Designing better interviews | Andrew Shapiro | Ep. 109

[Dillon] (0:03 - 0:14)

What's up lifers and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:15 - 0:16)

What's going on baby?

[Dillon] (0:17 - 0:20)

And we've got Rob with us. Rob, do you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:21 - 0:21)

What's up lifers?

[Dillon] (0:23 - 0:27)

And Andrew is here. Andrew, can you say hi please?

[Andrew] (0:28 - 0:29)

What's good y'all? How y'all doing?

[Dillon] (0:30 - 0:36)

Very good, very good. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Andrew, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Andrew] (0:37 - 0:49)

Absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

My name is Andrew Shapiro. I'm the founder of Dot Community, which is focused on building the resource for helping people get better at interviewing sales and customer success candidates.

[Dillon] (0:50 - 0:59)

The, I love the being this like declarative statement, the University of Miami, the resource.

[JP] (1:00 - 1:01)

That's how I practice it.

[Dillon] (1:01 - 1:14)

I love it. I love it. Andrew, you know what we're doing here?

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Why don't you tell us what that is for you?

[Andrew] (1:14 - 2:28)

Yeah. And thanks again for having me. I think what's on my mind and what my focus has been is that there is a problem, which is the fact that affordable and accessible and applicable interviewing training is not out there.

Right. So a lot of startups ask employees to interview and help decide who the future of their company will be, but they don't actually train them on how to do it. So you have interviewers who say, I get a Google doc with questions to ask and they say, go interview.

They don't know what they legally cannot ask in interviews. They don't know how to remove bias. They don't know how to give feedback internally.

They don't know how to give feedback to the candidate. They don't know how to evaluate. So unfortunately, what happens is you get people who interview, they don't give the best feedback.

The company doesn't make the best decisions. It costs at least six months of a mishire. Then you got to let that person go and start the process over again.

So you're missing time, you're missing money. It's not good for the company. It's not good for you as the interviewer because you want to get better.

So I've been really focused on trying to provide a affordable, accessible course that certifies people on how to interview sales and customer success candidates.

[Dillon] (2:30 - 2:40)

Rob, how have you confronted this issue? I think the numbers you've given is like you've interviewed and hired over a hundred people, maybe even more. Yeah.

[Rob] (2:41 - 4:45)

Andrew, you had me at accessible. That is something that I've had to remind myself of many times. Because to Dillon's point, this has happened hundreds of times where I've had an interview process and my inclination, like most of us in this little niche world of SaaS that we're in, is just let me go with the people that I know, people that I can refer from my network.

And the problem with that is that it makes for such a closed off community and one that generates a lot of groupthink, a lot of bias, internal bias for candidates that we know already. And we write it off as saying these are de-risked candidates and they are to a large extent. So there's a couple of strategies I've used to combat that.

And I'd be curious, Andrew, you seem like the expert on this more than I am to get your thoughts on this. But having a well-defined recruiting playbook is where it starts. It has to be documented.

And so I have a template that I've worked on over the years that tries to incorporate a lot of these principles around opening up a wide net of candidates. That includes net new candidates, having a diverse candidate pool, having a more diverse interviewing panel as well. And then all the way through to documentation around.

It's so interesting because I think of like experiments. Have you ever seen, you know, experiments? Sorry, guys, I'm doing it again.

There was an experiment that was done with a police force and they showed two side by side resumes. One resume had a male name and it described like all this person with this academic background. And then the other one was a female name.

And it was this like street smart type background. What the police force said was like, well, you know, we need people who have like a really good academic background. And then they swapped the names with a different police force.

You know, we really need someone with street smarts. And so it's so funny because there's so many implicit biases that we lean into when it comes to interviewing and hiring. That really is quite dangerous for the broader workplace.

I'm sure you guys have seen similar type experiments. My point is to say just bring awareness to it. Documenting it is a place to start.

But obviously curious to get the thoughts of the folks here on the call as well.

[Dillon] (4:46 - 4:52)

Andrew, what specifically are you guys doing in terms of like trying to avoid biases?

[Andrew] (4:52 - 5:49)

There's something that happens that and this course is specifically for interviewers. It's not completely for hiring managers. This is for interviewers.

There's something that hiring managers do, whether they like it or not, which I understand why it's happened to me before that creates bias. You might have a hiring manager go to an interviewer right before the interviewer goes into their interview and say, hey, I missed out on this. Can you evaluate that?

Or, hey, I'd like to know a little bit more about that. That introduces bias because now you're getting a little bit of their feedback or their thoughts from your boss or hiring manager before you go into the interview. So as an interviewer, part of what the course talks about is staying away from that.

