Conducting remote interviews successfully
Learn how the best teams adapt to interviewing while they WFH
At Insight, we partner with companies to build and scale their tech teams. In the last few weeks, teams that we work with have been transitioning to remote work to keep their teams safe and do what they can to limit the spread of coronavirus. We’ve seen the most proactive among them quickly shift their interview processes to include more remote options.
We conduct a lot of remote interviews ourselves (our team did nearly 4,000 in the last year), so we thought it might be helpful to share some thoughts on the advantages of remote interviews and ways they can make your hiring process better overall, plus a few tips on how to do them really well. Teams that are able to keep their hiring efforts moving forward will likely have their pick of candidates, if they can ensure that those interviews are effective and well-run.
Take this opportunity to re-evaluate your current interview process
In general, a good interview process is one that’s designed to gather relevant evidence needed to determine which candidates have the skills necessary for the role. It should also allow candidates to move reasonably quickly through a clear sequence of steps that feels personal to them.
Use this moment of shifting to remote engagement as a chance to take a good look at your current interview process. Is it really designed to get you the information you need? Does it provide candidates with clear expectations and instructions at every stage? Does it place artificial or unnecessary barriers in people’s way?
Follow a structured process
Remote interviews can make it easier to ensure a structured process and maintain consistency across interviews with different candidates. While many of us probably wouldn’t print out a script to make sure we ask all candidates the same questions in person, it’s much easier to discreetly have that list open on your desktop for easy reference during a remote interview.
Communicate details clearly
The structure of your process should also be clearly communicated to candidates, especially if they will be using new tools to connect to you. These are basic elements that candidates will need to know ahead of time:
- Who will they be meeting from your team?
- What should they prepare?
- Will you just want to talk (audio only) or are you planning on using video as well?
- Will you want them to share their screen at any point?
- What tools or platforms will you want them to use¹, and do they need to download and test them ahead of time?
If you keep candidates informed about what to expect, you’ll find you will be better able to evaluate them on what you want to see: the candidate’s relevant skills and experience. If you surprise them you’ll only learn how they respond to surprises. While that may be an important skill, especially if your workplace is chaotic and the ability to handle change is essential for the role, most of us are better off giving candidates as much information as we can.
Provide flexibility and fairness
Not everyone in your candidate pool will have the flexibility to attend multiple onsite interviews. Offering flexible scheduling can improve accessibility for candidates who may otherwise have trouble scheduling an in-person interview.
Insight’s Fellow application screening and interview process has been fully remote for over five years. But in our early days, we used a combination of in-person interviews and Skype video calls to evaluate candidates. We found that this approach often led to an unfair advantage for people lucky enough to already live in the cities where we operated. We knew in-person interviews wouldn’t be feasible for everyone — most of our candidates were scattered at university and college towns across the US — so, to make sure our process put candidates on equal footing with one another, we moved to an entirely remote process.
We allow candidates to select their preferred interview times through an automated system linked to our calendars², which adds even more flexibility to our system. The best candidates won’t always be in your city, state, or country, so reducing barriers to interviewing will allow you to tap into new, potentially transformative, talent sources.
Stick to your plan
Remote interviewing can also help you stick to interview best practices, like writing down your notes or filling out an interview scorecard immediately. Instead of walking the candidate out, returning to your office, etc., you’ll be right at your desk and ready to download all your reactions and observations into your candidate tracking system³. Candidates also value speed in an interview process, so anything you can do to move more efficiently will lead to dividends down the road.
Adapting to the medium
Running remote interviews well isn’t just about sticking to standard best practices, some adjustments will be necessary.
Building trust via video
In a remote interview, it is important to establish trust quickly, right off the bat. We think a friendly approach works best: “Hi Lily, I’m Genevieve, VP of Product at Insight. It’s really nice to connect with you; thanks for making time to meet with me today. I thought I could start by giving you a short overview of what we’ll talk about so that you know what to expect from our conversation. How does that sound to you?”
Our team often finds that the work of emoting, smiling, and building a connection over a screen can be even more exhausting than in-person interviewing, since you may need to exaggerate your facial expressions to be seen and understood. Don’t go overboard, but do use clear signals like a “thumbs up” or clear nodding to show agreement.
Keeping the interview moving
Allowing a candidate to go down a rabbit hole or continue answering a question when you are lost or bored doesn’t do them any favors. The kindest (and most productive) thing you can do is to interrupt and ask them to clarify, start over, or move on to the next topic. As the interviewer, it’s your responsibility to make the best use of your time together. When interviewing remotely, you will need to be more forceful in your interruptions than you would be in person. But you can still keep them at ease with positive language and a smile.
- If you’re confused: “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think I missed something and I want to be sure I understand. Could you go back to [the point you want to clarify]?”
- If they’re giving a long answer to a short question: “Can I interrupt? Thanks for sharing all that, but I want to make sure we leave enough time for all the things we have to cover.”
- If they’re getting sidetracked and you haven’t gotten an answer yet: “Before we go on, I think we’re getting too into the details/off-track and I want to go back to my original question, [then restate original question].”
