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How to be a great interviewer

@zachrazar — Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Why

You want the best talent working with you. Period. That's the whole point.

Whether you're a founder, hiring manager, or individual contributor, you can improve your ability to hire incredible people by leveling up your skills as an interviewer. The best ways to do this are to:

reduce the candidate's nerves
reduce implicit bias
and demonstrate leadership in the interview

Reduce the candidate's nerves

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

Nervousness is poison in recruiting ☠️. A nervous candidate will act completely differently when asked a question or faced with a challenge. You'll have amazing people fall through the cracks if they're nervous. And nerves often snowball into more nerves.

The goal of an interview is to see how the candidate would do if you were collaborating with them at work. The goal is NOT to see how they handle massive stress and nervousness. Unless your industry requires employees to stay cool as a cucumber under pressure at all times (most don't) then you need to do everything in your power to reduce the candidate's nervousness.

Tips to reduce nervousness

Reduce your own nerves

Practice interviewing, have someone shadow you and give you feedback, and be prepared.

Make them laugh early in the day

For our onsite at BuildingConnected, we would invite the candidate to breakfast beforehand. Jesse (one of my giants), used to say that if you didn't get the candidate to laugh by the end of breakfast, you failed. The point of breakfast was to reduce the candidate's nerves before the actual sessions started (and to get some extra signal).

Ensure they're comfortable and drop the formality

Start every interview with intros and discuss the agenda. This reminds the candidate of your name (even if you've already met) and lets them know what's coming up.
Between onsite interviews, ask if they need to use the restroom or would like some water or a snack. They'd have those luxuries when working! So try to simulate that. The candidate might be feeling too nervous to ask.
For many of us (especially in tech), our workplace and the way we collaborate on our team aren't formal. So why would we make the interview super formal? Drop the formality, reduce the nerves, and watch them start to excel.

Reduce your bias

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

We all have a picture in our minds of the perfect candidate for a role. Some of the qualities in that mental image are useful ("great communicator", "strong technical skills", etc.).

Unfortunately, we subconsciously have other biases attached to that image too (like "looks like me", or "Indian male", or "young and would be fun to have a drink with", etc.).

Implicit bias is a natural response we've all evolved to help us pattern-match and quickly evaluate humans and possible threats around us. You're not a bad person if you have subconscious biases, you're normal. So please don't skip this section and get defensive.

However, it's important to talk about implicit bias because acting on biases in recruiting can lead to:

Missing out on amazing candidates
Lack of diversity on your team (which hurts your team, culture, product, reputation, community, and industry)
Potentially even discrimination - which is unfair (and unlawful) for candidates

Tips for reducing bias

The goal of addressing biases isn't to become a perfect, unbiased, other-worldly being. The goal is to become aware of your individual biases, do your best to notice them as they influence you, and incorporate processes into your recruiting systems to reduce biased decision-making.

Here's how you can address bias on your team and become great interviewers.

Learn about implicit biases and accept that you have them

Take an implicit bias test (like the Gender-Career and Gender-Science tests from Harvard) and discuss the results as a team.

This is what Ashu (another giant) did with our team at BuildingConnected and it really opened our eyes.

Read articles available online (like this one and this one) and be brutally honest with yourself. Do you remember seeing or acting on any of these?

Accept that you (yes you), have biases and start trying to listen for them.

Create systems to reduce bias

Define your interview process beforehand

Train all interviewers on the specific questions they should ask in each interview along with ideal answers.
Define a rubric with the specific qualities you're looking for ("communication", "autonomy", "curiosity", "code fluency", etc.).

Document what you observed and reduce bias after the interview

When the interview ends, ask each interviewer to fill out the rubric from above before they discuss how it went. Ask them to provide specific examples for each signal that they perceived.
- For example, instead of saying "Good collaborator" write "Good collaborator - they asked what I thought of their proposed system design and responded to my feedback".
- Another example: instead of saying "Bad culture fit" write "Poor collaborator. Was defensive when we asked them to elaborate on their solution. Plus, they never interacted with [female interviewer] and only talked with [male interviewer]".
  - If you end up writing "Bad culture fit" but can't point to a specific example or explain further, it's probably bias talking 😉.
- Note that you will need to train your team what not to write down as well. Even if well-intended, interviewers should never write down anything related to topics covered by discrimination laws. For one, those topics shouldn't have anything to do with your criteria anyway and two, they can be misinterpreted.
After writing feedback, host a debrief with all interviewers involved and talk about your conclusions
- Discussing the feedback can reveal accidental bias and lead to better decision-making.

