getting the best signal, and your candidates are getting the best experience.

It’s probably worth emphasizing the importance of candidate experience. Delivering a positive candidate experience will increase your close rate and preserve your employer brand. A negative one (e.g., showing up late to an interview or treating your candidate poorly) can hurt your company’s reputation. All it takes is one bad Glassdoor review to cause some serious damage. Every person at the company the candidate interacts with, from the first outreach, to onsite, to hire, needs to understand the concept of candidate experience.

Below are the interview best practices that we share with our team internally. These best practices were written by Gem’s first Head of People, Caroline Stevenson, who spent 6 years at Dropbox building a world-class team before joining Gem to lead Recruiting & HR.

Feel free to copy/paste these into your own doc and share it with your team. If these best practices are more built out than what you need, definitely feel free to pair them down or tweak them as needed.

TLDR; best practices for interviewers

• Interview prep best practices - Review the candidate’s resume before the interview, know what areas/questions you’re responsible for.
• Interviewing best practices - Put the candidate at ease, ask probing/open-ended questions to make sure you get signal, avoid making assumptions about the candidate, take notes, leave time at the end of the interview for questions, don’t ever ask questions, directly or indirectly, around age, sex, sexual orientation, race, color, national origin, religion, genetics, or disabilities.
• Post-interview best practices - Write (detailed) interview notes promptly, attend the debrief, do not discuss feedback with others on the interview panel before the debrief

Interview prep best practices

Review the candidate’s resume before the interview

• You should walk into the interview knowing things like where they’ve worked, for how long, etc.
  • These facts might influence the questions you ask. E.g., the last company they worked at seems highly relevant to what we do - how might that help you tweak your questions. What about if they’ve never worked in tech before?
• There might be extra context available to you on candidates before going into the interview. If there is, make sure to read it over. This might include information like - why the candidate is looking, how they were introduced to your startup, and what things are important to them in their job search.

Know what areas/questions you’re responsible for

• Every role should have a doc with an interview panel and questions for each interviewer to ask the candidate(s). Make sure you know your part here! If you have questions, sync with the hiring manager.

Interviewing best practices

Put the candidate at ease

• It’s normal for a candidate to be nervous, so you should try to put the person at ease from the moment you enter the room. If we can help candidates be less nervous, we have a better chance of getting a clear signal on their abilities and personality!
  • A good way to do this is to start with small talk to get them warmed up.
  • Offer the candidate a quick break if they need a drink or a restroom break (sometimes they might just appreciate taking a minute to re-group).

Introduce yourself and cover the agenda for the interview

• Introduce yourself. What do you do at your company? How long have you worked here? How might you work with the candidate in the role we’re trying to fill? This will help give them context on who they are talking to and why you might specifically be in the interview.