After almost five years of interviewing hundreds of people who want to work at Reaktor, I’ve learned there’s a way to do it that can make the difference between an effective interview that reveals something about the candidate… and a waste of time. So, I’ve decided I’m going to reveal my techniques to you. I don’t view it as divulging my secrets to the other side — because I think you (the applicant) and I (Reaktor) are on the same side. With that in mind, let’s find out how to make our time together more pleasant, efficient, and hopefully lead to a position for you and a job filled for us!
A lot of past job candidates, including me, note how the Reaktor interview is different from many other places because conversation is at the heart of it. But this isn’t a chat over a beer or coffee with your friend. The context gives it very specific goals and limitations. The goal is to understand whether we want to hire, and the key limitation for both us and the candidate is time. In other words, an interview is a time-limited, goal-oriented conversation. And one could say that the limitations create demand for being very effective in this conversation. The effectiveness in interviews is mostly based on specific find-out-more-relevant-information-in-less-time techniques, and they’re something you’ll probably notice when you interview at Reaktor.
Ask the right questions
There are a lot of ways to ask things. Here are a few different types of questions:
Closed (e.g. Do you know how to run a retrospective?)
Open (e.g. What do you think about retros?)
Hypothetical (e.g. Which style of retro would best relieve a situation where the team lacks a common goal?)
Leading (e.g. What kind of action would you take if two team members have a lingering conflict?)
Non-differentiating (e.g. What’s the last book that you read?)
Differentiating behavioral (e.g. Could you tell me about a time when you noticed that the team’s vibe was bad?)
The way an interviewer asks questions makes a huge difference, not only in what the answers are, but also how valuable they are. It affects whether confidence is built in the candidate and if it differentiates the candidate from others. There’s also a cringe factor that needs to be accounted for, as well as learnings per interview minute. (At Reaktor, we don’t view ourselves as corporate, but we do have to keep things like this in mind.)
First we listen. Then we talk.
Any good relationship expert will tell you this is the key to effective communication, and it’s the same with interviews. First, it helps pace the discussion. But perhaps more important, it also manages an interviewer’s influence on the answers. For example, I could first talk about what we usually do at Reaktor, and then ask, “What do you want to do?” Typically, I would get at least a slight regurgitation of what I had just said. And it doesn’t always have to be intentional on the part of the applicant. It could simply be subconscious mirroring. A better method would be for me to first ask, “What do you want to do?” and then only afterwards talk about what we usually do at Reaktor. This allows the candidate to truly express themselves.
“So what you’re saying is…”
Summarising is another very powerful technique for making sure that participants have a similar interpretation of what was said. Mutual understanding is especially useful in interviews where, based on the discussion, we might communicate feedback to the candidate while stopping the interview process. Disappointing outcomes are much easier to accept if the conversation was clearly laid out beforehand.
This mutual understanding can be furthered by an interviewer communicating expectations in relation to their impression of the candidate. (e.g., “My impression is X, does this sound correct? At Reaktor people are often X and in addition Y.”) Talking about impressions is useful since it anchors the outcome to the discussion instead of the factually correct and perfectly documented skills of the candidate (we don’t have time for building this perfect understanding). This combined with questions such as, “Is there anything important you would like to add, or is there something that we forgot to ask?” is very effective and important for the candidate experience as well, so they have an opportunity to influence the situation.
Nothing beats preparation
I think this is the most effective technique. In practice it means having a plan and a discussion template which keeps things on track, makes the process repeatable, sustainable and yields consistent results. Getting prepared is best done by thinking about the goals and limitations of the upcoming conversation (or coming up with goals).
