Building Your Team #4: Nailing the Interview Part II

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. This week on Founder’s Journal, we're doing things a little differently. We're dropping our second miniseries ever. That means there are two episodes today, there were two episodes on Monday, and you're getting two more episodes on Friday. You're listening to episode four in the series, but make sure you catch today's classic episode as well.

The topic of this miniseries is Building Your Team. All of these shows together will give you the curriculum you need to create a badass team of A+ players at your company. Today, I’m talking about what it looks like for an interviewer to nail an interview process. Let's hop into it. 

So this is part two of Nailing the Interview Process. Part one was all about the different ways in which some of Morning Brew’s hires have stood out in their interviews. We had Neal, who broke down the Battle of Gettysburg to show his level of curiosity, and Toby who practiced permissionless apprenticeship to show his writing chops without being asked.

And then there was one of our senior leaders who worked with us as a freelancer to demonstrate that he could think strategically and proactively before coming on full-time. Now, I want to change the perspective here. Rather than talk about things from the vantage point of the candidate, I want to switch to the interviewer. I had conversations with dozens of senior people and founders that have conducted thousands of interviews over the last several decades. And I asked all of these people one simple question: What do you do to make sure you get the most out of an interview process? 

5 lessons for being a great interviewer

First, let me tell you why I asked them this question. People are the most important part of a business. I think we can all agree upon that. If you get great people in the right seats, you give yourself a chance for your business to succeed. If you don't have great people in the right seats, your business won't succeed. Period. It's that simple. But despite this fact, I feel that we are all woefully underprepared to get the most out of the interview process. We go into interviews without having any plans and just fire from the hip, asking candidates questions we think may make sense. We are part of an interview process with three other people from the company yet we don't coordinate with each other what we're going to ask. We finish our 30-minute interviews with a candidate and worry we didn't learn enough to make a decision, but make one anyway. We treat hiring like an extracurricular activity when in reality it is the most important part of our jobs. So now I want to share lessons learned from my conversations with best-in-class professionals so you can leave this episode feeling like you have new tools to go from someone who is good at hiring to someone who is great at hiring. So let's break them down.

Think of a job description as an investment memo 

Lesson one: Nailing the interview starts way before the interview. I think about a job description, or a JD, as your investment memo for the company and yourself.So here's how it usually goes down: First as a hiring manager, you always want to be thinking about what are your needs within the company and your specific organization, six-to-12 months from now, and that helps inform who you think you need to hire. Once you've thought about that for yourself, you end up going to your boss and you explain to them why XYZ hire makes sense to recruit. If you're a founder it's a little bit different, you're likely pitching to your board or your other co-founders why you want to hire someone. If you're not a founder, it's usually pitching it to your boss. Once you get the okay from your boss, you end up drafting up a job description, which I really think of as an investment memo.

Basically what happens is from this job description, you're forced to triple check that this role is actually necessary to hire for, and that you know exactly the type of candidate that you're trying to hire for. Actually, when I'm writing a job description, oftentimes what I'll do is I will pick out four or five sample LinkedIn URLs and attach them to an internal job description. So I literally have exact people that are what I consider to be the perfect people for the role. On top of that, a JD is also your pitch to your boss and the rest of the company about why investing company's money in this resource makes sense. And that's why I think taking a job description is literally the most important thing to set up an interview process for success, because you end up leaving, writing that job description, with no reservations about if the role is necessary to fill what you're looking for, and if the company is bought in. 

The second part about nailing the Interview before actually doing the interview is communication. Here's a quick story: Before Morning Brew, I worked in finance and I will never forget my first super day for this job in finance. It was my final round for the job in sales and trading. It was after my junior year of college and I had five back-to-back interviews with people at the firm. In every single interview, without fail, I was asked the same question. They would ask, tell me about yourself. And basically what ended up happening was half of every interview—and these were only 20-minute interviews—half of every 20-minute interview was me going through the exact same resume over and over and over. It was kind of annoying for me, but in reality, it was more just a reflection on the lack of coordination that was happening by this company, who has tens of thousands of employees, that I was interviewing with. And also at the end of the day, they were doing a disservice to themselves because they were wasting so much of their already limited time not learning anything new from interview to interview. It is the job of the hiring manager to make sure that everyone knows what they should be looking for in a candidate and also how they should guide their questions so there isn't constant redundancy throughout the process. So that's lesson one.

Focus on superpowers

Lesson two is about focusing on superpowers rather than weaknesses. This is the one-two punch of the last lesson I was talking about, which is communication among everyone in the interview process, and what to actually ask. Far too many interviewers get hung up on the weaknesses of candidates, or honestly, they just don't fully know what strengths they're looking for in someone they're trying to hire. Heading into an interview process, you should know the one to two superpowers that you need in every candidate. So here's an example: For every Morning Brew writer, we look for two things, obsession with the news and marriage of writing chops and wittiness. For a senior leader at Morning Brew, and I would say this isn't just specific to Morning Brew, we would look for two things: the ability to set and execute a long-term strategy and hiring plan, and a love for managing and mentoring a team. 