Demonstrate leadership in the interview

Photo by Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

Why? The candidate's ability to succeed in an interview is contingent on your ability to lead the interview well.

Tips for leading an interview

Start on time and don't let time wander

When you defined the interview questions, you most likely also defined a quality bar like "the candidate must finish all three sections in time". If you start the interview late or chit-chat too much in the intros, then you're starting the candidate already behind.

Be prepared. Rehearse the questions and jump in to clarify if they're confused.

Misphrasing a question can lead a candidate down a frustrating and time-consuming dead end. Great candidates will ask clarifying questions but some might not feel comfortable enough doing so (especially if they're more junior or are very nervous).

Detect nerves and reduce nervous snowballing

I already harped on the need to reduce nerves, but you should look out for nerve snowballing. When candidates get nervous, they might blank and start getting frustrated. This can make them more nervous which leads to more blanking and frustration! This cycle can completely disable someone who would be phenomenal to work with outside of this stressful interview setting.
If you see them snowballing for more than a few minutes, jump in and stop them! See if they have questions. Ask them to take a few steps back and ask them at a high level what they're looking to accomplish with the challenge.
- If they're completely stuck, talk them through with a hint. Yes, it's ok to dock them a bit for not knowing something or not being able to get themselves unstuck but it's better to have a candidate get through a challenge (and demonstrate all of their other qualities) than to have them get stuck on one small thing and then snowball into total failure.

Make the interview enjoyable and always be selling

You are the first impression for the candidate of your company. Your interaction with a candidate will sink in 100x deeper than a trendy careers page or company vision.
Always leave time for Q&A.
- While you're interviewing them, they're also interviewing the company trying to see if it's a good fit. Leave time at the end of each session for Q&A so that they can learn more about the team/culture/company/etc.
Making the interview enjoyable and simulating a real day-in-the-life of an employee will set you apart from the massive companies that have huge budgets luring your top candidates away.
Be excited about where you work! Get to know what your colleagues are working on and share their success stories if the candidate asks. In 9 out of 10 interviews, you will be asked "What's your favorite part about working here?". Have a great pitch ready because if you extend an offer to them, you want them picking YOU over the company down the street.

On the shoulders of giants - BuildingConnected

@zachrazar — Mon, 07 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I am standing on the shoulders of giants

... and I couldn't be more thankful.

I learned a ton while working at BuildingConnected (acquired by Autodesk). I'm excited to share those learnings in this blog - but it's important for me to acknowledge that a lot of the content that I plan to publish was introduced to me by these incredible individuals.

Over the years, I helped to iterate on the processes but very few I created outright.

This list isn't meant to exhaustively cover everyone who has influenced me or had an impact on my success (like my wife, family, friends, teachers, who all played a huge part). This post is more meant to give attribution to those from whom I specifically drew ideas and inspiration in the coming posts.

My giants from BuildingConnected

Jesse Pedersen

Though this list is not in order, Jesse has been my most influential giant. He has taught me to trust my gut, take action, be brave, and move fast (which are important qualities that counter my hindering perfectionism). He's an incredible leader in all aspects of building a great product, designing it, and engineering it. He exponentially magnifies his impact by building incredible teams and the culture/processes to allow those teams and individuals to flourish.

Al Urim, Karen Rose, Thomas Beirne, and Bradford Cook

These four make up the original engineering manager group with whom I worked closely. The vast majority of my management and team-building capacities are a direct result of their ideas or from collaborating with their great minds.

Ashu Agte

Ashu represents the highest caliber of an engineering leader that I've had the pleasure to work with. His mentorship allowed me to advance from a figure-it-out-as-I-go team lead to a manager helping to prepare new managers. I would not have been able to succeed without his guidance, trust, and empathy.

Dustin DeVan

Dustin showed me how a founder can attach to a vision of the future and drive relentlessly toward it. He saw with perfect clarity how technology could fundamentally change networking in preconstruction and he was excellent at selling that future to the industry and employees (including those like me with zero previous construction knowledge). As a future founder, I hope to emulate that same focus and drive.

