Running an Interview Debrief

The art of running an interview debrief is a skill in mediation, time-management and quick decision making.  My interviewing experience comes from being a bar-raiser at Amazon and from Who (Geoff Smart).

Learning to control all the egos in the room is the initial challenge.  A negative or loud voice can drown out the group and derail the entire debrief.  There’s a lot of competing psychological biases at play that you need to keep in check.  At times, you might feel like you’ll never hire anyone because of the cynicism, hypothesis, or conjecture.  The safest choice is to err on the side of caution, decline to hire instead of making a bad hire, but if this happens all the time you’ll never build a team and your frustration will only mount.

Ideally, you are the hiring manager or someone who has hire/no-hire veto power, like a bar-raiser.  The two roles seem diametrically opposed but really they’re more alike than you think.  A bad hire is a pretty bad headache for a hiring manager.  There’s really only three questions you need each interviewer to answer and one that you need to answer for yourself.

Each person in the interview loop should be assigned a different competency beforehand, therefore they should only speak to what they observed around that competency.  For each question, go through the entire group before moving to the next question:

  1. List the things that you admire about the candidate
  2. List the ways in which this person will make your team better
  3. List the circumstances needed for this person to be successful in this role

You’ll get differing opinions, some factual observations and some subjective opinions.  Keep them as objective as possible.  Ask for clarification if you need to understand better some observations or opinions.   If people go off on tangents, remind them to just list things relevant to the question at hand.  After collecting all this information, you now need to make a decision.

Geoff Smart defines an A-Player as a candidate that has at least a 90% of achieving the expected outcomes that only the top 10% of candidates could achieve.  If it’s clear this candidate doesn’t meet the competencies needed to achieve the expected outcomes, pass.

  • If you don’t have anything you admire about the candidate, pass. 
  • If this individual doesn’t make the team better by filling in the missing skills or experience gaps on your team, pass.  
  • If the circumstances needed for this person to be successful in the role do not exist on the team, pass.  Without the right circumstances in place, they will not have a 90% chance of achieving the expected outcomes.

You do not need 100% on everything to make a hire decision.  On the basketball court, if you have a slam-dunk opportunity, of course, take it.  Running a great hiring debrief and hiring the right person for the role is not always about slam-dunks but identifying high-percentage shots and when to take them.  That’s it.