[Reshare] The Art, Science, and Importance of Structured Interviewing with Heather Doshay

Hiring the right people can feel like a guessing game if your process isn’t structured.

Heather Doshay, Partner & Head of Talent at SignalFire, joins Shannon to explore the impact of structured interviews on hiring outcomes. She explains how unstructured interviews often lead to bias and why creating a consistent, repeatable process is essential for building high-performing teams.

Heather outlines the key components of structured interviewing, how to build interview rubrics, and why taking time upfront leads to more efficient hiring down the line. She also discusses how to influence stakeholders, manage expectations, and tackle common objections from hiring managers.

Key takeaways:

1. Structured interviews boost accuracy: Clear criteria help make the right hire every time.
2. Efficiency drives success: Investing time upfront leads to faster, more focused hiring processes.
3. Bias mitigation is crucial: Removing subjectivity levels the playing field for all candidates.
4. Influence is key: Helping hiring managers see the value of structure builds trust and compliance.

Timestamps:
(00:00) Introduction

(00:43) Meet Heather Doshay

(03:02) The flaws of the traditional hiring process

(06:50) The science behind structured interviews and the research supporting them

(12:03) Addressing pushback on structured interviews

(18:52) Coaching hiring managers on structured interview adoption

(26:00) Navigating the emotional side of saying no to candidates

(31:38) Using follow-up questions to improve candidate evaluation

(37:05) Training vs. outsourcing interview training

Transcript

Heather Doshay (00:00):

I think for me, hiring in a way that efficiently optimizes for the best outcome to build a high performance organization. So very loose, but keeping the outcome in mind, you're trying to build a high performance organization and you want to do it efficiently.

Shannon Ogborn (00:17):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started.

(00:44):

Hey everyone. Shannon Ogborn here, your host. If you haven't noticed yet, this summer, we are bringing back a few episodes that continue to feel incredibly relevant. And this one, with Heather Doshay might be our most evergreen episode of all. At the end of the day, the goal of hiring hasn't really changed.

You want to get the right person in the right role.  At the right time, but far too many teams are still relying on these "gut feelings" over solid processes, and it's making hiring decisions that aren't predictive, fair or repeatable. In this episode, Heather Doshay partner at SignalFire and longtime people and talent leader makes the case for structured interviewing, not just as a better process, but as a better experience.

First, she shares why candidates who go through structured interviews are 35% happier, even when rejected. Then we talk about how to get real stakeholder buy-in and why structure does not have to mean robotic. Drawing on her experience advising early stage companies and her doctorate in organizational leadership, Heather breaks down how to design structured interviews that actually reflect the job, reduce bias, and make hiring decisions easier to align on.

If you are still hearing, "we'll know it when we see it." From your execs and managers, this one's for you. All right, let's get into it.

(01:56):

Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am super excited because I'm here today with one of my all-time favorite people and career mentors, Heather Doshay from her Doctorate in Organizational Leadership to being an early team member at Hired to the first executive hired at Webflow and a VP of People role leading talent and HR. Heather brings years of experience to the table in both recruiting and people operations. Now she's a partner at SignalFire, an early stage technology VC firm. She brings her skills, experience and passions together to find strategic win-wins for both innovative companies and people that work for them. Heather, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited that you're here.

Heather Doshay (02:47):

Thanks, Shannon. I'm so excited to be here. I've known you for so many years, so it's fun to talk to you in this context.

Shannon Ogborn (02:52):

It's a real full circle career moment. 

So throughout your career as you've seen the recruiting processes play out at so many different organizations, what would you say is one of the biggest challenges that organizations face?

Heather Doshay (03:08):

Yeah, I mean I think organizations face many challenges, but one of those is hiring maybe the wrong people. And one of the main reasons why people hire the wrong people is because interviewing at its core is a pretty flawed process if you think about it. So basically you have this evaluator that's a human and a human is just full of biases. Humans are not great at making decisions when they're making them quickly. There's so much science around this. I love behavioral economics talks a lot about it. It's pretty well known that you can mitigate a lot of these biases in an interview process through structured interviewing to make sure you're making the best hiring decisions. But it's actually very rare that a company understands how to do this, especially at the early stage where I'm working with founders. Most often they're having these unstructured conversations where they're trying to figure out who they want to hire and they're having trouble. And so that's a core thing that I'm seeing right now.