Jenny Ji

Through Jenny, I learned why a team should keep such an incredibly high bar for design. That bar still helps differentiate BuildingConnected in the industry. Jenny also introduced me to personal finance. Many of my personal finance fundamentals (which I plan to share in future posts 🙂) come from discussions with her and from books that she has recommended.

Chelsea Hodge and Abbie Hanright

Chelsea and Abbie were my collaborative leaders in product and design, respectively. Their attention to detail (not only in design but in the process and systems behind a product) truly helped to shape my view on building a great product and sub-organization to support it.

Zac Hays

Through Zac, I learned why it's so important to have a solid vision along with strategies and roadmaps. He's even given talks on this. This giant taught me the value of defining and measuring success as well as how to hire phenomenal product managers.

Thank you, giants.

Use a system to evaluate your startup ideas (plus a bonus Notion template)

@zachrazar — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Create → Evaluate → Validate

You should imagine your startup ideas going through three phases of a funnel: idea creation, evaluation, and validation.

If you're looking to improve the startup ideas that you're pursuing, you can optimize and even measure those individual sections to make your process more successful. Let's briefly discuss each.

Idea creation

The idea creation phase is more like a lifestyle. You're deliberating putting on a new lens to try to see the problems, inconveniences, or holes in a market in the world around us. It takes time and awareness (and will be covered in a separate post). This comes naturally for some - whereas for others (like myself), we really have to practice it. You want LOTS of these ideas flowing in.

Evaluation

Ok, you now have ideas overflowing and you think they're as good as gold. But which ones do you pursue? We have limited time and resources - and realizing 6 months into an MVP that there's no clear path to making money with your idea can be brutal. It's time to evaluate those ideas and cut most of them using a system.

Validation

Does your product actually solve a real problem? Even if the solution would scratch your own itch, do others have that same itch (and more importantly, are they willing to pay for a solution)? Resources like the Mom Test can help you validate your idea with user research.

This post is all about the Evaluation section of that funnel. Most see this step as being part of validation and do it subconsciously but having it as a separate step makes this phase even more lethal to bad ideas.

Cut most of your ideas

This strategy is based on Tyler Tringas's "How to Get Startup Ideas: The Meat Grinder Approach".

Once the ideas start flowing, they pile up. It's common for entrepreneurs (and entrepreneurial hopefuls) to have a notebook filled with them (or a virtual notebook like a Trello board, Notion page, iPhone Notes page, ... - or a combination of all of these 😄). Sound familiar?

Cut almost all of them ✂️. Keeping that notebook of scattered could-be ideas isn't helping you achieve your goals.

What are you talking about?! These ideas are worth at least a million bucks.

Hear me out. Ideas summed up in a few sentences in a notebook sound promising and appear super valuable. But they're not. Unless you're a startup veteran, most of those ideas are probably bad in that they don't meet your goals, you don't have what it takes to execute them well (and that's ok), or the market isn't actually there to support them as viable businesses.

Instead of keeping these could-be ideas sitting on the back burner for months (taking up mental energy and giving you the false sense that you have a treasure trove of startup goodness to fall back on if you lost your job), you're much better off defining your goals, creating a system to help you cut those ideas based on your goals, and then removing them from your mental headspace so that you can churn through more ideas to find something special.

Define your goals

Image by Ben Kerckx from Pixabay

Whether you're looking for a side-hustle to bring in a little extra income, aiming to replace your full-time job, or aspiring to create the next startup unicorn, you need to dig deep and define your goals. What are you looking to accomplish? Why? How much time would you like to put into it? What does your dream outcome look like? Do you want to grow a large or small company around it? Do you want to raise funding? Do you want to take on a co-founder? Is there a particular industry or market that you would prefer to be in?

For me (and this may change), I'm looking to start a small, bootstrapped business that can replace my full-time income and provide a happy work-life balance. I'm most interested in B2B SaaS through a web application.

If you're not sure what you want, explore what's out there and see what others have done! Listening to the IndieHacker podcast and exploring that community helped me to see that there are more options than just the venture capital, rapid growth route. (However, a great conversation I had with Aviel Ginzburg recently has me reconsidering the VC path).

Build a system with questions based on your goals

Ideas sitting in a backlog are doing nothing for you. Instead, you want an idea to flow in, get evaluated with a set of questions that are driven by your goals, and then move on. If the idea seems promising, start validation around it by doing some user research and listening to others who have that problem. If not, archive it and focus your energy elsewhere.

