There’s no high school or college classes on “How To Run an Efficient and Productive Hiring Process If You Decide To Start A Company” so how are we supposed to learn this stuff??

Trial and error, baby! 🙃

Most founders — especially if the company is doing well — are thrown into the hiring fire.

And the more you’re hiring, the more little things add up, positively or negatively.

All of these mistakes are things that I did, sometimes for years, before someone showed me a better way!

For the sake of your team and all your future employees…

Here are 8 common mistakes — and how to fix them!! — that good startups make when hiring.

1. Too much time up front.

The first meeting?

15 minute Zoom call.

Do not — I repeat, DO NOT — do an in-person 30 minute meeting.

A 15 minute Zoom call will tell you a lot:

• Can they use technology?

• Can they show up on time?

• Do they have normal social skills?

• Are they nice, funny, and generally competent?

• Does their resume check out?

Block off a few hours per week for 15 minute intro calls and have candidates schedule via Calendly link or other DIY scheduler.

Hear that echo? That’s the sound of your calendar having more open space!

Exception: a personal intro to someone highly recommended may warrant a 30 minute coffee meeting or Zoom to start out.

BONUS TIME SAVER: Add a video component for entry level roles where high EQ matters and previous work experience may not capture the full picture (e.g. BDR or customer support). Candidates record a 1 minute video to supplement their resume. You can set this up in most Applicant Tracking Systems!

2. Not having an interview plan.

This ever happen to you?

1. Gather in a room to discuss a candidate.

2. Realize that we all asked similar questions.

3. No one asked the questions we really needed answered.

Me too! 🙋‍♀️

Two things to prevent it:

1) Make a quick plan before you start interviewing for a role.

• Who is going to meet them?

• What order are we going in?

• Who is assessing which role requirements (e.g. sales skills, core values fit)?

2) Relay “open questions” to the next person in the process.

As you meet people, you’ll have things you’re not sure about. You need to let the next interviewers know so they can dig in on those!

You don’t want to get to the end of a multi-hour interview and no one has followed up on that possible yellow flag.

3. Asking the wrong type of questions.

There’s 2 good types of questions:

• What have you actually done? (Tell us specifics of past experience.)

• Here’s a specific situation. Tell us what steps you would take. (See how they think through problems.)

Bad questions:

• Hypotheticals (“How would you help our customers?”)

• Self assessments (“What are your strengths?”)

The “bad” questions basically evaluate how good someone is at talking about themselves and sounding smart.

Which isn’t totally irrelevant in business 😂

But probably not the main skill set you want on your team.

Better questions = better insight into candidates = better hiring!

4. Getting creative with questions.

Another question-asking mistake that well-intentioned folks make. Myself especially!

I thought that having an arsenal of questions to ask showed the breadth of my interview skills.

FALSE.

Ask the same questions to all the candidates!

1. Easier for you.

2. More fair to them.

Then you’re comparing apples-to-apples rather than apples-to-favorite-roller-coaster-rides. (Or whatever creative question you came up with 😜)

5. Wasting people’s time (yours + the candidate’s).

When a candidate passes the 15 minute Zoom screening, time to meet in person!

YES: Have a “waterfall” plan of who will meet the candidate next if you like them. NO: Put a 2 hour block on the candidate’s calendar.

For the candidate, schedule a 30 minute meeting with 1 or 2 people.

You can say something like, “Interviews are usually 30 minutes, sometimes they’ll run a little longer depending on who is available to chat.”

Then you can put a hold on people’s calendar internally. The next folks in line will meet the candidate if the first meeting goes well.

If the first interviewer decides the candidate is not the right fit, no one else has to meet them.

(I’m happy to share exact wording and logistics. Usually after a few times through, folks will get a hang of the handoffs, language, and flow, especially if it’s the same interview team — see “Not Having An Interview Plan” — but you know I’ll give more detail if you want!)

This means you spend 30 minutes of 1 person’s time instead of 30 minutes of 4 people’s time.