Shannon Ogborn (03:56):

Definitely, and I remember back to our hired days, there would be some things that came up in the feedback that would be like, would I get a beer with this person? Yes. I'm like, okay, that's lovely. And everything, however, is that what is going to set this person up for success for the job? And the answer according to basically all IO psychology researches, no, that is not a predictor of top performance. So let's talk a little about what is structured interviewing anyway, what actually does that mean?

Heather Doshay (04:31):

Absolutely. And yeah, the answer is no, it does not work. So structured interviewing does work and it works at a greater percentage than others, but what it is basically, you can think it in three parts. The first part is you decide in advance what success looks like, what are the core competencies that this person will have that you're going to hire, and how do they align to the job at hand? So how can you extract competencies out of the job description? The second piece is that you have a consistent set of questions that you're going to ask all your candidates. It's the same hiring process for all the same set of questions for all so that you can essentially evaluate apples to apples. And the last bit is that you know what a great answer looks like. You probably have a rubric or something where you can say, this differentiates the answer to question two from good to great.

(05:12):

And this can happen in many different formats. It doesn't have to be that you're sitting awkwardly holding a piece of paper reading questions back and forth. These can happen sync or async, right? They can be live actually, or you could actually have a take home assessment or things like that. They can be remote or in person. They could be a dialogue or a work sample test, and it could happen even at the group level versus a one-on-one. There's many ways to make it happen. It's super flexible. It's just the notion that you have those three components all working at once.

Shannon Ogborn (05:36):

Yeah, I think one of the most common misconceptions is that structured interviewing is very robotic. Now don't get me wrong, there's a lot of people who do it robotically and we'll get to a little bit later, how can you actually be a really good structured interviewer? How can you make it feel more natural and things like that, but it doesn't have to be that way. When I was at Google, I was working with a lot of candidates who were like, ah, I just felt like the person was like, beep boop. Question, question, question. So I'm excited to get to that portion, but very good definition and kind of start here of what does structured interviewing entail? I know we're very big on the science side of this. I am too. Let's jump into a little bit of the science and the why do it. And I think as we're thinking through this, it would be great if you could talk a little bit about how to pitch this with this data to founders or to leadership. Because I think even though we know what's right, how do we really communicate that necessity using data? How do we influence using the data that we know about? 

Heather Doshay (06:52):

Yeah. By the way, there could be a whole other topic about how to influence people because my other thought is like you should influence founders or other stakeholders based on maybe what kind of personality type they have and what they must respond to you. But that's a whole other topic. So to get into the science first, so there's three big things that kind of stand out as to why structured interviewing is more effective, and this is research that is empirically validated research that has happened over time. You can look up on a Google search and see that there is tons of studies in this topic and they'll consistently tell you the same three things thing. Number one, a structured interview is the best way to predict job performance. So it's actually predictive validity around a 0.55 to 0.7 range, which is higher by a long mark than unstructured interviewing.

(07:37):

I think it's about double the predict of validity. Candidates also prefer it. Number two, there was a great Google study that basically they looked at their own internal candidates and those candidates who had a structured interview were 35% happier than those who did not have a structured interview when they were rejected. And so they looked at rejected candidates only and who felt like it was the better process. Those who experienced it, candidates do prefer it. It feels awkward for a lot of folks, but the truth is that candidates want to know that they're going to be fairly.

(08:05):

And then three, they mitigate biases. So there's actually been so many interesting studies. I just want to share a couple of them around mitigating biases. So maybe one concept to just bring up is, which is this notion that people tend to people who remind them of themselves. This is a huge area of research that I studied back in my doctoral program, and it's really, really prominent where if someone reminds you of, you just assume they're good like you, smart like you, great you. And so when someone seems different, you kind of come in with a more skeptical eye. It's honestly physiological response to question people who are unlike yourself. And so a lot of studies show that they just mitigate and create fairer outcomes for diverse group of candidates. When you've got a group of candidates, you can actually dissect out that the diversity aspect is more equalized when you remove some of the homophily because you have structured questions, you're not giving questions that remind you of yourself.

(08:54):

Maybe an easier question. And then the next piece I would say is there was a study that actually talked about overweight candidates. And so you think of diversity as race, gender, sexual orientation, these other pieces age, but there was a really interesting study around overweight candidates, which you'll hear about a lot in various pop culture, that they tend to have a harder time getting the job than candidates who might be looked at as more fit in certain ways. And that structured interview actually moderated that bias too, which is huge in a meaningful, meaningful way.

