Building Engineering Teams

Building teams is hard. Building engineering teams is harder. Building engineering teams for a startup is the hardest. There are many pieces to this puzzle of building engineering teams. I hope to cover some of these in the upcoming months. This post is about one of the many pieces — interviewing. Having varying degrees of interviewer experience on my team, we laid out some guidelines on interviewing at Quizizz, so we can all learn together and do our part to ensure we are able to share our journey with high-quality talent. We went over this post as a team (some parts that may not be relevant are redacted).

Interviewing is a two-way street. We want to provide the best candidate experience to every person who walks through our doors. We want to be consistent and thorough in evaluating our candidates. And we want to make candidates comfortable, so they can ask us questions too. As much as we evaluate candidates, candidates are evaluating us with every interaction. Interviews form everlasting memories of such interactions and come up while talking to their friends; friends who could be potential candidates in the future. As someone famous once said, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel!” Remember the times when you were a candidate and had a pleasant interview experience? Remember to consciously pay it forward!

Whether you are a candidate, interviewer or recruiter, interviews are stressful. Our goal is to make it as stress-free as possible, so we can get the candidate to showcase the best version of themselves and for interviewers to make the best decisions, all within a short time frame.

What are our expectations from you as an interviewer?

• Let candidates impress you. Talk less and listen more. Listen and ask insightful questions with genuine curiosity and ensure to not come across as judgmental. A good rule of thumb for a great interview is when a candidate talks > 70% of the time.
• Make clear decisions.A candidate is one of 3 — Strong Yes, Yes, No. There are no Maybes. Gather enough information and signals to make your decision. If you are in doubt, talk to your peers or leads, and convert the maybe to either Yes or No.
• Attend Debriefs. Notes are sometimes not sufficient. Providing context can help us better understand feedback and make good decisions collectively.

These will evolve over time and that’s natural. At this time, here’s what matters:

The last 5 mins after every interview should be used to write feedback in Workable. This not only helps us go fast, but also allows you to capture thorough feedback as the conversation will be fresh in your mind.

The biggest reason → You are learning! Interviews teach you a lot about yourself. Some concrete ones:

• Interviews help improve communication skills. Communication is not only about speaking, but also listening.
• Interviews help you understand the business, product, and technology better. Answering candidate questions requires a deeper understanding.
• You will get help when the candidate joins! They’ll remember how you made them feel, and pay it back.
• You are likely to spend more time with your co-workers than with your friends and family. You might as well have a say in the decision. 🙂

Take ownership when there is a conflict of schedules. Be proactive about asking for feedback, and discussing candidates. Stalk people’s calendars for interviews and ask to shadow. Be creative!

When do I have to submit feedback?

Hiring is competitive. We need to move fast so we can land the best candidates. In most cases, you are able to submit feedback within 5 mins after the interview. Stuff happens and we are overbooked sometimes. In such cases, ensure to submit feedback within 24 hours of the completion of the interview, at the latest.

Do I need to attend Interview Debriefs?

Yes, it is mandatory for every interviewer to attend the debrief session. We are all interviewing different facets and it is important to provide all the information/context so we can arrive at a good decision with high confidence.

How many interviews should I do in a week?

In an ideal situation, an interviewer would cap the number of interviews at 5 per week. There will be weeks when we will do more given our ambitious goals. Please pay attention to how you feel about taking more interviews and let us know — Interview burnout is real.

Some interviewers prefer batching all of them in 1 day, others prefer 1–2 a day. Priorities will be captured and scheduling will take into account interviewer preferences. But remember, the schedule has too many variables. As we know, scheduling is an NP-hard problem :-).

Will it look bad on me as an interviewer if I said yes, and everyone else says no, or vice versa?

No. We are all evaluating different skills for candidates as a panel. It is reasonable for candidates to be strong in some areas and weak in others. Every interviewer can probe different facets.

Can I give a strong YES when I have not evaluated all skills of a candidate?

Absolutely. Your strong yes is for areas that you have evaluated. For example, you will find a candidate who is strong at system design and you should give a strong yes despite not knowing their strength in coding. Bring all interviewers together in a debrief and discuss all aspects.

Should we have candidates work on home assignments / multi-day projects?

Projects can be a good idea for interviews. They provide a window into the thought process, execution, and communication of a candidate. Home assignments are more realistic when compared to operating under the gun in an hour-long conversation. However, candidates may not be able to afford the time to complete projects when juggling jobs, families, etc.,

Too many interviews will burn me out. What can we do?

In addition to capping the number of interviews/week, as an organization, we practice NO-interview days on Wednesdays.

Interviewing is both an art and science. It is important to be yourself, throughout. It may be challenging to trust your process as you start and it will be tempting to follow these steps to the T. However, over time, you will rely a lot more on your own than the guidelines provided. And that’s a natural evolution!