AND it’s a better experience for the candidate.

Nothing feels worse than being sent home after 20 minutes when you had a 2 hour interview scheduled.

That person may have taken time off work, gotten a sitter, played calendar gymnastics for that 2 hours.

It’s unkind to them and also hurts your company’s reputation because they’ll have a negative experience.

Way more fun to have a 30 minute interview turn into multiple meetings!

If they don’t have time for more meetings today? No problem. When there’s interest on both sides, things move quickly!

6. Missing the work product.

Having a hard time assessing candidates for a role?

Maybe you’re only talking to them rather than seeing the quality of their work!

A few ideas on how to see their true work product and abilities:

• They submit examples of previous, related work and you review it with them. You want to understand their process, strategy, lessons learned, and impact (and of course that they actually did the work 😳).

• Do-at-home exercise that relates to the work they’d be doing in the job. This is after the in-person interviews go well and they are close to a job offer. They should be able to do it within an hour or two with resources generally available (e.g. your online Knowledge Base). You’re not looking for perfection, you’re looking at the quality of their thinking, communication, effort, follow through, research, and generally, could they do the job really well?

  At-home work examples:

  • coding exercise

  • building a AI agent

  • make a prospecting list

  • marketing analysis of the website.

  • handling customer issues

• White boarding session to work through a current company problem. This is especially great for executives/team leaders who deploy resources and execute long term plans, operations roles, engineers, probably other uses cases too!

  • How do they think?

  • What questions do they ask?

  • How to they work with others?

  • How are they on the fly?

• A paid short-term engagement that is real work you need done. The key is — pay them for their time if it’s going to more than an hour or two of work.

Or whatever makes sense for the role and your company within reason.

You want the candidate to say, “I’m glad I tried,” not, “What a huge waste of time, I can’t believe they had me do all that for nothing.”

So yeah, keep it reasonable, you crazy founders! 😉

7. Flubbing the sales opportunity.

Every candidate is a future advocate for your brand!

At Pardot, the highest compliment was someone who didn’t get hired referring a friend.

There’s two parts to a good interview experience:

• the people they meet & how those people act

• the communication about and throughout the interview process

Even if you know, in the first 5 minutes of an interview, that you’re not going to hire this person, be nice. Don’t be rude or abrupt.

Treat them well and pour a glass of that startup Koolaid!

It’s a great time to share a few stories about your customers, culture, and team. Or pick this person’s brain on experience or insights they may have.

They are going to tell their friends about the interview process.

Being organized throughout the interview process matters also:

• Do you follow up in a timely manner?

• Do you give clear directions to the office and validate parking?

• Do you explain who they are meeting with and what to expect?

I call this the “Undressed-In-The-Examination-Room” effect. The doctor leaves but you don’t know what’s happening next. They do, of course, because they do this 20x/day.

But you are in a medical gown wondering if you should get dressed and leave or wait for someone else to poke and prod you!

Don’t leave your candidates in their dressing gown, uh, metaphorically speaking, of course. 😳

8. Not building a bench.

You don’t literally need to build a bench.

(But I’m sure IKEA has some to match the rest of your office decor.)

I’m talking about a sports bench aka a roster of talented folks waiting in the wings!

You may not need a VP of Marketing right now. But if someone intros you with a glowing recommendation, take the coffee meeting, get to know them, win them over, and keep ‘em warm.

Because you will need a VP of Marketing eventually!

So if you meet or interview someone that you really like but there’s not a role currently, don’t tell them “no.”

Tell them “not yet.”

And then track them in a spreadsheet, Gmail label, or Claude chat of potential hires and (have your AI bot) periodically reach out to see how they’re doing and low-key mention the recent mega-huge milestone you passed. 😜

What are some of your favorite tips for hiring? What hiring mistake did you make for way too long??!! Let us know so we can learn from you!

Share with a founder or friend who is in the thick of hiring! ❤️