(9:22):

And so I think the best way to explain it to somebody who's outside of the recruiting world is that they might know somebody who went to med school and then they did a lottery to figure out where the residency would be. The very reason why the lottery for residencies exists is because there was too much bias in physician interviews for med students to residency. So they actually changed the process. We can't have lotteries across the board, but we can mitigate bias and we can do that through structured interviews. And so I think if you're looking at somebody who likes data and facts and you share those things and they also care about mitigating bias, you're going to find somebody who is really excited to now do a structured interview just on the data alone. But some people don't actually care about those things and you've got to find the way to actually win them over and help them see that through.

Shannon Ogborn (10:06):

Yeah, I always think too, you kind of start, and like you said, when you're trying to influence a founder or an executive, or even honestly I'm sure you've experienced this in your career too, like head of people, head of talent, you're trying to influence whoever it is, it's surprising how many people don't see the liability of bias as a strong enough motivator to do structured interviews. Have you ever run into pushback? What is the pushback and why wouldn't people naturally gravitate towards doing this type of interview even despite knowing the data?

Heather Doshay (10:51):

Totally. So I think people tend to think one of three things. So I find one, it takes more time. You have to prepare. People are busy, they just want us get started. They met a candidate, they just want to talk to the candidate. They don't want to have some whole pre-work process that takes tens of hours. The quote that I like, which is attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but it's probably not actually him, these things are always fake, is give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. It's actually more efficient to do it. So people will say, takes too much time. I don't have time. Let's just have conversations. But we've all probably been part of an interview process at a company where they go, and now I'd like you to talk to so-and-so and wait, can we have another conversation?

(11:33):

We didn't get to this other thing. And it's like you didn't plan ahead and now you're actually spending far more time with four more rounds. And we all know that time kills all deals, both in sales and in recruiting, and you're more likely that great candidate is going to find another job before you get to the end of the process if you just keep adding steps. So I kind of find that just talking about operational efficiency and time savings, if the pushback is that it takes too much time is the right way to go. In terms of the second set of reasons that I find it's so interesting, I've seen both ends of the same spectrum. On the one end, you'll have an overconfidence thing oftentimes with founders or executives who are pushing back who are saying, I know how to interview. I'm a great judge of character. I hired you, whatever the thing might be. Or they're very, very new or nascent to come to interviewing and they go, I don't have a lot of experience interviewing. Interviewing is super awkward. I don't want structured questions that are going to make it feel like I'm doing that back and forth. I just want to have a conversation with a person. And in both ways, it's like the confidence gap somewhere in the middle of structured interviewing and people kind of end to both sides. I dunno if you've seen that as well for you, Shannon.

Shannon Ogborn (12:37):

Yeah, I mean honestly, even talking to especially folks who are more tenured, it's like, oh, I know what I'm doing. I can trust my gut. And I'm like, but you can't trust your gut. That's the one thing about psychology that all research has shown is that your gut, so to speak, creates all these biases because your mind is trying to work off of concepts in situations that it's familiar with and it has seen in the past. And so then you fall into this effect that you were talking about earlier of hiring people that are more like you or even just simply I like that answer, so I'm going to go, I think that person interviewed well. Whereas if you have a more structured process, did the person even answer the question or did you just like what they said after the question and the rubrics and the things like that. So yeah, I have seen more of the overconfidence then. This feels awkward to me, although I feel like there are people who do feel that way as well. For sure.

Heather Doshay (13:47):

Totally. And I think Adam Ward talked about this in the previous episode of your podcast, which by the way, I loved, and if you haven't heard it, you should go listen to it. This is my plug right now for those listening. But he mentioned this notion of shifting from recruiter as service provider to recruiter as trusted partner advisor. And so how do you think about when someone is pushing back on something that you are suggesting a structured interview process that is the best thing, and they're saying, I don't need this. I already got it. What's your chance now to say, oh, okay, I'm providing a service. I'm just going to do what they say, oh, well, or I'll try again. You've got to find another way in. When you're advising founders, when you're advising hiring managers, you've got to figure out how to get them to see it for themselves because that's what you do when you're coaching and consulting.

(14:27):

And so think about, okay, well help me understand then what are you looking for and see if they can concisely say the competencies that matter to them, or if they just start listing things off to the point, they're like, okay, and how do you think you'll assess all those things you just listed off? And then they add one more thing in as you're talking just like on a whim. Okay, yeah, on a whim. So you're assessing as you go, you're figuring out what you need as you go. Have you ever written down a list of the five things that you're looking for in this person before? And they go, well, no, let's just do that together just so if you're going to go in, fine, do it unstructured, but let's just write down the five things. So you're actually getting them to build a structured interview in real time because you're realizing it's not that hard.

