My long time friend Chris Moody, president and COO of Gnip, has offered to write some guest posts on management – we’ll call the series Moody on Management. In addition to being an outstanding early stage / high growth executive, Chris has made a study of management in startups and is extremely thoughtful about what does and doesn’t work.
His first post is aimed at anyone looking to get a job in a startup and talks about how to be effective at interviewing for a job. Feel free to weigh in if you have other “Stop, Don’t, Nevers” or “Pleases”
I love interviewing people to work at Gnip. Unless I’m having a really crappy day, I enter each interview full of hope and optimism. I’ve done countless interviews in the last 20+ years and I can easily slip into autopilot mode if I’m not careful. In order to avoid this trap, I mentally prepare by reminding myself “today could be the day I’ll meet the next great team member.” I’ve found this mental pep talk helps remind me that there is no better use of my time than investing in the interviewing process. In other words, the next interview could be a company game changer and I need to be 100% engaged.
Most interviews don’t directly lead to someone joining our company. Often the person doesn’t have the right skills or experience. There are plenty of cases where it becomes clear to the candidate that we can’t provide them an opportunity that meets their interest/needs. Both of these outcomes are normal and healthy. Unfortunately, I often find another outcome can occur which is frustrating and deflating. This situation occurs all too often when a person is so poor at interviewing that we’re unable to determine if there is a potential match. I’ll invest up to an hour in an interview trying to peel back the layers. However, I’m frequently unable to get to a substantive layer of discussion that will help both parties determine if there is a potential match. I’ll leave these interviews thinking, “Maybe that person was great, I’ll never know”. Over time, I’ve started to referring to these as the “who knows?” interviews.
The good news is that I think job candidates can follow some simple guidelines when interviewing at a startup that will help avoid the “who knows?”
Stop, Don’t, Never
Please
Ask CEOs of successful startups about their biggest challenge and they’ll often cite the inability to hire great people. My theory is there are plenty of great people, but many are just terrible at interviewing. Hopefully these few tips help lead to more great matches down the road. By the way, Gnip is hiring!
Chris Dixon had an excellent post yesterday titled Recruiting programmers to your startup. The post, and the comments, are full of super useful stuff that every entrepreneur should read carefully.
I sent the link for the post out to the Foundry Group CEO email list and it generated a great discussion thread, including one of the companies sharing their full day interview / evaluation process which includes a four hour coding exercise. Among the feedback was a great short list of four addition things that Niel Robertson, the CEO of Trada (and an amazing programmer in his own right) has learned over the years.
Trada, like many of the companies we’ve invested in, had spectacular growth (both revenue, customers, and headcount) in 2011. They, and others, continue to aggressively search for great software developers to join their team – when I look at the Foundry Group Jobs page I see well over 100 open positions for developers across our portfolio and I know this list undercounts since not all of the companies we are investors in are listed there.
It’s an extremely tight hiring market for software developers right now. I expect this to continue for a while given the obvious supply / demand imbalance for great people. So – if you are hiring – read Chris’s post and be thoughtful about how you go about this. And, if you have comments for him, me, or Niel about how to do this even better, please offer them up!