Hiring is your brand: 9 small things to improve your interview process

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Interviewing potential hires is the most important brand building exercise your company will go through and it’s conducted primarily by people whose primary day jobs are very different. This should scare the bejeezus out of you.

But it’s a completely solvable problem, and the solution comes when you recognize that hiring is sales: a repeatable process that involves convincing others with good information.

1. Every candidate should take away one thing from the interview process: they want to work for your company. Even if you deeply regret the last 30 minutes of your life, their friend might be a fit 6 months from now. Treat everyone you talk to like a potential customer.

2. During onboarding, every employee should be trained on how to pitch your company. This pitch will be told every time your new employee is explaining what they do to anyone. Your company pitch should tell a story: the beginning (the founding story), the middle (what you’re doing now) and the end (your incredible future).

3. Training your team on how to pitch the company and how to interview is not enough. You need to audit interviews as well as send out surveys to all candidates who reached any stage in the pipeline. You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and the act of measuring will tell everyone how important this is.

4. Don’t waste time on bad questions. Good questions are:

   • Open-ended: there isn’t one right answer.
   • Qualifying: the answer tells you something about the candidate that is relevant to the job.

   For a product manager role, here are 3 questions I’d ask at Imgur for the phone screen:

   What do you think Imgur’s 3 most important metrics are?

   If you could make one change to Imgur’s new iOS app, what would you change?

   Do you communicate differently with designers than you do with engineers? What’s the difference?