Time Management

Time management is one of the biggest differentiators between elite and average interviewers. You can expect a skilled interviewer to get 2-3x the number of actionable stories compared to a typical interviewer.

Obviously, those additional data points increase your hiring accuracy, as you will hear key stories, uncover trends, and avoid overly relying on any one particular story. So, given that we want more data per unit of time, how do we actually do this?

There are two answers: strategy and tactics.

Strategy: Obsess over Relevance

If you’re familiar with our PROB framework (Past, Relevant, Open-ended, Bad) for asking great questions, you already know the emphasis we place on relevance. It’s at the heart of time management. If you are not eliciting relevant data, you are wasting time. (“Relevant” in this context refers to whether or not the data is likely to map against the Target that you and your teammates have defined for the role in question.)

So the prime question you need to be asking is “are we using our time well here?”

This is the constant relevancy engine that is running in your brain at all times. It’s what determines whether or not you ask to hear more about a potentially interesting tangent. It’s also what determines whether or not you ask to hear more about a particular story or simply wrap it up and move on to another one. Relevancy is constantly guiding your allocation of time.

In summary, relevancy is the “what” of time management — it’s what we care about and it’s what we are optimizing for (subject to maintaining great rapport with the candidate).

Tactics: (Or How to Interrupt)

All of the strategic understanding of relevance is worth nothing if you are incapable of actually managing the conversation. You just sit there while long-winded candidates drone on with irrelevant monologues and you feel powerless to stop it.

So here are the tactics for how you actually implement relevance to manage time effectively in an interview:

1. Set the agenda strongly once the small talk dies down. You make clear that you’ve got questions you’re excited to ask them and there’s time for them to ask questions about you at the end.
2. Optional: You can also mention during the agenda setting that your company has a culture of “headline-first” communication where you’ll dig into certain stories in more depth if they’re particularly relevant.
3. Vocalize frequently from the very start of the interview. You must establish that this is not going to be a “I ask a question and then sit back for 5 minutes silently listening to your answer” type of interview. By having your voice heard from the very beginning, you help the candidate avoid going off on long rambling stories and you also make it easier to “increase the volume dial” on your own voice and transition into a quick follow-up question: “So what was the end result on that story?”
4. Listen for micro pauses. Assuming you have a good internet connection it’s actually pretty easy to interrupt if you get a sense for the person’s cadence and where they take micro pauses. It can also be helpful to show that you are about to ask a question with your face (make the shape of the letter “W” like you’re about to ask the word “What”). If they aren’t looking at the screen, a clearly audible “S” sound or saying the word “So” and waiting a half-second will often help create space for the rest of your question: “So — how did that compare to expectations?”
5. Just interrupt with fascination. You were taught as a young child not to interrupt people. And that’s good advice for polite society, but it’s horrible advice for being a great interviewer—at least in the format of assessing someone for a job. Keep in mind that the candidate will not really notice these interruptions. This is because people are most upset by interruptions that disagree with them (the canonical example is a relationship fight, or two people arguing politics). When you “jump in” with fascination to hear further details of someone’s story, it does not emotionally read like an interruption at all. If anything, it shows active engagement and that you are curious and eager to hear the rest of their story.
6. “Time Out” + Blame the Clock. For really long-winded talkers, you might need to clock-check them. You simply say “whoa—time out. I just looked at the clock and realized we only have X minutes left and I’ve still got a lot of questions I’m excited to get to. Moving forward, let’s just go headline-first on the answers and we can dig in where we need to. That sound good?” You’re blaming the clock; you’re not blaming them.

If you want to make great hiring decisions, you need great data. To get great data, you need effective time management. This combination of strategy and tactics is how we train interviewers to get there.