And once you know your one-to-two superpowers that you're looking for, first of all, it focuses the entire process, but then you should also communicate that to everyone involved in the hiring process so they know exactly what they should be looking for, and then after the interview, when they reflect on it and give you feedback, they know what lens they should be giving their feedback through. Those are the first two things to supercharge your interview process and do the right thing when hiring. We're going to take a quick break and then go on to lesson three.

Set expectations with candidates

Let's hop back into it. Lesson three for being a great interviewer is setting the right expectation for candidates. And in general, I've talked about this in the past with Founder’s Journal, where people are notoriously bad at setting expectations and I think this is especially true when interviewing people. Reason being all people care about is filling a role. Hiring is a grueling process. There's tons of rejection from candidates, it can take months on end, and so what ends up happening is people will make decisions for short-term alleviation of pain versus long-term benefit. And what ends up happening is people end up overselling a role within the company without talking about all the headaches, all of the shit that a candidate will have to go through if they end up accepting the job. And this is a disservice to everyone because, know what's worse than a long interview process that's grueling? Hiring the wrong person and then having to do two interview processes with a firing that takes place in between. It is your job to paint as realistic of a picture of all of the issues and the good things as possible so that this person will know exactly what to expect if they get an offer and they accept it. So as it relates to setting expectations for candidates, one question that a senior leader at Morning Brew asks, especially for all sales hires that he's interviewing is he wants to understand what motivates them, because obviously traditionally salespeople are motivated by money, but he wants people in the revenue org that are motivated by more than just money.

He's looking for people that potentially have a chip on their shoulder, who are looking to build great careers and be successful because they're trying to prove something to someone. Something he said directly to me is, I'm not looking for someone that is going to be out in 18 months. I'm looking for someone that this will be their place in four years. And he didn't just say that to me. He said that exact quote to every candidate to make sure expectations are fully aligned, that they know if they're joining Morning Brew it's for the long haul. Setting the right expectation for candidates and people in general is everything.

Take the time you need

Lesson four in being a great interviewer: A long interview process is not a bad thing. This is the thing I'm most guilty of by the way. People get afraid about taking too much time from a candidate. Obviously everything has to be done within moderation, but you should never leave a 30-minute interview feeling like you didn't get all of your answers and you can't follow up with more questions. I personally hate the feeling of making a candidate go through many interviews and also following up with a candidate if I have more questions, because I'm worried I'm being rude about their time. But at the end of the day, like I've said this whole time, hiring is the most important thing in a business. And if you think about the analogy of just any relationship, think about a personal relationship, a long-term relationship.

Imagine if you just started fully dating someone, you moved in with someone after a first date that was an hour long. It would just never happen, it wouldn't make sense. You wouldn't have had the time to vet if you share the same values as this person. That is the same thing for hiring. And by the way, a long interview process is just as valuable for the candidate because they get to suss out if they like the people that they're going to surround themselves with for 10 hours a day for the next several years. 

Don’t rely on memory

Now, the fifth and final lesson that I have learned in being an effective interviewer and hirer is not relying on your memory. One big lesson I've learned in life is that our memories are imperfect and that's why documenting everything, everything in life, professionally or personally, is such a huge asset. One of our other senior leaders at Morning Brew actually creates a rubric that they end up handing out to everyone involved in their interview processes and the rubric basically has sample questions that test for the one or two superpowers that I was talking about before, and then there's a place on the rubric for everyone to evaluate candidates on those strengths and to leave notes. And the reason this is so important is because an interview process can literally extend for weeks or months, and if you don't take the time to reflect after each interview, you end up being left in the awkward position where you're talking about a candidate weeks from now, and you literally don't even remember who they are and if they were fit for the role.

So those are the five lessons of nailing an interview process as an interviewer. First being great at interviewing is all about what you do before an interview. Second, focus on the one-to-two superpowers you need versus focusing on the weaknesses. Third, set the right expectations of the job—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Fourth being thorough and long in an interview process is not a bad thing, what is bad is making the wrong hire because you didn't have enough information. And fifth, and finally don't rely on your memory, it is imperfect. Now, I'd love to hear from you. Is there anything that I'm missing that is absolutely crucial to being great at interviewing and hiring great talent? Send an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM on Twitter @businessbarista with your thoughts. If I get any quality responses, I'm going to share it in an upcoming episode of Founder’s Journal. 

And also just a reminder: This is part of our second miniseries ever on building your team. This is episode four. We have two more episodes that will come out on Friday, but also if you haven't listened to the whole miniseries yet, go back and listen to the episodes from Monday. This is your master class on how to be an effective team builder at work. Finally, if you enjoyed the episode, please leave a review for Founder’s Journal on Apple Podcasts. It is the number one way to grow the show, so I would love for you to help me and this community get to 750 reviews for the podcast. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.