Start with an agenda

Set clear expectations to put the candidate at ease.

Welcome to The Candidate, a new weekly newsletter about candidate experience and recruiting technologists from an interviewer’s perspective. During my software engineering career, I’ve built campus and experienced recruiting pipelines, trained my teams on interviewing for everyone’s benefit, curated interview question banks, and conducted hundreds of interviews myself.

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After we get through the “can you hear me now?”, I like to start every interview with an agenda that sets the stage for what’s to come. It only takes a minute but allows you to convey important information to the candidate that can help make the interview a smoother experience for everyone involved, and can head off questions you’d otherwise answer in the flow of the conversation.

Why spend time on an agenda?

Coming into any interview, you can bet that a candidate will be at least a little nervous. There’s a lot of information asymmetry between interviewer and candidate, so reducing that by tipping your pitches gives the candidate a better chance at performing their best. Setting clear expectations for what you’re going to cover also allows you to move on quickly from topic to topic without making it unsettling. I like to state this explicitly.

Establishing the agenda at the outset provides some guidance on depth during resume & past project talk. If you’re interviewing someone with 20 years of experience and they introduce themselves with a detailed walkthrough of everything they’ve done since the dot com bubble, you can take this as an important signal of their communication style and situational awareness. Without the agenda, they might feel like you’re just having a chat and will be sticking to behavioral questions and discussion. This area has the most natural variance between candidates, so I tend to save it for the end in a 30 minute interview.

Lastly, the agenda lets the candidate know you have a plan and you are taking their candidacy seriously. This functions as a symbol of professionalism and says volumes about what the candidate can expect from working at your firm. If you get the small stuff right, the candidate can have more confidence about the rest.

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Sample Technical Interview Agendas

60 minutes
0-5      Agenda & Introductions
6-16    Experience review and resume questions
17-45  Technical question(s)
46-54  Candidate questions
55-60  Buffer, Sell Time, Farewells & Next Steps

45 minutes
0-4      Agenda & Introductions
5-10    Experience review and resume questions
11-39  Technical question
40-44  Candidate questions
45        Farewells & Next Steps

30 minutes
0-2      Agenda & Introductions
3-19    Technical question*
20-25  Resume questions (your buffer time is here)
26-29  Candidate questions
30        Farewell and next steps 

* 17 minutes isn’t long at all for a technical question. I recommend reviewing already completed questions given as a prescreen in this context, but that’s a topic for another day.

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Communicating the agenda without cornering yourself

In the sample agendas above, you’ll find minute by minute suggestions. In my experience, being explicit about these timings corners you into keeping to them and might have the candidate watching the clock (that’s your job). Let’s take a prose stab at an opening for our 60 minute interview.

Hi candidate, I’m Dan, thanks for taking the time to meet with me today. We have 60 minutes together and I want us to get the most out of it, so let me tell you how I’d like to structure the interview and we can go from there.

First, I want to spend a few minutes on some deeper introductions so we can get to know each-other a little better. Next, we’ll take about 10 minutes to talk about your experience and some of the projects you’ve worked on.

From there, we’ll spend most of our time working through some technical questions together.

I’ll make sure we save 5 or 10 minutes at the end for you to ask me some questions, but feel free to interject if they feel relevant to what we’re talking about.

As you can see we have a lot to cover, so if I cut you off or move on before we’ve finished something, it just means I have enough to go on and doesn’t mean you’re doing poorly.

Sound good? Let’s get started…

Offering ranges and vague timelines accomplishes the goal of setting expectations without cornering you. During the interview, you have the ability to flex a few minutes in either direction to continue a promising line of thought or to move past a topic you’ve already gained enough information on.

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An agenda for this newsletter

I would be remiss not to follow my own advice. To set some clear expectations (and to hold myself to account), here are some of the upcoming topics you can look forward to in future posts.

• Nailing your introduction

• Choosing a technical question

• Establishing a hiring bar

• First rounds, the appetizer platter of interviews

• Looking for strengths

• Turning a bad interview into a good experience

• Following up post offer

• What can we learn about hiring from Donald Rumsfeld?

• Calibrating your interview funnel

• Building an interview panel

• What does your job description say about your company culture?

• Tools for remote interviews

• Code review interviews for all experience levels

• What you can learn at lunch

• Using show and tell to signal opportunities

• Prescreens that don’t waste anyone’s time

• What we do in the shadows

Subscribe and leave a comment below to tell me which topics you’re most interested in reading about. If you know someone who’d like this newsletter, I’d be honored if you tell your friends!