Dealing with a poor connection
An interview is often a stressful moment for both the candidate and the interviewer. A poor connection will only exacerbate things. If you find yourself trying to do a video interview or screen share with a very poor connection, try shutting off video and continuing with voice only. If that’s not enough, suggest calling by phone and continuing. If the candidate is showing some of their work, you might ask them to send screenshots by email while you are on the phone. You don’t want to judge the candidate by the quality of their internet connection, which can lead to bias against those with fewer resources or anyone living in areas with less reliable service.
If the connection continues to be a problem or the person is getting really flustered by technical issues, suggest rescheduling if possible. Coming from the interviewer, this suggestion can help the candidate feel confident that they’ll get the chance to put their best foot forward.
Adapting for remote “on-sites”
When transitioning your on-sites to remote and asking candidates to complete a series of back-to-back interviews, build in more breaks and be sure to check in with the person you are interviewing more than you usually might. The candidate may need to get a glass of water, use the bathroom, or walk around, and they may be hesitant to ask.
Ensure evidence-based decision making
To hire well, you want to understand the skills needed for a particular role and build an interview practice that allows you to evaluate those skills. But you’ve got to base that evaluation on evidence rather than just the quality of your conversations. It’s nearly always a mistake to make a hire based solely off of likability during an interview. Of course we all want to work with people we like, and I am emphatically not arguing for hiring talented jerks, but in addition to assessing how nice a candidate is, you should be gathering evidence that they’ll be able to do the work you need from them. When you aren’t bringing candidates on-site, there are several good approaches you can take for amassing this evidence.
Get examples of past work
A strong predictor of future work is what people have accomplished in the past. Ask to see examples of previous work. You can do this before you even interview them by asking applicants to include a writing sample or provide a portfolio. This has an added benefit, in that you’re asking people to draw from work they’ve already done, rather than asking them to produce new work.
During interviews, you can ask candidates to walk you through a system they designed or some code they wrote. It’s important to be clear about what you’re looking for in these types of evidence, both with yourself and with the candidates. For example, if you explain that you want to evaluate familiarity with statistical methods, then your interviewee may select a different piece of work to show you than if you explain that you want to see how comfortable they are with specific tools. When we invite applicants to interview for one of our Insight Fellows programs, they’re given different instructions depending on the program they are interviewing for.
If the work you’re evaluating was collaborative, ask for specifics on what the candidate did themselves:
- “What parts of this did you contribute?”
- “How did you divide up the work with your colleagues?”
- “What did you learn from your collaborators in doing this work together?”
By following this line of questioning, you’ll not only be probing for their specific knowledge and skills, but will often also learn more about how they work with others.
Assign challenges
You may also consider asking candidates to do new work, with parameters set by you, as part of your process. Lots of data teams we work with at Insight do this with take-home data or coding challenges.
If it is a small challenge, meant to learn more about how they get things done, it may be more appropriate to set up an enforceable time limit, or co-work through the problem with them. If the work is something that could be eventually put to some use, you should pay people for their work. Consider how you can leverage short, paid contracts in your hiring pipeline.
Take advantage of references
How can you know what it will be like to work with someone day-to-day if you never meet them in person? I’d argue it’s nearly impossible to know this based on a few short meetings, or even multiple day-long on-site interviews. A more reliable source is references. When interviewing remotely, you’ll want to make sure you complete solid reference calls for every hire.
As with all other steps, you’ll want to take a structured approach to your reference calls. Start by making sure the person you’re talking to understands the role you’re hiring for. Even if the job title is identical, there may be significant differences in the responsibilities for those positions at your organization. Take the time to share the important qualities and skills you’re looking for, either ahead of time in writing, or as the first point you make in your call.
From there, be sure to plan out your questions and, again, focus on gathering evidence. To do that, avoid vague or totally open ended questions like, “Tell me about Genevieve” or “What was it like working with Genevieve?” Instead, go for questions that aren’t closed (i.e. not yes/no) but will solicit evidence.
- “What’s it like to work with Genevieve when she is juggling a lot of different tasks at once?”
- “What challenges do you see for Genevieve in the role I described?”
- “What suggestions do you have for me, if I’m Genevieve’s manager, to help her do her best work?”
Start now
Interviewing well, like any other skill, is something everyone can get better at doing if they practice. Even if you don’t have to switch your entire team over to conducting interviews remotely right now, getting them to practice will help make them more resilient to the current public health situation and any future scenarios where operating remotely will provide a benefit. And because remote interviewing options will allow you to widen your talent funnel to candidates living outside of your country and time zone, or those with responsibilities that limit their availability for in-person interviews, it should improve your team’s ability to hire the very best people.
- We prefer Zoom because of its overall ease of use and call quality (video, audio, screen share etc.). It’s also got some good built-in accessibility features like closed captioning and automated transcripts.
- We prefer Calendly — it can be a little tricky to set up initially, especially for a large team, but once you get the hang of it it really makes things easy.
- We’ve used Greenhouse for several years and their scorecards offer an excellent and customizable system.