(15:03):

And then you go, okay, so you're mentioning problem solving. How will you assess if they're a good problem solver in your conversation? I'm just curious. I'd love to learn what makes you so good at this unstructured and maybe not in such a snarky way. And then they tell you and it's like, oh, well would you ask that of every candidate? And then if they say, well, no, it depends. It's like, well, help me understand. So you kind of get them there. It's a slower, again, totally give me six hours, I'm going to spend four sharpening the ax, a lot of that stakeholder management and buy-in. How can you get them to want to do that thing? And so you can kind of just get them there and then they realize, wait, we just built out a structured interview. Do you want to use this every time just so you can have a place to keep your notes? And then suddenly it's done. So there are sneaky ways in, but again, it's about shifting your mindset from "I do as the hiring manager or the founder tells me to", and "no, I'm an expert on this area". I know this is going to be better for you. How can I help you see that for yourself?

Shannon Ogborn (15:51):

Absolutely, you can lead the person to water without it feeling so forceful. So yes, that's the art of persuasion and just getting it done in a more covert way can sometimes be a really tactical way to work with managers. So where we just talked a little bit about how you could maybe practically get somebody to there if they haven't really considered it, but where does this live? Where does this scope of decisions come from?

Heather Doshay (16:25):

So I think ideally it's happening at every role at every time. It's not a conversation you have each time. You as a company decide, this is our interviewing philosophy, this is our hiring philosophy. And then you implement it across the board. And that's the ideal way in. If you're having trouble getting buy-in, you can try it with one department or one team as the way they're going to do it, and it works really well for them, show off the data to get everyone else there. But ideally, if you're starting from scratch and you have all the buy-in in the world, you are setting this up in your infrastructure. And what happens is this portion of the design on the role level exists at what I call the intake process. So this is before you go to post a role, you're figuring out what is this job that we're hiring for?

(17:02):

What is the requirements are? What are the projects this person would do in the first year on the job? What does a job description look like? Then once you have a job description, you can almost extract, oh, communication seems to be a big thing for this job. X technical skill tends to be a big thing for this job. Let's figure out what those things are. And so the idea is it lives in that intake process each time, but you can in the infrastructure of your talent function, build it into the process so that it just happens. It's not something that you have to figure out where to fit it in each time you go. It's a part of your process and it's in the intake for me at least. I don't know, Shannon, if you've seen it elsewhere before or is that where you tend to see it as well?

Shannon Ogborn (17:37):

Yeah, I mean I think ideally it's going to be at the beginning of the process because the quote that you were talking about, if you get ahead of it and some other folks we've talked to on the podcast that have spoken about this as well, if you can get ahead of it, you're going to be saving yourself so much time in the end because there's nothing worse as a recruiter or recruiting team than going 90, 120 days and then suddenly, oops, we've been evaluating the wrong thing because from the jump, the job description wasn't right and we didn't spend enough time getting there. So yes, I'm definitely a strong believer beginning of the process is where that should take form with the description, the competencies in extracting those. Yeah, for sure.

Heather Doshay (18:22):

Awesome. And I think for me at least is a hard piece. So oftentimes you might be a recruiter and think, I don't have the power to decide what the company is going to do, but we don't really have a head of talent. I reported in finance we're early, I dunno the stage of the company that folks are listening from, but in the very early stage, it's very common to hire a recruiter before there's leadership and the people are talent function. And so these people often feel like they are order takers, they're just getting things done, they're kind of biting their time, filling roles until someone can actually come save them almost, and recruiters can save themselves. So the way you think about it is what if you implemented a framework? So picking a framework that works for you and then giving ownership to different people so that it's a collaboration, but giving yourself a role where you know can make the thing successful.

(19:04):

And for me, I found that the RACI framework is one that works really well, which is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed and basically just saying, Hey, we're going to start structured interviewing here and we want to talk about how we want to do it for us. Maybe we don't want to do it the same way everyone else does, but it's going to be consistent. The key is consistency, and so how do we keep it consistent for us? And so maybe you are the one who's responsible as the recruiter, you're driving the process, you're designing the set of questions, you're thinking through how this is going to work. You can make the accountable AKA the person who's approving this motion, the person who maybe feels like they have the power to you, so the founder or the hiring manager or whatever your leveling is where you're at in that decision process where you're trying to get buy-in for structured interviewing and then let the consultant and informed be the people who are on the slate.

