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Interviews & Assessments

After defining and sharing what your team needs with the world, establishing an effective hiring process minimizes bias as you search for talent that is competent, motivated, and compatible with your cultural norms and values. Interviews and assessments serve as mechanisms to narrow down your candidate pool to ultimately hire the right person for your job.

There are various ways to screen, assess, and interview applicants, even for the same role in the same industries. Some swear by live coding assignments for software engineers, portfolio presentations by designers, or case studies when recruiting leadership talent. Others go all-in on whiteboarding activities or special interview gauntlets. What’s more important than picking the perfect method is defining “good enough” upfront and then closing a candidate who passes that bar without hesitation.

Even as AI transforms recruiting workflows, human-to-human interaction remains essential, with behavioral interviewing as the current gold standard. Therefore the resources below focus primarily on interviewing.

Recommended Resources

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Quick and Dirty Interviews: Manager Tools with one of my most shared podcasts yet on hiring. This isn’t just a brilliant intro to interviewing, but can also be shared with colleagues who may not have much experience with recruiting talent. Like many other managers, I have been asked to cover for another interviewer on short notice. This is when the tips in the podcast truly prevent unnecessary chaos. (35 min listen)

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The Interview Results Capture Meeting: This is another gem by Manager Tools and focuses on how to debrief effectively and quickly after an interview. I’ve been using this approach for years and it has saved me from many needless debates or ramblings. There simply is no need to ramble or endlessly debate candidates that are clear “hire!” or “don’t hire!” cases. (41 min listen)

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How I interview engineers to assess ability to deliver impact: Siadhal Magos with one of my favorite articles on interviewing to assess for impact. This is particularly intriguing because Engineers don't always think in terms of business impact the way Product Managers do. He also does a great job of illustrating the job of an interviewer to ask probing questions to move beyond pre-studied answers to common interview questions. (8 min read)

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How to evaluate a designer with a design exercise: Braden Kowitz lays out how to assess designers with a thoughtful exercise. Much could be said about asking for unpaid design work in hiring processes, but the article sets a high bar in intentionally designing a hiring process you may find inspiring. While this is a design role example, many ideas translate well to other jobs. (8 min read)

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Big 3 Leadership Assessment Scorecard: Russ Laraway shared one of the few great public hiring rubrics for leaders. While this serves as an accessory to his book, the brief summaries for all frameworks are good enough to get the idea. After reviewing this example you should be able to create your own rubric as long as you have considered your interview questions and what good looks like in a given role at your org. (10 min read)

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Hiring a Head of Product: Richard Mironov with a compelling read on hiring a Head of Product. Again, this will be a useful resource even if you’re not specifically hiring for this exact role. Many execs don’t know much about various leadership roles but have to hire for them. Richard’s scenarios and tips do a great job of keeping your role definition tight and focusing on that over hiring someone who is simply like yourself. (8 min read)