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https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/job-interview-team-tips

Job interview team tips: how to lead with an agenda, leverage the job description, ensure all areas are covered, and hire faster better smarter.
https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/job-interview-team-tips

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Job interview team tips: how to lead with an agenda, leverage the job description, ensure all areas are covered, and hire faster better smarter.

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# Job interview team tips: how to improve first‑round calls



I often help my clients with interviewing of candidates, including team-based interviews. I also often am on the other side of the interview, where a potential client is interviewing me. This means I'm fortunate see both sides of the process.



I hope this page may be useful to you and your teams for your interviewing and hiring, because I believe that better communication can help all of us. Feedback welcome. Suggestions are especially appreciated. 



## 1. Lead with an agenda.



Lead the interview call by describing what you want to happen, along with an approximate timeline. This creates shared understanding among all the participants, and is also a big help toward keeping everything on track throughout the call.



If your team is able to provide the agenda ahead of time, this is excellent because it focuses the conversation, and also saves time at the start of the call because the moderator can simply say "You've all received the agenda so we'll just take a moment to review it now."



### Example



"Thank you for joining our call. We would like to start by briefly describing the agenda, so everyone knows how much time we have to cover all the important interview aspects today."



"We'll start with 15 minutes to introduce the people, project, and context. We'll do 15 minutes on the job description specifics. We have 15 minutes to look together at real world work-in-progress together. We'll conclude with 15 minutes to cover any remaining questions and next steps."



### Team responsibilities 



Before the call, the interview team designates a moderator. The moderator is responsible for leading with the agenda, and keeping the timing on track, and tracking that all key points are covered during the call.



**Success looks like:** the team feeling they covered everything sufficiently, even if it's at a rapid pace, and even if there's follow up such as action items. Bias toward success i.e. looking for reasons to say yes to progressing the candidate to the next interview, which is typically an assessment of specific skills and the team's real-world work.



**Subpar looks like:** "We don't have an agenda", "The team ran out of time", "The team needed to cover these four must-have areas, but wasn't able to get to one of them", "The team missed asking about topic X so is dropping the candidate", "The team didn't focus enough on high-priority aspect X", "The team skipped assessing key area X".



**Rate your results from 1-5:** 1 means needs significant improvement, 5 means perfect success.



## 2. Leverage the job description.



A job description is the single best starting point for getting into specifics about the job needs and the candidate's capabilities. This is because all team stakeholders should be familiar with it, and all candidates should have read it. 



Ensure the job description has at minimum a clear meaningful overview and a clear meaningful list of responsibilities and requirements.



### Example



"Let's look at the job description together. It has a description of the role and responsibilities, and has bullet points of requirements and skills that we want to go through together in order."



"We probably won't have time for all of them, because we want to keep the agenda on track. So we'll start with the items that we believe are the highest-priority ones for this interview."



### Team responsibilities



If the team feels the formal job description is bad, or wrong, or doesn't fit, then the team is responsible for creating an informal job description that is more suitable for the interview call, and also responsible for sending the informal job description to the candidate ahead of time.



**Success looks like:** The job description overview and/or each bullet point have a yes/no/maybe mark done by each teammate, or similar tracking. Checklists help improve hiring quality, and also help keep each teammate tracking the interview call progress.



**Subpar looks like:** The team didn't cover the job description overview and/or each bullet point. The team isn't able to compare two different candidates in terms of job description bullet yes/no/maybe check-marks or any other kind of team rating or ranking.



**Rate your results from 1-5:** 1 means needs significant improvement, 5 means perfect success.



## 3. Ensure all areas are covered.



A good interview has many aspects, so it's critical to ensure that all areas are covered in sufficient depth for a yes/no/maybe decision. If time is short, then it's acceptable to delegate some areas to a conclusion-of-call action item, such as a next call or code pairing or more in-depth assessment. 



Each teammate should maintain a checklist of their own must-cover areas. The moderator should maintain a checklist of overall must-cover areas.



### Example



"This is good discussion. I do want to keep our agenda on track, because we want to have time to cover all the important interview areas. We still need to talk about area X, so let's change now to talk about this."



"If there's more to cover about the earlier discussion, then we can follow up about that after this call."



### Team responsibilities 



The moderator is responsible for the alerting the participants in real time if the areas are not receiving sufficient coverage given the time limitations, and also responsible for switching the discussion to the necessary area. In addition, each teammate is responsible for ensuring each area of their own expertise is receiving sufficient coverage in the discussion given the time available, and also for alerting immediately if not. 



**Success looks like:** The teammates all agree that all areas received sufficient coverage. The teammates all agree they got the information they need to bias for saying yes. The teammates all talked sufficiently.



**Subpar looks like:** Any teammate states that an area of importance didn't receive sufficient coverage. Any teammate says "I didn't hear a clear enough answer to question X". Any teammate says "The conversation was too high-level and not enough low-level (or vice versa)". Any teammate says "The discussion felt lopsided". Any teammate stayed silent throughout the call.



**Rate your results from 1-5:** 1 means needs significant improvement, 5 means perfect success.



## Conclusion: self-rate then iterate.



### Self-rate



After each interview call, quickly have each teammate rate their own skill from 1-5 in each of the 3 areas above. 1 means needs significant improvement. 5 means perfect success.



**Share the scores:** Share the ratings with the team. Do this immediately after the call, such as on a team chat. Use a blameless approach because the goal is always team-wide improvement, and never singling-out any individual for punishment.



**Discuss outliers:** If anything scores below where you want to be, or if any teammate seems to score themselves much differently than your opinion, then acknowledge these outliers and also decide when is right to discuss them. 



### Iterate



In practice, honest self-ratings tend to rapidly help teams improve. It's common to have teams start at average rating 1-2 and improve to average rating 4-5, all in a few months.



**High-velocity teams:** For high-velocity teams, including lean teams, agile teams, and technology industry teams, there's already a good strong bias to iterate and improve. Honest self-rating greatly help with iterative improvement, continuous improvement, and retrospective improvement.



**No gaming:** As with all metrics, if teammates are gaming the metrics, then stop that behavior and instead choose better metrics.



### Cross-cultural cross-norm surprises



For cross-cultural teams and cross-norm teams, the ratings tend to quickly turn up cultural surprises and norm surprises. This is especially true when the team and the candidate are from different cultures or different norms. To help with this, teams could (and should) make expectations explicit, and also address these at the start of the  interview call.



**Example of perspective:** Some people favor bottom-up low-level discussion, such as about details or tactics or short-term tasks; other people favor top-down high-level discussion, such as about aggregations or strategies or long-term goals.



**Example of leading:** Some people favor the team talking more than the candidate because the team is hiring, whereas other people favor the candidate talking more than the team because it shows more initiative.



**Example of relating:** Some people favor favor agreeability and circumspection, whereas other people favor bluntness and directness.



**Example of talking:** Some people favor the most-senior teammate talking first because the person has the most experience, whereas other people favor the most-junior teammate talking first because this builds experience.



### Overcoming resistance



If team members are resistant to ratings, or have significantly different opinions about a call's ratings, then it can help to learn more about teamwork improvement practices. Try these two guides to get your started.



**[TEAM FOCUS](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/team-focus)**



**[Ways Of Working](https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ways-of-working)**