Why You Should Prep Your Candidates

This one is for employers, hiring managers and recruiters.

Hopefully you look this happy while you’re interviewing people — these are your future teammates!

Let’s first define what I mean by prep your candidate — this means, giving your candidates an overview of what to expect from each segment of the interview process, a guideline to what you’ll be grading them on, and a reasonable timeframe in which to expect feedback by.

No, I’m not saying you should tell your candidates what the questions are in your interview process and I’m not telling you to give them a full outline of your goals for the interview outcomes. But, it’s been well studied that most people do not do well in an environment where expectations are unclear and in situations where they are surprised with questions (link articles here).

Did you know anyone who did great on pop quizzes? Probably not. So, why pop quiz your candidates?

Interviewing is stressful.

Not understanding what’s expected of you is stressful.

It’s even MORE stressful for people who are introverted, and research has shown that introverts make some of the best leaders. So don’t you want to have an interview process that is nice to people who may be your company’s future leaders?

Prepping your candidates gives them an opportunity to prepare answers and examples the questions you want answered while allowing them to frame the data in a way that fits in with your expectations.

SIDE NOTE: If you do not used structured interviewing, it’s going to be really hard to prepare your candidates in advance. I’d recommend reading and creating a structured interview process first, then coming back and building out prep materials from there.

Here’s one example of how this could work for one type of interview:

THE ASSESSMENT:

You have an exercise in which you want a candidate to design a piece of scalable software using a schema drawing software that you provide.

THE PREP:

• Tell them how long they’ll have.
• Tell them what they can expect to utilize their interviewer for (questions, bounce ideas, or nothing). My recommendation is that the Interviewers should treat Candidates as if they are teammates. If your teammate was struggling, would you help them or watch them flounder?
• Tell your candidate what they’ll be assessed for during the exercise (that you understand distributed systems and how they work, that you can identify edge cases and how to solve for them, that you understand the pros/cons to building a system with that specific architecture).
• Give them access to the tool that they’ll be using in advance (so the thing that doesn’t prevent them from succeeding is not understanding how to use your tool — all software is different!) or let them use their own software of their choice.

How do candidates react to having all of this access to prep in advance of an interview?

Your candidates should be excited to speak with your company, not nervous and scared!

THEY LOVE IT. I’ve gotten reactions to Interview Packets that was nothing short of awe, gratitude, feeling like the company supports them before they’ve even started working there. I’ve sent Interview Packets or included a 15-minute call for preparing my candidates and everyone from the Googlers to the startup candidates have had rave reviews about the experience this creates for them. Plus, people are more likely to perk well in a situation they feel happy and relaxed.

What’s the benefit to you as a company?

You’re going to get the best signal possible on whether or not someone understands the assessment, if they’re able to collaborate well with their interviewer aka a future teammate, and if they care enough to spend time preparing.

Where can this go wrong?

I think the places I’ve seen this go wrong are for candidates who misunderstand the prompt/exercise and end up over-indexing their prep for something different. Maybe your candidate looked on Glassdoor or Blind and expected to get a specific question they saw leaked online. There are no real ways to avoid this as understanding the prompt, prep and exercise is a part of the assessment process. However, the best way to do this is to be clear to candidates that there are multiple types of questions and they may be asked something different than another candidate, but that the signals you’re looking for and expectations are the same.

Remember, in a work setting, people don’t like surprises and candidates use the experience they have while interviewing as a proxy for whether or not they will like working at your company. So use your interview process to your advantage and give candidates a clear and concise experience.