Interviewing is like a dinner party
How to create an interesting conversation and stand out
Tuve el placer de entrevistar a Tyler Vawser, el VP of People de Apptegy. Apptegy es una startup de EdTech con una oficina en Little Rock, Arkansas y Monterrey, Nuevo León. Tyler entrevistó a casi 1000 personas, pero no en la parte técnica! Vamos a hablar de la parte “cultural” de la entrevista, o cómo tener una conversación memorable de ambos lados del Zoom meeting.
Conozco Apptegy desde hace rato, y es un de mis mejores clientes. Tenemos una relación cliente/reclutador sin falta, y eso dice mucho sobre su cultura empresarial en mi opinión. Si estás buscando algo nuevo, te recomiendo ponerte en contacto con Tyler a tyler.vawser@apptegy.com o en Twitter @Tvaw.
Tell me about yourself and Apptegy.
I’m Tyler Vawser, and I’m the VP of People at Apptegy. We are an education technology company, we are based in Little Rock, Arkansas. We opened an office in Monterrey just last year. We are about 5 ½ years old, and we have a SaaS platform that helps schools in the US manage their marketing and communicate better. We use Ruby on Rails and Vue.JS.
You are not doing the technical part of the interview. So what is your goal when talking with an engineer?
Technical chops are important, but what is just as important (and what I’m trying to figure out in an interview) is whether this engineer can make our team better, and is this someone I’m going to look forward to working with. What do they care about? Do they care about the same things/ideas that we care about? Will Apptegy be the best place for them? Not just if they know Ruby on Rails. Are they a learner and mentor to others, or a rockstar ? There is no right answer, but rather a right fit.
So you and the candidate have 30 minutes to figure that out, in hopefully a natural conversation.
Interviews are this weird thing, and we (most people) don’t practice it very often. I like to use a more common example of dating or dinner parties. In both, you are introducing yourself to people who know a little about you and want to learn more. But they also want to get a feel for how you would be over the longer term and not get bored or turned off. So you want to give people as much context as you can, but you also want to hear from them. This is often where interviews break down: they are too one-sided. It becomes more like a courtroom with one person asking and the other person answering..., and it is not very human. Imagine you did this at a dinner party? You wouldn’t be invited back. You need to build a conversation and share a human connection.
Ok, so let’s continue with this dinner party analogy. You’re at the table, next to someone new - and they ask: “tell me a bit about yourself?”
This is an important part of both a dinner party and an interview. Firstly, you need to keep it brief - maybe 30 seconds or so. I’ve interviewed people who go on for 15 minutes non-stop about their career. It's good information, but you’ve probably bored me and exhausted my attention. I don’t even know where to dig in! So what you want to do is pick a couple of things that are true of you, and use them as hooks. A hook is something that the person you’re talking to can ask more about and is something that they have an interest in too.
What’s an example with you?
I grew up in Colorado, spent a good amount of my professional life in NYC, worked in digital marketing with startups before moving into talent management at Apptegy.
That took me 10 seconds to say, but you got a few hooks to dive in deeper. Colorado, NYC, startups...etc...So you got a little info on a few parts of my life, and you can decide where you want to dive in deeper based on what is interesting to you. That is the key piece. You can potentially connect your personal life with what I mentioned and that way we can build a real conversation.
You might be thinking: “I’m being interviewed. This should be about me.” And that is true, but you are also trying to capture the attention of the recruiter, who probably has a bunch of slack messages and to-dos. And so the best way to get that person's attention is to make the human connection — find shared experiences. Even if the topic is not programming specifically, the interviewer learns that once you join the company, you’ll be an interested and curious member of the team.
You mentioned a term I really like, the meta-conversation, aka the conversation that is not being said out loud.
Exactly. For instance, if you talk non-stop for 15 min about yourself you might not be a selfish person, but that is the message I’m getting from you. Or if you are on Zoom and I hear typing. That means there is something else more important right now.
That goes both ways. If you are chatting with the recruiter and they seem distracted, that should tell you something about the company and how they approach recruiting. What signals are they giving me? Is this a friendly place?