Your questions should be geared toward your goals.

For some examples:

if you're looking to start a unicorn startup, you should have questions about the size of the market, how you might achieve rapid growth, and how you could pitch the vision to investors.
if you're looking to build a physical product, you might have questions like "do I have manufacturing connections who can help me design and build this?" or "how can I fund this?"
if your goal is to start a non-profit, you might ask "is my local community facing this problem?" or "is this a viable idea for a non-profit or does this have a better chance of succeeding as a for-profit with a strong mission?"

Below is the list of questions that I use which are geared toward my goals. Many of these could be used in your system, but others are very specific to what I'm looking for.

I pulled all of these questions from the super talented people below who have started similar businesses to what I'm interested in:

Courtland Allen: "How to brainstorm great business ideas"
Tyler Tringas: "How to Get Startup Ideas: The Meat Grinder Approach"
Jon Yongfook: "4 Things I Look for in New SaaS Ideas"

If you use these questions as a template, I strongly suggest reading their posts to better understand the questions and why they're worth asking.

The Questions in my system

What is the problem and who have it?

The problem is everything - so let's only talk about the problem first. What are the pain points? Do I know any specific people who have the problem (red flag if not)? General personas of those people?

Note: we should try to become experts on the problem during the Validation phase.

How can I solve that problem?

Define your idea/solution to the problem. Don't go into every detail or technical specification, just high level.

Do I have the skill set required to make this?

Can I make this solo? What skill sets am I missing? Would this have a better chance of succeeding if I take a co-founder?

Are people currently spending money on this? Who are the biggest competitors and is there a clear winner?

This takes some market research. Are people paying money to have this problem solved? How much are they paying? Is there an obvious solution that everyone in this market uses?

What are the distribution channels to reach them? How will I get my first 25 customers? What about the next 250?

If your answer is "I don't know anyone and I'll just use marketing", that's a red flag. How will you find these people? Can that strategy scale?

If it works, will the business be sustainable? Long term, how do I stay competitive?

Will this business be able to last long term? What moats will I aim to develop? What's keeping Facebook from just building this in a week and crushing me?

Am I the person to build this business? Would I enjoy this in the day-to-day?

Be honest here. It might take years for this to pick up. Would you enjoy solving this problem day after day over the long term?

If this is a micro-SaaS solution: is it too innovative and new? Is it low maintenance for the customer?

Micro-SaaS should be set-it-and-forget-it for users (and not require a massive marketing and sales budget to convince users that they have the problem to begin with)

My system

I use a Kanban board in Notion to power my system.

When I have a new idea, I create a card in "Just created". Once I'm ready to evaluate it, I turn the card into a page using a template with the questions above. I run through the questions, highlight the red flags and opportunities, and then move the card forward as the answer becomes more clear on whether I should put more time into the idea or not.

Try it out 🚀

Here is a Kanban board in Notion that you can duplicate and start using. It includes a template with the questions above that you can edit to match your goals.

Brain tricks

My brain fights this process and naturally wants to stockpile ideas (even though I know this system works way better than idea hoarding).

To help me avoid that, I use the following brain tricks:

I try to answer these questions pretty quickly so that the friction of the process doesn't cause me to make excuses and bail.
I highlight red flags as I'm typing to help convince my brain that something doesn't feel right and that it's OK to cut the idea.

Now go spend an afternoon evaluating those pilled up ideas, cut through any that don't meet your goals using a system like this, and find that gem that you should focus on now.

Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

How I built this: The tech stack behind this blog

@zachrazar — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

tl;dr - Tech stack:

Netlify
React
Gatsby
Namecheap
GitHub
Bulma
D3
VS Code on a Mac Book Pro
Eslint + Prettier

Goals

My main goals when building this site were:

Low maintenance
Inexpensive
No backend to manage (and no servers/databases to upgrade)
Automated CI/CD
Low friction when writing new posts
Not Wordpress/Drupal (I already have experience with these and wanted to try something new)

I picked the following technologies based on those goals.

Infrastructure

JAMStack served on Netlify

This site/blog is powered using the JAMstack strategy. JAMstack encourages you to build the site and all content upfront, load up a CDN with optimized everything, and forget the backend details. It's fantastic for use cases like this. There's no backend to get out-of-date or hacked ☺️.