(19:49):

Oftentimes you can get buy-in from a hiring manager, but then you go off and do interviews and you build out these beautiful scorecards with all the questions, and I can't tell you how many times they come back just blank with all of the notes in the summary section at the top and people just going, I liked them. Here's what I thought. And it's like, what? Did they answer any of the questions? Did you ask any of the questions? These things kind of boggle the mind. I would go make them mandatory to answer. I put little asterisk in so that you had to answer, and then people would put a period or a space mark to get around it and still leave everything at the top. They were actively avoiding the structured interview. And I find that it's because you don't have buy-in.

(20:23):

And so when you think about that RACI model, who's consulted and who's informed, where do the hiring slate folks come in? The interviewers come in. And so this idea that I like to share also when you set it up in a hiring process is to make sure that part of your hiring process, you have an intake that's you as recruiting team plus hiring manager, and the two of you're super aligned on what the role is, what the need is, you know how to sell it, what the process is going to be, who you want interviewing, but then invite all those people into a kickoff, which happens before the interview process takes off or the hiring process takes off is like you've got this place where you can invite everybody, treat it like a party. Honestly, if you're in person in office, bring donuts to it. If it's remote, make it feel rah rah, have intro music.

(21:01):

You can make it really fun. And basically you're sharing, we're hiring this exciting new role and you can use the pitch you develop for candidates to pitch the role to the whole group. They feel they've been importantly invited to this room, they're a part and part of this process. And then if you do what I like, which is a competency-based interview process, you essentially have your five to say eight competencies that, and each person around the room is the owner of one or two of those competencies. So there's like, oh my gosh, deciding if this person is a good problem solver is on me. Nobody else is really assigned to look at that thing. Okay, I got to take it seriously now. And then you say, and we've designed some questions for you that we believe are the right ones to ask, but we'd love your input.

(21:39):

Do you feel like these are the right questions to get the most signal? You're the expert in problem solving, that's why we brought you in. What do you think? Are there other questions you'd rather ask? And then you can partner with each person to make sure that they feel like, oh yeah, I signed off on these questions. So now when that scorecard comes around as they're doing their interview, they're like, shoot, I said I would answer these. I even wrote this one. I got to stick with it. So it's sort of that mutual public accountability, which I think can make a big difference in terms of behavioral economics and decision making. So I think that's just when you're setting it up, if you can get that one two punch of a good intake and hiring manager buy-in and then the full slate, you're going to increase your odds of at least 50% from 0% filling out that. And then over time you can reinforce those who are doing it to get more and more compliance.

Shannon Ogborn (22:22):

Definitely when you're setting up this process, I found that doing things like you're suggesting, I love everyone coming to the kickoff meeting. That's not a very common practice, but I think it's a very good idea for getting buy-in, making people feel involved. 

So in terms of setting things up and implementing it into your process and some of the fundamentals around that, besides some of the things that we've been sprinkling in here, how would you go about setting this up and implementing this into your process? 

Heather Doshay (22:52):

Yeah, so this is where your ATS is your best friend, where essentially you can build out sort of a prep doc at the very beginning of the interview process that kind of helps you understand that's going to get automated and sent to you that says, Hey, here are the expectations for you as an interview. Like a reminder, even if you've done the kickoff and you think they're good and they've helped write the questions, people have other things going on in their lives, this isn't the only thing they're doing and they've got maybe a helpful nudge would be very good for them. And then in the actual scorecard, I find it's really helpful to write out a little bit of an intro script, but they can share to get started.

(23:24):

And so for me, whenever I start an interview, just personally whether I'm using an ATS or not, there's a script or not always just start off with, Hey, I'm so excited to get to know you. I know we have limited time together and I want to ensure that we both get the most time or most out of this time. And so I want to make sure I'm sharing the structure of the call with you. Note the keyword structure is right in that intro, and I'm saying this from a very friendly place. I want us to both introduce each other and then I have a set of questions that I would love to ask you that help me get better signal. I believe that structured interviewing mitigates biases and I want to make sure that there's that great chance for me to understand and get the most signal out of the noise from the great answers you're going to share with me.

