Interviewing isn’t just about filtering candidates, it’s about shaping the future of your company. The way you interview determines not only who gets hired, but who feels welcome, who feels respected, and who chooses to say yes to a job offer. After leading hundreds of interviews across roles, levels, and companies, I believe great interviewers do four things well: they ask good followup questions, treat candidates with respect, look for reasons to hire instead of reasons to reject, and promote the company to the candidate.

I've been an interviewer at other companies I've worked at, but nowhere was I as involved as my time at Amazon. My favorite kind of interview was with student candidates. I enjoyed hearing about their school projects and activities. I learned how computer science education evolved over the years. Candidates used to talk about the mobile apps they built, then they started talking about machine learning projects, and more recently their school projects are incorporating artificial intelligence.

Despite the importance of hiring well, companies vary wildly in the amount of interviewer training they provide. Some don't train their interviewers at all. There isn't a ton of material online to fill in those gaps. Anything useful is hard to separate from the wealth of information on how to perform well as a candidate. Probably the best writeup I've seen is from Joel On Software back in 2006. His approach boils down to hiring people that are "Smart, and Get Things Done." He even turned the blog post into a book.

At Amazon, I received in depth interview training on the Amazon way. I'm not going to claim the Amazon way is the best way. It is simply one of the ways. Companies structure their interview process based on their scale, culture, and tolerance for risk. Still, every company is looking for people who are smart and get things done. Here are a few ways to help you find those people as an interviewer.

A good interviewer will ask followup questions to get the information they need to make a hiring decision. Being interviewed as a candidate isn't something most people do regularly. Without a lot of practice, many people aren't good at following the STAR format or providing a cohesive, off the cuff narrative about their past experiences. It is important for an interviewer to help the candidate put themselves in the best light by adopting a curiosity mindset. Make yourself truly interested in their past experiences, even if their narratives don't seem interesting at first.

I've heard some interviewers argue against in-depth followup questions, saying that if the candidate can't follow STAR format or provide strong, cohesive narratives that's a negative indicator. It's a fair point, but only if providing strong, cohesive narratives is part of their job description. Not everyone is a type A personality who has had a lot of time to devote to interview prep.

The best way to ask followup questions is to try to figure out how someone did what they claimed. Last week I gave advice to candidates about framing their past job experience like a sandwich. The situation's problem and solution are the bread of the sandwich. Candidates are often vague about the sandwich filling, the process of solving the problem. Ask questions about the things they tried that didn't work, who they collaborated with, the resources they used to arrive at the solution and how they found them.

One of the best followup questions is, "Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?" It gives you some insight into their ability to think critically and improve. Not all candidates will have thought about this for the particular situation. This is fine. It can still tell you if they are able to consider how to improve. But asking if they have an example of where they applied their lessons reveals if self improvement is an intrinsic part of them.

If a candidate has a bad interview experience, it hurts your company far beyond one individual. Large companies garner reputations. Sites like Blind, Glassdoor, and Reddit have dedicated places for candidates to post about their job and interview experiences. Bad experiences get around and future candidates will be that much more hesitant to interview or to choose your company over another given equivalent offers.

Reputation is a risk for every company. If you are a big company that sells to consumers, your candidates are probably also your customers. A bad experience might mean they stop shopping with you. If your company sells to other companies, candidates with a bad experience will remember and be less inclined to recommend you as a solution wherever they do end up getting hired. If you're in a niche market, the kind of expertise you're looking for probably comes from a small group of people who all know each other. A bad experience will haunt you online and through word of mouth.

Anne Victoria Clark said to "Treat all women like you would the Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson." That is, be respectful. A corollary in interviewing might be, "Treat all candidates like they'll be your boss someday." This means being attentive and non-combative. Don't beat dead horses. If the candidate isn't understanding the question after rephrasing a few times, move on to something else.

Creating a good interview experience means providing hints and coaching when necessary. I've been in interviews the candidate couldn't even get started on a programming problem. I switched to a more conversational chat about programming in general and walked them through the problem. It was a much better experience and kept us from awkwardly staring at each other for 30 minutes.

Try to be on the candidate's side and look for reasons to hire them. For decades, the narrative in hiring has been that it's better to miss hiring a great candidate than to accidentally hire a bad one. I think that's true, but it has led to a dynamic where interviewers are overly focused on finding reasons someone is a bad candidate. This has led to gotcha type trivia questions and over-analysis of minor character quirks.

A better approach is to focus on finding reasons to think someone is a great candidate. Interviewing is an expensive process. The average cost to hire someone is $4,700 when you tally up recruiting and employee time away from regular work. Quickly finding a candidate who is smart and gets things done cuts the process short, saves your company money, and starts getting the problems solved the role was created for.

High quality interviews evaluate how people think, work, and collaborate. They don't test how well someone performs artificial social rituals. Good questions directly ask for what the interviewer is looking for to uncover skills in making tradeoffs, communicating under pressure, and continuously improving. Bad questions test whether the candidate has rehearsed common interview questions. An interviewer's goal is not to test for polished interview skills. Your goal is to find how the candidate has operated in real life scenarios.

"Tell me about a time when you didn't meet a deadline" is a classic example. The interviewer is hoping for a story about a missed deadline where the candidate recognized they were behind schedule, took charge, made tradeoffs, and communicated to stakeholders throughout. More often than not, they just get an example of a missed deadline that was understandably outside the candidate's control. The interviewer would have been better off asking about "a time where they had to communicate being behind schedule and made tradeoffs to deliver." That phrasing of the question is more directly asking for what the interviewer is asking for, and avoiding guess-work on the candidate's part.

My all time least favorite interview question is "why do you want to work here?" The answers you are likely to get are another piece of "interview theater." They will tell you very little about a person's ability to do the job. Interviewers who ask this question argue that it tells them if someone is passionate and interested in the company, but there's no way to trust the answer. Who was ever passionate about SaaS HR applications?

Many times, you're interviewing a candidate the recruiting team reached out to and convinced to interview. An honest answer would be, "Your company asked me to do this interview. Maybe you should tell me why I want to work here." Rather than wasting time on a story about how the candidate has dreamed since they were four years old about building GUIs for oil drill firmware, an interviewer should spend that time convincing the candidate why their company is a great place to work.

I make sure to leave time for the candidate to ask questions. I usually offer them the opportunity at the beginning of the interview after introductions. This guarantees I have the opportunity to tell them about the company and why they should be excited to work there. It also heads off some awkwardness towards the end of the interview. Candidates often ask for feedback and interviewers often don't want to provide it (or aren't allowed to). In interviews where technical problems are being worked through, transitioning from working through the details to immediately having the candidate start asking questions is awkward. This is especially true if the candidate is having trouble with the question or is just on the cusp of a solution. Not all candidates will want to ask questions at the start of an interview, and that's all right. You can leave them to the end and do your best to make sure to reserve time.

The interview setting shouldn't be a theater where you are judging how well someone performs at interviewing. Great interviewing is about uncovering data, human respect, and convincing someone that working with you is a great idea. The best interviewers aren't gatekeepers. They're stewards that protect the company, the candidate, and the culture at the same time. If you treat interviewing as a responsibility instead of a power, you don’t just hire better people, you become a better company.

For more information on how to be a better interviewer, check out these links.

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