Your interview is a sales call

I’ve been doing hiring manager screens lately. Here’s a few tips.

You’re not asking for a job, you’re selling a service. I said that 5 years ago and it feels even more true from the other side.

Your future manager has a problem to solve. They’re looking to solve it with the Who Not How approach. Great book btw.

The idea is that even if you could do the thing yourself, it’s better to pay someone. They’ll have more time to focus on this particular issue, build deeper expertise, and overall do a better job than you could yourself.

Now how do you find such a person?

You get people on the call and you’re pitching each other. I have 30 minutes to show you’ll want to work with me. You have 30 minutes to show you’ll solve my problem.

I like to start the call with introductions.

I go first and briefly introduce myself, explain that we’ve doubled the engineering team (~6 to ~14) since August, that my team owns a lot of critical infrastructure, that the company is doing wild revenue, and that this may be the fastest growing startup I’ve seen.

Notice that 80% of my introduction was a pitch on why you should work for us. That’s to get you excited. And I briefly mentioned the pain-point we’re hiring for – the team owns lots of critical infrastructure and there’s more work than we can handle (growing fast).

Then the candidate gets to intro.

The best candidates will position themselves as a solution to my problem. Highlight their experience in similar situations, talk about the results they’ve achieved and ask questions.

What kind of infrastructure? Who are the stakeholders? What’s the tech stack? Where are the biggest challenges? What’s breaking every day? How can I help?

The magic words I’m looking for are some version of “Oh yeah this one time when we , I , and then we “.

This gives me somewhere to dig in and ask more about your project and how it went. I’ll try to fish out:

• what your contribution was,
• how you approached the challenge,
• where the dragons were hiding,
• what was the outcome

Looking for people who own the outcome, not just do the work. I want you to take things off my plate.

The main thing you can offer at the hiring manager screen is a track record of solving similar problems. For that you’ll need to fish out my problems (ask questions) and position your experience as similar (pitch yourself).

Cheers,
~Swizec

PS: if you’re down to work hybrid in SF, we’re hiring

PPS: this works differently in BigTech where they hire people into an internal pool of approved humans that teams pick from. The process there is less role-specific from what I’ve heard