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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Great work Dan well done
Dan, thank you for this.
Having a set schedule with time windows for each section makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of starting the interview with setting an agenda with the candidate, but should you share the timeline (even the vague timeline) of each part of the agenda beforehand? It sounds like you don't want to have the candidate watching the clock nor corner yourself into these timeframes. In your experience, how does the interview change if you do not share the timeline with the candidate?
One more quick question; if within the first few minutes it is clear that the candidate is not the right fit for the job, do you continue to with the prepared agenda to keep things proper, or can you shorten the process knowing it is likely wasting everyone's time?