Principles for a More Efficient Hiring Process
The job market for data roles is growing and evolving at a rapid rate. Capable managers, analysts, engineers, and data scientists can choose from a multitude of sectors, companies and roles. However, the bar remains high: candidates are expected to go through several rounds of technical screens, take-home exercises, and onsite interviews.
The hiring process is stressful for both candidates and interviewers. In this post, we reflect on a few generic principles of interview processes, and some specific tips for data roles. The common denominator is: the hiring process can benefit from more transparency, coordination, and access to information for all parties involved.
What Candidates Want
Candidates choose job opportunities by weighing several factors:
Fulfilling mission and impact: we all spend a good portion of our days and lives working. Our work contributes to the greater mission of our company and we want it to be meaningful.
Job security vs upside potential: some candidates prefer to join established companies that guarantee a steady income while others prefer to join startups with a big potential upside, in exchange for lower short-term compensation and higher risk.
Opportunity to learn and grow: especially early on in our careers, we like to be surrounded by people that can teach us something, and be in an environment that facilitates learning and trying new things.
Brand recognition: why do people like to write “ex-Amazon, ex-Apple” in their Linkedin headline? It’s an easy way to show that you worked at a successful company and contributed to that success.
Well defined role: this is especially important in Data teams where many roles exist and navigating through them is confusing. See our blog post on this topic.
Title: many candidates aspire to eventually become a “Senior Principal <blank>” or “Senior VP of <blank>”.
Compensation: compensation is an integral part of any job, and both parties - candidates and companies - have an interest in negotiating the components of a compensation package: base salary, annual bonus, equity, sign-in bonus, benefits. More on this later in the article.
Location: many candidates prefer to work from home, others prefer to go to the office. Everybody likes having the flexibility to choose what’s best for them.
Well defined interview process: candidates like to know what to expect and how to prepare for interviews. Many interview prepping tools are available for data roles, from blog posts to books, coding platforms, online courses and bootcamps. The next section describes what companies can do to establish a smooth interview process
Candidates should reflect on how much these components weigh at that particular time in their career. Then, they can start to do some research to determine which companies check the desired boxes. Many online platforms provide access to information on companies from current or former employees on culture, titles, compensation, and interview processes (e.g. Glassdoor.com, TeamBlind.com, Levels.fyi, H1Bdata.info)
How Hiring Managers Can Create a Smooth Hiring Process
When it comes to hiring, the goal of a company should not be to fill open roles at all costs. The goal should be to hire the optimal match: a candidate who has all the desired qualities and who is looking for the exact position that the company is offering. There is no point in hiring someone by deceiving them about the role, the team, the title, or the value of their compensation package. These issues will eventually come up, will be hard to fix, and will make the employee unhappy.
The hiring manager is ultimately responsible for partnering with existing team members, interviewers and recruiters to develop an effective hiring process. They should be explicit about:
Defining the open role: what are the title and the tasks associated with the role? Which tools and coding languages should candidates be familiar with? What kind of experience is needed in engineering, statistics, analytics, experimentation, modeling, machine learning, deployment? This information should be consistent across job posts, websites, internal documentation, and interview processes.
Defining the pool of candidates: what kind of education and professional experience does the ideal candidate have? Which skills are the most important? How to establish sourcing principles to guarantee a diverse pool of candidates?
Career ladder, levels, compensation bands: these guidelines are useful for both existing employees and candidates. They guarantee fairness and consistency over time.
Interview structure and content: a good interview process should test candidates on the skills that are required for the job. Do you need to hire someone to run and analyze A/B experiments? Ask questions on experiment design and statistical analysis. Is your ideal candidate an SQL-ninja? Work through a few queries. The number of interview rounds depends on many factors, often correlated with the level of maturity of a company: some large companies do multiple phone screens, followed by take-home exercises, and at least one or two rounds of technical interviews. A small startup that doesn’t have the same level of resources could try to extract the maximum amount of information from just a couple of rounds of interviews. It’s worth noting that some companies still use brain-teasers during interviews, like “How many windows are in NYC?”. Although these questions are meant to test quick analytical thinking, they rarely capture the technical depth that is required for most data roles and are not representative of other skills that are actually needed to be successful on the job.
Choosing and training the interview panel: people in the panel have a huge impact on the process and on the perception that candidates have of the company. The interview panel should provide as much information as possible to the hiring manager. A good interviewer is a person that already covers a similar role and can ask technical questions, or a person who will work closely with the new employee and can test technical and soft skills. Many tech companies have created the bar-raiser role, a person in the interview panel whose responsibility is to maintain the hiring bar high across the company and can help the hiring manager reach a final hiring decision.