(24:01):

So not only will I be asking a set of questions that I might feel kind of structured, but I'm also be taking notes on what you say. So if you see me sort of looking away, by the way, I'm usually remote on Zoom as I'm interviewing look away or typing. I'm not texting a friend, I'm taking notes on all the great things you're saying. And then at the end I want to make sure that we both have time for you to ask questions of me because interviewing is a two-way street and I want you to have time too. And so if you notice that we're going over time, let's stop hold space and we can figure it out and I can always ask questions afterwards. Does that work for you? Right. That's my personal script writing probably a more concise version of that with the bullet points of things.

(24:33):

Remember to say to an interviewer is really huge because it reminds them of like, okay, these are the things I can ask about and say, and then I'm setting it up. So now when I start to ask my questions and type my answers or write down my answers in a notebook, if it's in person, they're not taking it personally totally. They're taking it as me taking this process very seriously for them and wanting to make it very fair for them. And then hopefully it's not so bad. And then one note to just say, because I don't think I've said this before in this call, is that structured interviewing is setting a set of questions up in advance, but you could have ad hoc unstructured questions that are natural flow from those main ones. So it's not like, tell me about a time you did X, Y, or Z thing and how did it go?

(25:13):

And then they tell you the thing and you're like, wait, but what about this aspect and that aspect? You don't have to move on to the next question. You can say, oh, you mentioned this. Tell me more about that. That's where the lack of structure can come in and be helpful Totally. Because you're basically rounding out an answer with them on the main question through some follow-up questions. So that's where you can be really kind of casual and ad hoc and they're going to see more of you thinking out loud with them and collaborating so it doesn't feel like this push and pull back and forth when you do it that way. And I tend to find that actually structuring an interview, let's say it's a 30 minute interview just having three questions, and if it's a 60 minute interview, we're just having six questions because it gives you space to not have to rush through the rest of the questions and you have time to ask those follow-ups for sure.

Shannon Ogborn (25:54):

Yeah, it's important to make the experience positive for the candidate as well. So in this script that you're talking about, which I love that idea, it's like I'm taking notes, please feel free to take notes too, even though it shouldn't have to be missed for candidates to feel comfortable taking notes, you're just opening the door for them to feel more comfortable in the circumstances that they're in, because interviewing is a very anxiety driving process, hundred percent. So if keeping keep that in mind. When people know what to expect, they feel more at ease. And I think it's really important as an interviewer to allow a candidate to feel at ease.

Heather Doshay (26:33):

Totally. The core of anxiety and nervousness is the unknown and not having certainty about the future. So if you think about it at a very micro level when you're sitting in an interview and you don't know where it's going or what's going to get asked next or what the agenda might be, you're anxious the whole time unless you're extremely confident person who just loves to have a conversation. But that's not 95% of us who are interviewing. And what that's doing is putting bias towards people who tend to have more confidence in these situations, which goes back to homophily. So the notion is you're putting the person at ease. The same thing happens parallel in companies where people want to have, and this is an HR thing, but people want to have, they think about, oh, we don't want to define too much or over architect what career pathways could look like, but then nobody knows how to get promoted and it feels, it's like, oh, we keep it really open and flexible. You've got great paths here, but what are they? How did that happen? People want structure. They think they want it to be flexible and open so that they can take advantage of more things, but at the core they want some level of structure that they know what is my latitude to move around within this space. And then you can find the freedom within the space that's provided, but it's a scaffold that's safety net.

(27:37):

So I think it's really, really huge. And then I think at the talent level too, you really want to decide a hiring philosophy and then aligning, structured interviewing is a part of that philosophy so that people understand what you're strategically trying to do. If you just say, we do structured interviewing here, it mitigates bias. Like, okay, think about we're trying to hire great talent who's going to help us achieve our mission faster, better, stronger. We want to bring in the right sets of things to us core. This is having a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences to make sure that we have all the benefits of a diverse team structured interviewing, support that for the mitigating bias actually matters in practice. And then you can show the stats around how much better companies perform revenue wise, even when they've got a diverse team. You can look to the efficiency.

(28:19):

We want to be an operationally efficient team. Structured reviewing supports that too. You can have these things that matrices together support each other so that there's no loophole in the kind reason for the objection from the hiring manager. And I'm thinking of engineers the most because engineers are trained as a profession to find edge cases, so that products work, right? When you're a software engineer, you have to look for all the things that could go wrong that could break down your product essentially. And as a result, you're just trained to look for flaws in things. So they're trying to poke holes, they're trying to not do a process because there might be a hole in the process. The more you can think about your holistic strategy and how these things fit in and that there are no holes, the less pushback you're going to get and you're going to have engineers being your biggest champions in the interview process.

