9-min read

These nine tips from Ivan Lopez, Techstars General Manager of Accelerators across the Americas West region, will teach you how to add structure to the often unstructured process of interviewing. Ivan has over 25 years of global executive leadership experience in business development, marketing, and technology. By his estimation, Ivan has interviewed nearly 2,000 candidates around the world.

In the absence of a considered structure, interviewers often ask random questions that can create a sloppy, repetitive process and result in a bad candidate experience. The hiring process is the candidate’s first impression of your organization. A structured, consistent process will not only help identify the best talent and fit for the organization, but also promote positive brand building and solidify your reputation as a top employer in a tight job market.  

Structuring the interview process includes:

• Determining the number of interviewers;

• Standardizing the way notes and scoring are documented;

• Identifying a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses;

• Clearly articulating what attributes you’re looking for and aligning them with the organization’s core values and leadership principles. 

A structured interview process will help identify whether a candidate is the right fit for a role and for the company overall. 

For example, maybe you're interviewing someone for a business development role and discover that many of their strengths overlap with a product management skill set. The candidate shows they are strong at determining client needs, translating those into business requirements, and developing product sales strategies, but not as strong at lead generation as would be needed on the business development team. The structured interview process will help determine that the candidate is a strong potential hire, but they are better suited for a role on your product team. This leads to hiring the best, regardless of what role they may have held in the past or their current application. People tend to wear many hats during the course of their career—and within startups there are rarely perfect boxes. 

01. Align interview standards with leadership principles

The first step to implementing a structured interview process is to establish standards that align with the organization’s leadership principles or core values. At Techstars, we use three of our core values against which everything we do is measured: We Give First. We act with integrity. We treat others with respect. Our interview process is structured and scored to reveal how well a candidate aligns with our core values. 

Amazon has 14 leadership principles – Think Big, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Learn and Be Curious – to name just a few. Candidates are never scored against all of the leadership principles, but a typical interview could easily cover several of them. Your organization’s leadership principles should serve as your guiding star as you develop and standardize your interview process.  

Outline your organization’s  leadership principles or core values and then identify situational questions that highlight a candidate’s behavior. For example, for the Techstars principle of acting with integrity, you might ask a candidate to describe a time when they made a mistake with a client and how they handled that situation. In an answer, the interview panelists would look for an indication that the candidate was transparent and forthright in owning their mistake, and that they learned from the experience. 

If it’s a cultural value, ask the candidate what that value means to them and how they’ve seen it in their own life. For the Techstars value Give First, an interviewer might ask, “At Techstars we give first, which means we try to help anyone with no expectation of getting anything specific in return. Can you give me an example from your own life when you’ve acted this way?” In an answer the interviewer would look for a personal connection with that value. Maybe that’s a story about a time they practiced give first or a time that someone gave first to them and how meaningful that was. 

02. Include a “Bar Raiser” on the interview team

Be thoughtful about how many people, as well as what roles, the interview panel represents. The panel should have no more than six people, and the candidate should not have to interview with anyone more than once in the process. The ideal interview panel should consist of the hiring manager, a peer or someone in a similar role to the position you’re hiring for, a customer or internal partner, and a bar raiser, that is, someone who doesn’t have anything to do with the role and can impartially represent the company’s interests.

The bar raiser was initially envisioned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, with a goal of making every hire 10% better than the existing team. The bar raiser is someone on the interview panel who will not be directly involved with the new hire from a day-to-day workflow standpoint, but who understands the organization’s culture, leadership principles, and team dynamics, so they can determine whether the candidate will be a good fit. 

Make sure the bar raiser understands their role when they go into an interview. They aren't in the room to evaluate technical competency or grill the candidate on their previous work experience. The bar raiser is looking for a candidate who will bring diverse perspectives to the team, drive growth and innovation, help advance the company, and provide a level of competency that will elevate the team and the organization.

03. Brief everyone on the interview team about the process to ensure consistency

Hiring and interviewing are skills that takes practice and honing over time. Those who don’t use these skills regularly need help to do them well. When you providing hiring managers and other interviewers with a structured process, it gives them a template for this skill set, which often falls into the ‘other duties as assigned’ category of the interviewer’s job description. 

Provide each panelist with a solid and very crisp briefing about their roles and responsibilities for the interview process. Gather your interview panel for a 30 minute meeting to explain what is expected of each panelist in terms of scoring and taking notes and provide some background information about the candidates. This helps manage expectations and provides clarity and consistency in a process that is otherwise very subjective.

Hiring managers are incentivized to make quick – and unfortunately often bad – hiring decisions. The hiring panel brings alternative perspectives to the process, and it’s important to note that the panel doesn’t need to have consensus. In fact, the panel rarely reaches consensus. Rather, the purpose of the panel is to give the hiring manager a full perspective on the candidate. 