Partnering with sourcers and recruiters: these are key figures in the interview process. They should be able to speak to candidates about the role, responsibilities, and compensation. Experienced recruiters can help hiring managers significantly improve the interview process. Some companies outsource the sourcing and screening processes for convenience and speed.
Transparency and fairness apply to all the parties involved in the interview process: candidates, existing employees, and interviewers. Hiring managers and recruiters should make sure that everybody has access to the right level of information, via documentation and proactive communication.
What to Expect During and After Interviews
The previous sections of this post describe what candidates and interviewers can do to prepare for the interview process. In this section we go over a few practical tips and dynamics of interviewing.
During interviews
Everybody should dedicate their full attention to the interview. Pause notifications on all the devices, and think about that email or project after the interview is over.
Interviewers should try and follow a script, to guarantee fairness and consistency across candidates. However, they should feel free to follow the conversation in a natural way and adapt their follow-up questions to each candidate’s skills and background. When candidates struggle with a problem, interviewers can progressively help.
Candidates should ask meaningful questions about the specifics of the role, the structure and composition of the team, the partnership with other teams, career ladders and levels, projects & tools, culture. Candidates are interviewing the company as much as the company is interviewing them.
Hiring managers should clarify roles & titles (see our blog post on Data Roles) and answer related questions: be transparent about what works and what doesn’t in the team and the company. Current challenges can be interesting opportunities for career development.
The length of the interview process depends on how many rounds there are. Hiring managers and recruiters can help the process by adopting a quick turnaround on decisions and keeping candidates informed about next steps. For example, Amazon adopts the 2-and-5 promise.
After interviews
Every interviewer should collect their interview notes and submit them via a hiring platform’s scorecard system or send them directly to the hiring manager and the recruiter. Scorecards should contain notes from the interview with the candidate, and a clear opinion on the hiring decision, typically one of: strong no, no, yes, strong yes. Having clear scorecards contributes to maintaining the process objective and factual.
The interview panel typically holds a short debrief meeting to further discuss their thoughts and evaluate the signals that have been collected during the interviews. During this meeting, the hiring manager, possibly in partnership with a bar-raiser, should have all the information to make a hire/no-hire decision, or can decide to have the candidate go through an additional round of interviews to clear specific doubts.
It is common for companies to ask for a list of references. Candidates should select a group of people that know them well and can speak about their strengths and, even more importantly, about their weaknesses, and what they have been doing to improve.
Thank you notes from candidates to interviewers are not necessary, but do not hurt if they express natural excitement for the role and the opportunity to join a company.
When a company extends an offer, it’s time for the recruiter to discuss the compensation package with the candidate. As mentioned above, both parties have an interest in negotiating. The best thing a company can do is to offer competitive and consistent compensation for the selected level. Having clear compensation bands guarantees consistency across candidates and existing team members. It is better to let a candidate go because of unreasonable expectations, than making exceptions that would generate inappropriate inconsistencies within a team. On the other hand, candidates should do their homework and understand how to value the different components of a compensation package. Having multiple offers is the best way to assess their own value and gain leverage for the negotiation process.
If the outcome of the interview process is a no-hire decision, the process can still be a valuable and pleasant experience for all parties. Candidates can still be happy clients of a company, meet interviewers later in their career, or even reapply for a role in the same company in the future. Most companies do not provide much feedback to candidates if they decide not to move forward with an offer. Only a few hiring managers and recruiters spend some extra time explaining the broader reasons that led to their decision (e.g. lack of signal on technical skills, below average coding session, lack of experience with a particular platform).
The last step of the process, after an offer is extended and a compensation package is discussed, is the sell call: the hiring manager usually offers to call the candidate to congratulate them for the offer and answer any remaining questions. This is another good opportunity for the candidate to ask about the role, the team, potential projects, and career opportunities within the organization.
The hiring process is stressful for both candidates and interviewers, and the perfect process does not exist. In this post we discussed a set of principles to help candidates and hiring managers prepare for interviews. The job market is truly an economic system where supply and demand meet to find an optimal match. Increasing the level of transparency for all parties is one of the best ways to make the market more efficient.
Are you a manager trying to grow your Data team? Data Captains can help you develop an effective interview process and attract the right talent. Get in touch with us at info@datacaptains.com or schedule a free exploratory call.