Shannon Ogborn (29:03):

Yeah, business alignment is a really critical piece to structured interviewing I've found personally. Okay, so let's move to a little bit of a different type of conversation here or topic. How do you get really good as an individual interviewer? So if someone's like, great, we have the structured interviewing process. Now what? Because now I'm panicking, I'm nervous, I feel awkward. How do you get really good as an interviewer?

Heather Doshay (29:35):

I love this question because I love interviewing on both sides. It's a sickness maybe, but I find it's a thing you can get good at over time and ultimately you're making connections with people and you're learning about yourself and someone else in the process every time. So if you could almost reassociate in your brain rewired as this really positive opportunity to make a new connection that whether for this interview or elsewhere you've met a person that's interesting. It's a great opportunity. And so I think the things you can really do to become really great at it once you've decided it's something you want to be really great at because you want to spend time here, is honing your intro to tee up where you explain the approach you're using. That's script I shared. How do you get really good at finding the language that works for you?

(30:15):

I just use my own language that's not going to be for everybody else. I'm a very peppy individual who talks fast and has a lot of extra context, like what's your version of that tee up where you're going to explain it so that every time you make space for yourself that it feels really natural to do that so that you can move into the structure where the questions might change out and you're not as aware of what you're asking or what you're assessing because you haven't done that as many times because every interview is a different topic typically. And then how do you also tee up your intro about yourself? How do you talk about yourself in 30 seconds or less when someone says, tell me about you. And so even as the interviewee or as the candidate, those things are important to do. But also at the interview, remember interviewing is a two way street. And then I would say just practicing your listening skills all around, getting really good at listening and finding out you could practice at home with your family. Finding out...

Shannon Ogborn (31:00):

That's a tough one too. Active listening with your family can be quite difficult.

Heather Doshay (31:04):

Right? Practice a dinner where you just really work on active listening and repeat back what you hear the person say because ultimately you're jogging your memory and your understanding or you're checking for understanding. You're giving a person a chance to clarify themselves if they screw up on an interview because they didn't say it the right way. And it also helps you take notes better, really furiously taking notes of that later when you're going to do your scorecard, you actually understand what the person was saying, you go back to time because you've kind of really listened. And then I would say taking the extra step to align scorecards and feedback to the job description. Sometimes when I dunno where to start with designing a structured interview, I just go to the scorecard or the job description and say what core things really speak to me out of these bullet points that we've said this job is?

(31:47):

And what are some common questions that could assess that? Do they feel relevant for this role? And then what are some good rubrics you use and reusing those over time too. Most jobs, communication is going to be a thing. Maybe the context has changed, but just get really good at those common things like communication-based interviews because you'll get really good at honing your rubric, honing your questions, knowing which ones work the best, all of that. And then I would say shadowing others, which is what I say with a caveat because very awkward for a candidate to have someone shadowing an interview where this other person just sitting listening, if you do it, you feed with a really skilled interview who can cheat up, make it not awkward. But you can also do paired interviews where you say, Hey, we're going to have two of our team members interview on this one topic and do a more senior seasoned interviewer with a more junior learning interviewer. And they each ask questions and just say, we're trying to get you a chance and you have to tell the candidate more time to meet more members of the team without spending more interview cycles.

(32:36):

This is a chance for you to meet more people whenever you're doing something that benefits you figure out why it benefits the other person as well, AKA the candidate so that the experience isn't lost in the mix, but you're also helping your interviewers get better. And then last but not least, of course, interview training. This is a huge thing that every team wants to do. Most teams don't find time to do, and if they do, it's like this very generic 30 minute session that doesn't actually get to people's psychology about why structured interviewing is a scary thing. So don't be afraid to be different and talk about not just the list of biases that exist, but normalizing the feelings that can come up around some of these things we've talked about today.

Shannon Ogborn (33:14):

Yes. I love that. So a couple of questions for you before we wrap up that we love to hear from everyone about what does hiring excellence mean to you?

Heather Doshay (33:25):

I think for me, hiring in a way that efficiently optimizes for the best outcome to build a high performance organization. So very loose, but keeping the outcome in mind. You're trying to build a high performance organization and you want to do it efficiently. So yeah.

Shannon Ogborn (33:44):

Period.

Heather Doshay (33:45):

That's it.

Shannon Ogborn (33:46):

I love that. My personal favorite question, I know I say this every time, it's my personal favorite question, but it really is. That's why I say it. What is your recruiting hot take?

