A Case For The Team Interview

By Nicole Hitner, Exago

Three years ago, I found myself having to decide between two job offers, and I was torn. I’d already broken out my poster board paper and spent hours writing pro-and-con lists, journaling, and drawing Venn diagrams. I’d consulted with friends. I’d slept on it. But I only had a few days to decide, and it still somehow felt like a toss-up.

After all that weighing and considering, I ended up focusing on the interviews and how they’d made me feel. At one company, which for the purposes of this article I’ll call Acme Solutions, I’d been confronted with four executive-types, and though it was a casual scene with comfy lounge furniture and two of the execs in jeans and t-shirts, I was more on edge than I’d ever been during an interview before or since.

Questions felt barbed. At Acme, I learned, staff were expected to wrestle with problems on their own before turning to teammates for help, and then they should be able to demonstrate how they attempted to solve the problem and enumerate the tactics that failed. It was a policy that seemed to anticipate and discourage lazy troubleshooting, and I left with a desire to prove myself.

Exago, the second company, had been different. After a fairly standard interview with the role’s first-line manager, second-line manager, and CTO, I was ushered into a conference room and seated at a round table with six or seven of my would-be peers. There was lots of banter and small talk as people settled into their chairs, and in the conversation that followed, I learned that new Exago staff were encouraged to ask lots of questions early on to get their bearings, that everyone at that table knew what it was like to be new. I left feeling capable and appreciated.

I was wary of choosing the more comfortable option, determined not to let myself take the easy way out; but since either position would have constituted a radical career change, there was little danger of that. As I hit “Send” on my acceptance email to Exago, I thought back to the roundtable portion of the interview. Something about it had simply felt right. Little did I know I’d be back at that table only a few weeks later, this time as an interviewer.

Neutralizing Biases

The team interview is a rare and underutilized interviewing methodology. Though only one of our two offices conducts team interviews, the process impacts the whole company and is one of the reasons Exago has 25 reviews and a five-star rating on Glassdoor. It embodies how our managers and executives treat general staff: as integral to larger processes, projects, and decisions.

This doesn’t mean, however, that our recruitment process functions like a popularity contest. The team offers its impressions of a job candidate following the interview, but managers still have the final say. How much weight they give the team’s feedback is entirely up to them and will likely vary from candidate to candidate. Having staff act as advisors to the hiring committee helps avoid some of the issues germane to panel interviews, which are often likened to firing squads.

The Society for Human Resource Management describes panel interviews as “formal sessions where the candidate stares back at a tribunal of assessors under a barrage of rapid-fire questions.” There are uncomfortably silent stretches of notetaking between questions and little opportunity for the candidate to pose her own. After reviewing all applicants, the panel takes a vote, which often means either “ignoring the best candidate and settling instead on the one candidate that everyone agrees upon” or going with whoever the loudest or most dominant assessor picks.

There is considerable debate around whether groupthink brings people closer to the truth in a wisdom-of-crowds sort of way or distracts from it in a too-many-cooks sort of way. In our experience, crowdsourcing offers decision makers a broader perspective on an applicant and even helps neutralize individual biases. People interpret behaviors differently. I remember one applicant who seemed like an effective communicator to me but failed to impress my more technical coworkers. Quieter or more introverted candidates sometimes spark debate as well, particularly if they’re applying for customer-facing positions. It’s always valuable to see where people disagree (and how strongly), even if it ends up making the decision more difficult. Cultural fit is one of our recruitment cornerstones, so we go to extra lengths to find friendly, hardworking, communicative people we’re confident will stay with us for years to come.

Tips And Tricks

Because team interviews are so rare, not a lot has been written about how best to structure and execute one (they’re not even on this list of interview types!). So, here are some quick bullet points on what we’ve learned by refining our team interview process over the years.

1. Sit around a table. Avoid the “firing squad” feel of a panel interview by gathering around a table rather than along one edge, opposite the candidate.
2. Keep it small. Restrict the number of interviewers to around five or six. This is the sweet spot for maximizing feedback variety while keeping the applicant from becoming overwhelmed by the size of the group. Including the same staff each time will help hone your process and mixing it up will get more people involved. Find the balance that works best for your team.
3. Have a leader. Make one person responsible for steering the conversation. Our leader initiates introductions at the beginning, asks the first interview question, reinitiates questioning during prolonged silences, keeps track of time, prompts the applicant for her questions at the end, and escorts her from the room.
4. Keep it short and focused. Make sure team members are coordinated on which questions to ask and what traits to assess for. Avoid marathon interviews by enforcing a cutoff time. (We usually keep to 30 minutes.)
5. Don’t be afraid to abort. It’s expensive to take five or six people away from their work for 30 minutes, so coordinate a means of either cancelling the team interview or cutting it short if the candidate doesn’t look promising.
6. Don’t be afraid to ask about outside interests. It’s okay to ask what applicants like to do for fun, and their answers usually convey a lot about where their passions lie. Sometimes their hobbies also speak to their fit for the role in question.
7. Have fun but stay professional. Keep crosstalk between team members to a minimum and avoid unprofessional language, inside jokes, and whispering entirely.
8. Leave time for candidates’ questions. It’s important that the group interview be a two-way conversation, so ensure that applicants have ample time to ask questions of the team.
9. Record your impressions and review them promptly. We rank each candidate on a set of traits and then discuss, focusing on outliers and points of contention between team members. Having a system of recording these impressions helps hiring managers refer back to them later.

Participating in team interviews always has made me feel like a valued member of the company, and we know candidates appreciate the practice as well because the ones we hired told us as much. It establishes a culture of camaraderie at the outset, underlining our reputation as a people-first company. That’s the message I got three years ago, and it’s safe to say I haven’t been disappointed.

About The Author

Nicole Hitner is Content Strategist at Exago, Inc., producers of embedded business intelligence for software companies. She manages the company’s content marketing, writes for their blog, hosts their podcast Data Talks, and assists the product design team in continuing to enhance Exago BI. You can reach her at content@exagoinc.com.