Don't read other people's feedback. Don't listen to what other people said about the interview. You have one job.

You're going in to ask specific questions about a specific attribute and evaluate that. Your job is to help the hiring manager make a decision. You don't want to get biased from these other places because otherwise that will bias you.

[Dillon] (5:52 - 6:18)

JP, I want to go back to your experience in retail when you were managing retail establishments and how you went about this, because obviously in your role now, it's a little bit different. Right. You're just getting started in CS.

But I want to talk about when you've had to hire folks in the past. Have you thought about this? Was this an issue?

I feel like you work for some really big names. So did they have training around how you should avoid this sort of stuff?

[JP] (6:20 - 8:38)

That was one of the things that stuck out with me from the beginning when you started talking, Andrew, is that they don't give you training. I'm trying to think back, and I know it's been a while, but I got zero training on interviewing people. I didn't get one.

I can't meet them one single time when I had to be in charge. So I don't want to say the name of the company because they're big, but let's just say they're Lingerie. They sell Lingerie.

That's their claim to fame. It's interesting, piggybacking off what Rob was saying, because I was hired and I'm the only guy that's working there. Everyone else is a woman, female.

That's it. So when I'm in charge, I am hyper aware. Now, the applicants that I had, they were all women.

They all identified as women. So I didn't even get that chance. The only time I think we ever had another guy there was a temporary situation where I think it was holiday and stuff like that.

In a pool where it was, I don't know what the word would be, monogendered or something. I don't know. Basically, that is gone.

I think that it did make it at least a little bit easier for me to look for things that I thought would be traits that I could mold on my team. If someone comes in, I'm thinking about how does this person learn? Because part of what is going to have to happen is they come in and I don't want to talk too much because it's going to seem like I'm pooh-poohing them.

But it's hell. This is a company where people are rabid fans. So this person coming in, I have to think about how is this person going to deal with these other elements of the job that might not strictly just be your responsibilities.

I think that to your point, Rob, it's different. I've never had to hire for CS. But I am curious about one thing, Andrew.

I would like to hear if there is something, maybe one thing that you've noticed is usually either it could be a light bulb moment or maybe the thing that people seem to get wrong a lot, for lack of a better way of saying it, when you go to train people. I think that would be really interesting to hear about.

[Andrew] (8:39 - 9:57)

JP, actually, I just want you to know you're not alone. For this course, before I did the course, I interviewed 129 people to do product market fit. Out of 129 people, nine said they were formally trained on how to interview.

That's people who are founders, C-level, VP, executives. They were directors, managers, ICs. They worked at Salesforce all the way down to a 50-person startup.

So interview training is just not out there, and it's just not something that happens. And to your point, something that I think learned that people do time and time again, it's very easy for you to Google what are the best questions to ask in an interview. That's not what an interview is about.

An interview is knowing what you are looking for, what you're evaluating, understand three or four questions you're going to use to ask that, and drawing a picture from what a score range is, from one to four, what looks good, what doesn't. That's the three-step process you've got to use, rather than just going in, asking, and then weakening up to, well, did that sound good? Or would I get a beer with them?

Or would I be okay on the layover with that? That's not what interviewing is about. So plenty of more in the course, and happy to talk about it more.

But I think that's a really good question, JP and Rob. I also like what you said, and of course, Dillon, you always are on top of it. So I do appreciate you all having me here.

[Dillon] (9:58 - 11:07)

I like that I got the generic, you're just cool, Dillon. I like that. What's funny to me is hiring so often, and we'll leave it here, hiring is so often this thing of, oh, crap, we're over capacity.

I got to go find somebody, do it really quick. And so how often do we really think, I got to go about this the right way, and I got to create these guardrails, and I got to create an avatar for what this person looks like that doesn't include race or gender or background. It's just the way they answer these questions.

It just so rarely happens. You're like, yo, HR, throw this up, get as many people in the door as possible, and I'll start talking to them in between the 10 meetings I have a day. It's one of those things where we're just not taking the time to make sure we do it right from the beginning.

It's like when you paint, if you go to paint a room, and you don't tape stuff off, and you don't got the right, it's going to end up looking like shit at the end. And you're going to have to redo it. It's going to cost you more money, more paint, more supply.

Anyway, Andrew, that's our time. Thank you so much for being here. This is an awesome topic.

We will make sure to include in the notes the course and how they can get in touch with you. Let's have you back in a couple of months, hear how things are going. But for now, we've got to say goodbye.

Absolutely. Thank you all so much for having me.

[Voiceover] (11:11 - 11:42)

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