How can somebody prepare for this?
Before interviewing, you should think “what are the 3 things that people should know about me?” For example, it could be: “I’m very experienced in Rails”, “I’m a fast learner”, and “I like to be challenged”. And then every time you tell a story, you can bring it back to one of those 3 things. You don’t need to have every talking point planned out, but keep those in the back of your mind as you are talking about your experience.
What about when the candidate has to ask questions?
It's a part of the interview that often gets messed up. As a candidate, normally you get questioned for 80%+ of the time and then you have 20% to ask your questions. Imagine if you did that at a dinner party? People would just walk away.
My suggestion is when you answer a question, ask a related question back to the interviewer. Not in a confrontational way, but rather friendly conversational. For example, if someone asks you about your motivations to join a company, answer the question and then ask in return, “I’m curious what motivated you to join the company?”. It makes the conversation more memorable, it makes you more interesting, and you will get better information than if you grilled them at the end of the interview. It feels more human.
You also want to ask questions you genuinely want the answers to, not just asking questions for the sake of it. And importantly, you want to ask questions that you can’t get the answer on your own.
What’s an example of a great question you got?
Here is one of the best questions I got:
“I looked at Apptegy’s careers page, and I saw that you talk about thoughtfulness and high-performance. But other than that, how would you describe the culture?”
It tells me that they did their research. It also put me on the spot, and I had to take a minute to think about it. And we built a very interesting conversation from that, which I still remember even though I’ve interviewed close to a thousand people. I even told the rest of my team about it.
It’s so much better than generic questions about vacation days and working hours that should really only be kept until the very end of the process.
So how should a candidate begin crafting these questions?
They need to take a minute and think about a few things. “What is important to me? What do I value? If the basics of 3 jobs are the same, what would make me pick one job over another?”
Hone in on those differences. And figure out what sort of questions you can ask a company to see if the values align.
For example you could ask: “Tell me about the last time someone was not successful in this role? How did you handle it? Did you coach them up, did you let them go immediately? What are they doing now?”
Those are sort of weird questions, but they will give you a feeling for what the situation is and what the culture is like. A recruiter won’t be able to make it up or default to a canned response. They are too specific and situational.
Specifics, examples, stories. Forcing the interviewer to think about a specific moment. Ask them to recruiters, but also to engineers. They are the ones you will be working with, so their experience matters a ton.
My piece of advice is: assume you got the job offer, what sort of questions would you ask? Now that commitment is on the line, and you are not just in the “getting to know you” phase. Be almost a bit suspicious, but not in a negative way.
Yeah, you need to be curious. If you are curious, ask questions upfront. It won’t scare people away - on the contrary, it displays confidence. You can ask them about their best days and their worst days. See how open they are about the lows. For instance, I wanted to work at a place with lows and amazing highs - instead of a place that is sort of the same everyday.
I think this is a cultural difference between LatAm recruiting culture and US Tech culture. The former is much more hierarchical, and the latter is very egalitarian. You can make mistakes, you can share your opinion or debate even if you are very junior or just interviewing, as long as you have the arguments to back it up.
Yeah very true. Here at Apptegy you get a voice at the table from the beginning, and we are trying to see if you are the right candidate for that. Will you voice your opinions without fear of “disrupting the hierarchy”? Or do you feel like you need to put in your time.
We are pretty flat at Apptegy, and to be honest who cares about your co-worker’s title when you are working together. You care more about whether you’ll get help, how easy they are to work with...etc...
Anything else you’d like to add?
Be thinking about this regularly. What do I want? What questions should I ask? How can I discover that in a company?
And my door is always open and I’m on Twitter. If you want to learn more about Apptegy, we have a great team in Little Rock and Monterrey. As we grow we will be looking for more engineers who want that sort of experience for themselves, but also help create it for others.
Thanks!
That’s it from me! Thanks again for being a reader, and let me know how I can improve. And don’t forget to follow @Gringojobs on Twitter.
Peace and Jobs,
Georges