When I first started interviewing candidates, I recall experiencing a level of anxiety similar to the one I experienced being in that seat across from me, not too long prior to that. Interviewing candidates is stressful — it’s a lot of responsibility to both hold someone’s future in your hands, and to make sure you’re doing the right thing by your team.
It requires a lot of energy and attention to balance listening, understanding, and lining up follow-up questions. Half an hour, or even an hour, depending on the interview, is not much time to assess a person for their skills and general fit, and when you’re starting out, it’s not uncommon to walk out still wondering whether the person is the right fit.
As with anything else, you do get better at it with practice and experience. With each time, you’ll find new questions or methods that help you uncover more of what you’re looking for in a candidate.
The magic question
For me, there’s one question that I’ve found myself reaching for over and over, regardless of the role I was interviewing the candidate for. That might seem surprising, but let me explain. It’s not a riddle, or a trick question, but a very simple:
“Tell me about something you’ve worked on that you’re really, really proud of?”
So, why do I find it so effective?
My favorite thing about it is that it’s not a gotcha question. We’ve all heard about (and even prepared for) the dreaded Google questions, and yes, there’s value to those too. But what I like about this is that it gives the candidate a chance to shine, and regain their confidence in what’s otherwise a very tense environment: literally tell me the best thing you could possibly tell me about.
Ok, you’ve asked your question, but now, what are you looking for?
Are their values aligned?
The answer to this question will tell you a lot about the candidate. In PM roles especially, I’ve found that the answers tend to fall into one of two buckets:
- Trying to impress me with big words and numbers “I increased revenue by 7000%”
- A challenging, but ultimately rewarding experience like shipping, or learning, or even sometimes trying really hard but failing at something
This first of all tells you about their values: do they take pride in their work, and in taking on hard challenges and working through them? Or are they looking for a top mark on a test?
Can they go deep?
This is the thing they’re most proud of, so I expect them to be able to go as deep as possible. Ironically, it’s often the case that candidates in the former bucket have the least depth to their answer — once you try to dive into what that number was measuring, how it was measured, or their direct impact on that number (so what did you actually do?), you’ll find that there’s little substance there. If all the answers you get are vague or handwavy, well... that's your red flag.
By contrast, candidates who talk about a challenging experience will be happy to tell you more about the really tricky bits they overcame, or sometimes even didn’t, but did learn important lessons from them. The more details, the better.
My favorite follow up questions to this question are: what did you find the most challenging (was it the technical aspect? Winning over stakeholders? Getting adoption…)? How did you overcome it? What was the end result? What would you do differently if you got to do it knowing what you know now?
Again, if they're truly proud of their accomplishment, they should have no shortage of details to share — that’s what you’re looking for! If you can get them to open up, and be vulnerable (sharing mistakes, lessons), that’s even better — you want someone you can trust to be honest with you when things are tough, and being able to be vulnerable in an interview shows a lot of courage.
Do they communicate well?
The other nice thing about this exercise is that the candidate is in the position of being the expert on something you’re not. So the other thing you’re looking for is: can they bring you along on the adventure and communicate it to you in a way you understand without having all the context. The ability to communicate technical concepts, and break them down to different types of audiences is a big part of most tech jobs (both PM and engineer!).
Good luck!
So that’s it, that’s my little magic trick. It may seem simple, but don't underestimate its power. I hope you’ll find it helpful next time you go into an interview (on either side of the table!).