How we interview

Interviewing well is a real skill, not something you wing. This page is for whoever is on the other side of the table. The job is to get the strongest honest signal about whether this is a good fit, in both directions, without wasting the candidate's time or tripping over your own biases.

Get signal, not performance

The point of an interview is to understand how someone actually thinks and works, not to watch them perform under artificial pressure.

• Go deep, not wide. A long checklist of questions asked rapid-fire gets you shallow answers to all of them. Pick a few themes that matter for the role and dig into each until you actually understand how the person reasons. One real problem explored properly beats ten skimmed.
• Use real work. Talk about things they've actually built, and lean on the paid work sample rather than trivia. How someone approaches a realistic slice of the job tells you far more than whether they can invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.
• No gotchas. Trick questions, riddles, and puzzle-box interviews mostly measure who has seen the puzzle before. They make us look clever and tell us nothing. Drop them.
• Let silence sit. Give people room to think. The first answer is rarely the most interesting one, and rushing to fill the pause cuts off the good stuff.

Keep it fair

An interview that isn't consistent isn't a measurement, it's a vibe, and vibes are where bias walks in.

• Same themes for every candidate for a given role, so you're comparing like with like instead of comparing your mood on Tuesday to your mood on Thursday.
• Write down what you saw, with specifics, right after, before the halo of a good first impression rewrites your memory. Evidence, not adjectives.
• Watch your defaults. We're trying to find people who can do the work and who we'd want to do it with, full stop. Pedigree, accent, whether they remind you of yourself: none of that is the job. If you can't tie a reservation to the actual work, it isn't a reason.
• Decide as a group, on the evidence. No single person's gut is the verdict. We compare notes and reason it out together, so one loud opinion doesn't carry a hire or a no.

Respect the person

However it goes, the candidate should come away thinking well of us. They're trusting us with their time and, often, real hope.

• Sell honestly. Tell them the good and the annoying. Overselling to close someone just moves the disappointment to month two.
• Leave time for their questions, and answer them straight. An interview they can't interrogate back is a bad interview.
• Give a real answer, quickly. When it's a no, make it a clean no with a reason. See how we hire for how we handle that.