Additionally, using a hosting service that is designed for JAMstack applications makes the development workflow super enjoyable. I use Netlify and love it. They have a generous free tier that my usage falls in. They even power the Contact Page. Netlify will automatically receive the form submission, filter out spam (which I get a lot of), and then forward me valid submissions. Plus it scales as we even use it to power the main BuildingConnected site!

Other tools

For the domain name and DNS routing, I use Namecheap.

The code for this site is in GitHub (and it's public if you would like to view exactly where this line is). I pay for the GitHub pro plan at $4 per month for the unlimited private repositories. Also I have Netlify connected to the repo so that when I push code to main, it automatically builds and deploys prod. The coolest part is that when I have a PR, it will build a preview deploy. I combine this with Dependabot which will automatically upgrade my dependencies in a PR (and Netlfify will automatically make a preview deploy with those dependency changes) which makes validating an upgrade super easy. Someday I'll add tests too 😉.

Screenshot of preview/production builds in Netlify

Frameworks and Languages

React

I have lots of experience working with React and it's my go-to for most web development. I've found it can scale phenomenally as websites (and the teams that build them) grow. The community behind it is great and there are so many components/frameworks out there that you will be able to solve almost any problem that you face.

For what it's worth, I'm also a big fan of Svelte. I'm not sure how to describe it, but coding in Svelte is a lot of fun. It feels like when you first learned to code, saw something on the screen move, and thought it was the coolest thing ever and you had superpowers. So far, I've only used it for smaller projects and I'll probably continue that trend. I don't see how it could scale with larger, stateful applications. It could certainly power this website, but I feel like React is better suited for larger apps that deliver lots of business value through complex workflows.

Gatsby

The entire site is powered using Gatsby.

I chose Gatsby because I wanted a framework to handle the following areas for me:

Optimization (for overall speed and for image performance)
Accessibility
Routing
Hot reload and enjoyable developer experience
Asset pipeline
Extendability (plugins)
Markdown blog posts

Other frameworks I considered were next Next.js and Hugo. Gatsby seemed the most approachable and easiest to host on Netlify at the time of starting v1 of this site. If I started from scratch now, I might be swayed toward Next.js. I've come to find that Gatbsy can be pretty finicky to work with as it has a fairly steep learning curve with sometimes confusing error messages. Overall though, I love Gatsby as it helps me be a better, more productive web dev.

Other libraries

The site uses Bulma for styling (along with Sass). I'm still working on my design skills and Bulma makes it easier to make the right decisions. For local development, I lean heavily on Eslint and Prettier. For the interaction on the Resume page, I use D3 (which is overpowered for that page but at the time of writing it I was on a D3/Angular kick when cofound Lever Insights). Speaking of local development, I'm rocking VS Code on a Mac Book Pro.

In future posts, I'll share how I manage my different projects (including this site) using Notion and how I ensure that I'm making progress each week.

New blog! Setting the mood

@zachrazar — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog 🎉! I'm so excited to have you here.

Earlier in my career, I was against blogging. I thought it was reserved for the "experts" and tech evangelists. As more of a generalist, I didn't think that I had anything to share.

However after I overcame a tricky React error the other day, I wanted to share my discovery with others. I wrote it down (somewhat jokingly) in a This Would Make a Good Blog Post list. The list kept growing and growing. This gave me the motivation to throw the list into a Kanban board and set out to create a blog.

I've come to the conclusion that you don't need to be an expert at everything to pass along what you know. As you hit roadblocks and discover new information, you should share that with those around you. For example when I get stumped by a problem, I'm constantly discovering blog posts written by others that save me hours in debugging. I've always enjoyed sharing like this in person when around friends and coworkers, but I've struggled to do this in our virtual, digital world.

I would be lying if I didn't say that I have other motivations for kicking this off as well. I would like to start an online business one day. To do that, you need to build trust. 95% of the code that I've written is behind private repositories and I'm rarely on social media so I have very little online presence. My hope is that this blog can help me connect, allow others to see who I am, and build their trust - one helpful blog post at a time.

Stick around if you enjoy reading about software engineering, entrepreneurship, personal finance, starting an online business, web development, and engineering management. I'll also throw in a few photos of my dog Rooney too along the way. Thanks for joining me!

- Zach