4 tips to optimize your interview process

Observation 🧐

When I was at Salesforce, hiring felt endless. Open roles constantly popped up as the team grew. The market was hot, but finding great candidates was tough.

Today, the tables have turned (hello, tight job market!).

Now, hiring managers are spoiled for choice and face a different challenge:

How do you hire when everyone seems equally great?

One of my clients—a new sales leader—faced this. She had a strong candidate pool but couldn’t decide. Each candidate had impressive resumes and solid interview answers.

Here’s the 4 tips I shared to create space between candidates in the hiring process.

1. Get a second opinion—but keep it consistent.

As hiring leaders we are often reluctant to ask our peers for help with interviewing for our team. After all, there’s really nothing in it for them and we know first hand how packed our calendars are. 

Finding your tribe of fellow leaders is critical and you have to get comfortable asking for their time. 

My client had originally asked 4 different leaders for 30 min of their time to interview her top 4 candidates. 

I encouraged her to rethink this approach. 

While this structure respects the time of other leader’s, it doesn’t help you narrow down your decision. Each hiring manager could be a “yes” to each candidate and you’d be no further along. By having fellow interviewers meet all your top candidates, you’re then able to ask them to stack rank them. 

If different interviewers meet each candidate, you lose perspective. Making a hiring decision isn’t just about choosing the best candidate, it’s about choosing the best person relative to the entire pool of candidates. 

2. Develop your ICP (Ideal Candidate Profile)

If you want to hire the best person for the job, you have to know what you’re looking for. 

An Ideal Candidate Profile is a list of the personal attributes and professional experience that you know are needed to be successful in this role. 

An ICP defines “must-haves” versus “nice-to-haves.”

When developing the ICP for your open role, think about team needs:

• What skills complement your current team?

• Where are the gaps?

• How can a new hire add diversity?

This will become your “North Star” for hiring. Share this with your recruiter to help when she’s sourcing candidates and leverage it throughout the hiring process. 

3. Be thoughtful and consistent with your interview questions. 

Many interviewers don’t have preset questions to ask, they wing it based on the conversation. While this facilitates natural conversion, it can make it harder to differentiate between candidates. 

Instead:

• Have a handful of questions that are consistent for each candidate. 

• Tailor the questions to focus on the skills you’ve set out in your ICP. 

• Share the ICP with your fellow interviewers and ask them to follow a similar process. 

This approach allows you to be flexible and leave room for additional questions that may come up as part of the interview, but also maintain a level of consistency across candidates.

4. Go beyond the standard Q&A interview format. Test presentation skills.  

A major skill of a sales person is their ability to present in front of an audience and clearly articulate their point of view.  Presentations provide a completely different perspective on the candidate that goes beyond their ability to answer standard interview questions. 

In my experience, this is where candidates really shine or flop. And when all the candidates are strong, you need more data points. 

Create opportunities to see how candidates manage a room (presentation), handle objections (role play) or think strategically (case study). 

Examples include: 

• Present their current company’s solution. The candidate will be most comfortable with a pitch they know really well and you can assess their effectiveness. 

• Present their 30-60-90 Day plan. This allows you to dig into their approach to running their territory and get tactical. 

• Present their point of view on a product you sell. Note: Most candidates struggle here. Their level of knowledge won’t compare to yours and will seem glaringly basic.

• Role Play on a fictional case study. Develop a scenario with product and customer background information and assign roles to each interviewer. Note: When I interviewed at Salesforce, this format allowed me to show my approach regardless of my lack of tech sales experience and it landed me the job. 

This all matters because hiring is the most critical decision for leaders. It’s also one of the hardest decisions new leaders must make. These strategies ensure you find the best person for the job and allow you to choose wisely, every time. 

Thought Starter  🤔

The job market is tight. 

How tight?

A fellow sales leader posted a role on his team for an Account Executive position at a Series A Startup last week: 

1 job posting on LinkedIn 

$35 in Ad spend 

48 hours 

568 applicants.

🤯

Love 🥰

My favorite question to ask a candidate in an interview:

“ How did you prepare for this interview?”

Why I like it:

• Research and preparation before a customer or prospect meeting is a core skill of a sales person. 

• The more scrappy the candidate is with the research, the more tenacity they demonstrate

• Candidates who take the time to research signal that they are taking the opportunity seriously and truly want to work at my company. 

What a typical (mediocre) response sounds like:  

• “I reviewed the links the recruiter sent me” (This content was served on a silver platter) 

• “I looked at the LinkedIn profile of interviewers” (This is table stakes)

• “I read Glassdoor Reviews” (this is what you would do before you eat a restaurant, you should be doing more research than this) 

What a good response sounds like: 

• “I listened to the latest earnings call and here are some insights I learned”. 

• “I spoke to current employees at your company”. Bonus points if they had to do cold prospecting to employees to find out intel. 

• “I called your customer service line and pretended to be a customer”. Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes and trying the product/service is a creative and effective approach.