Determine ahead of time who has the final say, and make sure everyone involved knows who this is. A good method is to allow the final decision on a candidate to be made between the hiring manager and the bar raiser. If they disagree, I vote for the bar raiser every time. 

04. Create a simple scorecard that is aligned with your organization’s leadership principles

Scoring the interview process should be as straightforward as possible. 

I recommend developing a simple scorecard (positive, negative, or neutral) rather than using a numerical scale, which produces results that vary wildly from person to person. For each question, interviewers should measure their responses against the leadership principles or core values. The scorecard should also include a recommendation from each interviewer: hire, not hire, or identify the candidate as good for the company, but not in this role.

05. Use the STAR method for behavioral interview questions

The STAR method is a common methodology for behavioral interview questions. These are questions that start with “Tell me about a time when…”

• Situation: The candidate will provide an overview of the situation, challenge, or business problem that aligns with the question they were asked.  

• Task: The candidate will outline the specific tasks they led to address the challenge or business problem.

• Action: What action did the candidate take to address the situation? 

• Result: What was the result or outcome based on the candidate’s action? 

The STAR method is simple for candidates to apply, and it forces a more data driven, less anecdotal approach. When I ask a STAR question I’m looking for a beginning (Situation), middle (Task/Action) and end (Result). As the interviewer, you can expect the candidate to effectively outline the “S” based on your question, then you can follow with probing questions as necessary to get the “TAR.” If you have given the candidate guidance ahead of time that they are expected to use the STAR framework, you shouldn’t need to probe as much. 

Applying the STAR method allows the interviewer to understand what the candidate has done in the past vs. hearing about what they might do in the future. Past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior; it shows how the candidate thinks and acts in a given situation. When a candidate’s answers are not tied to specific examples, they are instead answering hypothetical questions with their best guess of what you want to hear. The STAR method strongly supports data centric decision making—and it helps to eliminate bias or assumptions in the process. You can dive much deeper using this method, as the answer to the original question can lead to several follow up questions.

If you want to implement STAR based behavioral interview questions into your recruiting process, check out this list of sample questions.

06. Brief the candidate about the interview process so they can present their best self in the interview

There is no upside to surprising candidates. If your organization has internal or external recruiters, they should be responsible for briefing the candidate. Often startups don’t have a recruiting team, in which case the hiring manager should brief the candidate on the interview process, timeline, leadership principles, and methodology. This gives the candidate the opportunity to prepare appropriately and gives the hiring panel the opportunity to score the candidate on their ability to follow directions. If a candidate has made it this far in the selection process, they deserve the opportunity to present their best self.  

Set clear expectations, and share the names and roles of the hiring panelists. If a candidate knows your approach and your organization’s values, they will be able to show you how they’ve acted from those values in the past. 

It’s also important to commit to a hiring timeline and stick with it. People are busy and don’t have time to be strung along, and it’s not a good look for the organization. By example, it shouldn’t take you more than two days to give feedback after a phone screen if you are going forward with the candidate. Measuring your recruiting teams or hiring managers against clear goals in this area ensure that the organization is being transparent to candidates and efficient in hiring.

07. There is no need to compare and contrast candidates

I often see hiring managers who find a great candidate but insist on holding out to find someone better or another candidate for comparison’s sake. This step is not necessary, particularly when your organization uses the structured interview process. A great candidate is a great candidate regardless of the other talent out there. Make the hire, or you’ll risk losing a great candidate to your competition. 

08. Keep the hiring team’s interview notes confidential until everyone’s notes are compiled

Verbatim interview notes are valuable to the interview process and should be presented to the interview panel in aggregate. The recruiter or bar raiser should compile the notes into a report before sharing them with the panel. The report can reveal insights from the other perspectives represented by the panelists and capture details others may have missed. This report is helpful in the hire, not hire, or “other role” recommendation process.  

09. Exercise caution when giving candidates assignments

It is perfectly appropriate to give a candidate a brief writing assignment or coding test if it’s germane to the role they are pursuing. But I strongly recommend against giving assignments that require candidates to prepare presentations for a variety of reasons. The hiring process is time consuming as is, and cumbersome assignments are a demotivator for candidates. They wonder what the organization will do with the marketing plan they create if they’re aren’t hired, and if they decline to complete the assignment it’s a disqualifier. 

Assignments and tests present an ethical slippery slope and can cause an organization to lose a great candidate. It’s important to note that tests have been found to be largely discriminatory when not applied correctly. If you are planning to administer a test or give an assignment as part of the interview process, make sure you understand which types of tests are legal in the country you are hiring in and how to administer them in a way that prevents bias.

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