Effective Interviewing (Part 1): Know What You Actually Want

There are hundreds of articles telling job seekers how to prepare for interviews, and I wrote one of them myself.

However, not enough articles talk about the other side of the desk: how most hiring managers usually wing interviews.

If your job post remains empty for months on end, you have negative feedback coming your way, or you just want to learn how to be more effective in your interview process then I welcome you in Part 1 of a series on effective interviewing.

The core rule isn’t complicated, but it is rarely followed: define the role before you start interviewing.

1. High-Level Steps vs. Real Specifics

The structural stages of an interview for standard roles can be quite obvious:

• Software Engineer: Recruiter intro → Technical assessment → Team fit chat.
• Sales Representative: Intro call → Mock pitch/case study → Executive interview.

Defining the steps is fairly simple; knowing what you will be evaluating at each stage is where most hiring managers stumble.

Let’s take a practical example of a role that requires “Communication skills”. You might list this in your job ad, but internally, and sometimes in the job ad itself, it is important to define the level of proficiency required for the specific role you are filling today.

”Good Communication” has a different meaning entirely for a Senior Engineer leading cross-functional alignment than it would for a Mid-level Engineer presenting PR updates to their immediate team. If you don’t define the exact depth expected, you will end up evaluating against a vague personal standard rather than the actual job requirements. Alignment on the requirements and what they actually mean is also something we will discuss in a future post.

2. Must-Haves vs. Nice-to-Haves

Make two buckets, break down your requirements and be aggressively honest about what goes where:

• Must-haves: Non-negotiable competencies which are required from Day 1 (e.g. proven experience architecting distributed systems).
• Nice-to-haves: Skills that enhance performance but can easily be taught on the job and you are willing to make space for that (e.g. familiarity with a specific deployment tool).

If these are not clearly defined you will end up with a pipeline of people that will waste your time and you theirs. And worse reject candidates over minor gaps or approve others over major gaps.

You should be honest about these from the beginning.

3. The Holy Trinity: Job Description, Job Ad, and Rubric

The internal job description is not a chore. It acts as the single source of truth for the entirety of the hiring pipeline. This is the holy grail.

Internal Job Description
  │
  ├──► Public Job Ad (attracts the right candidates)
  │
  └──► Interview Rubric (evaluates candidates accurately)

• The Job Ad is a translation of your internal JD in a clear, attractive message in order for candidates to know exactly what to emphasize in their application and during the interview process.
• The Interview Rubric is an extension of your internal JD, providing you with a standardized scoring system.

By having these artifacts aligned, candidates know what you expect, and your team knows what to evaluate. Otherwise, you end up interviewing for a role that is different than the one advertised.

4. Clarity for You = Guidance for the Candidate

When you have an alignment between your JD and the rubric two things emerge:

• You steer the ship. You can actively guide the interview towards the exact points you want to measure instead of leaving the conversation to wander into irrelevant anecdotes.
• The candidate performs better. When you as an interviewer ask on point, deliberate questions aiming at the specific scope, the candidate better understands what to emphasize. The better you know what you are looking for, the easier it is for the interviewee to give you a clear, relevant answer.

5. Not All Feedback Is Created Equal

A robust JD allows you also to assign different weight to the people that take part in the interview process based on their proximity to the role. For example, if you are hiring a Tech Lead:

• Direct reports and peers are in a better position to evaluate the communication and leadership style, as their score on team collaboration carries more weight.
• Cross-functional partners and upper management are better suited to evaluate strategic alignment or architectural depth.

When a final decision is to be made, do not sum up all scores equally. This does not negate anyone’s opinion but the proximity dimension needs to be clearly respected. Weight the feedback based on who is best qualified to evaluate that attribute.

6. Structure Creates Space for Nuance

This is important: Any rubric is not an absolute decision matrix, it sets the direction.

Every metric, attribute, level are there to give a direction to your process and avoid unnecessary chaos which will emerge if you do not have a streamlined process. They should not remove the human from the process.

Let’s take for example a candidate who manages to showcase an unexpected strength. They have demonstrated a great capacity and speed for self learning, even though they might have missed the technical benchmark required.

Someone who might not fully match the requirements but their unique experience or skills opens up a completely new perspective for the team is still an asset worth considering.

Never remove the human element from the interview process. The holy trinity, as we mentioned earlier, is there to guide and not to remove intuition; it is there to build a clear baseline so that when you do decide to bend the rules you are doing this as a conscious decision and not by accident.

The Takeaway

Hiring the right person does not start with setting up clever interview processes, it starts before any candidate applies for the role.

In short

• Define the exact skills
• Separate must-haves and nice-to-haves
• Align your job and the rubric with your internal JD
• Weight the feedback based on proximity
• Know what you are looking for

Happy interviewing!