Heather Doshay (33:56):

Okay, so Shannon, I have one and I know we disagree on it, so I'm going to say it, recognizing that there's probably not much time for a debate, but the cover letter is not dead. The cover letter as you know it, the to whom may it concern, very generic cover letter that just takes up space as a download that you're like, I don't even want to read totally dead. The cover letter in which you tie together the parts of your resume that may not make sense from an outside eye for the person reading it so that they understand your story and what you contribute to the company. Totally not dead. I read every single one of those, and it not only allows me to see their story to understand, yeah, maybe they don't have the right title on paper or the right organization, the pass on paper, but here's why I have confidence they're worthy of an interview because they could match and do the job potentially.

(34:44):

That cover letter has helped me so many times, give people a chance that maybe the resume alone didn't speak to. And it's also a really good chance that someone's writing skills, communication skills, can they be concise? Can they write well? Are they detail oriented? All these pieces matter so much and is a great way to get signal and some of those core things so that you need to spend less time on it during the interview process. But Shannon, I know you disagree, so I'm actually very curious for a rebuttal if you have one. If we have time.

Shannon Ogborn (35:07):

Yeah, there's a couple of reasons that I don't, well, what it really comes down to for me is I feel like it's not typically a good use of candidates time and here is why one, and I hate to say this, but I've never read a cover letter entire recruiting career. It's just I've always worked at organizations where there just wasn't the capacity and time to do it. And I really felt like if I couldn't read it for everybody, it would be very inequitable and unfair if I read it for one person who submitted it, but I didn't read it for the next person because...

Heather Doshay (35:50):

Okay, so sorry, not to cut you off, but here's the thing. You could open it. If you see "To whom it may concern, please accept my resume," close it. It's not going to give you anything. But if you read it and it's like addressed to you or somebody who have made sense to address into the organization, like they did some research, that person probably spent an hour drafting that thing. The minute you know that they look up the name of the person, if there's any interesting kind of language on it that's like, oh, I can assess this person's communication skills. If communication skills are a part of the job, which I don't know, a job they aren't a part of, oh, this gives me a little inkling of their soft skills. And here's my thing. So I find that whenever I talk to people who are looking for a job, just friends out in the world, almost all of them want to change something about the job they have to the job they want.

(36:32):

That's why they're looking for something else. So maybe it's because they're nonprofits and they want to move to a startup. Maybe it's because they've been a CSM their whole life and now they want to be in AE. When those people apply to jobs and you only see the resume, it's not very clear why they should stand out. If there are 500 applicants for a job and 100 of them have an AE title, why would I consider a CSM? But if that CSM could share that actually they closed some deals on their own and put that in the cover letter and explain how that sparked their interest and realize that they're much more of a hundred than a farmer and here's how they're thinking about their career, it shows and they can actually almost outbound to you in a sales note almost of sorts mimic outreach essentially to show how good they could be at it.

(37:10):

Well, gosh, I certainly want to read that because that makes me more excited about that candidate than the one who's like, I've been in AE a bunch of times and I'm in AE again, this person is someone who's hungry and hungry is huge if you're trying to hit revenue targets. So that's just one example, but I've seen those all over, especially in people in talent because so many great people in talent, people are people in talent. As a second career, they were a great manager in some of their function. They realize how important hiring is or how important people management is, and they want to go solve that at the company level. So I know, I get it. This is, I'm going to stop because we're going away over time, but Shannon, you can have the last word. I just wanted to make sure I got that in.

Shannon Ogborn (37:44):

It's not that I'm against cover letters conceptually, I think they can provide value. I just know that so many people, actually, most recruiting teams don't review them. And so when I am advising candidates from a career coaching perspective or a resume perspective, I actually always recommend that candidates instead of a summary, which is also dead on the resume, instead of having like "I am seeking blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," use those two to three sentence to create a micro cover letter that can explain your through line in a few sentences right at the top of your resume. I subscribe a little bit more to that than a full cover letter, just because I know how understaffed recruiting teams are and how many people just don't have the capacity to read them, not because they don't want to, but simply the time does not allow. So that's what, when I'm advising people on their resume versus cover letter, I'm like, listen, you could submit a cover letter, but do it for jobs that you're really passionate about. Do it for jobs where the through line is very unclear and spend a little bit of extra time. But if you do it for every job, I just don't find that to be feasible for job seekers now or ever. With the volume of roles you have to apply to get one single interview, it's just so taxing.

Heather Doshay (39:09):

That's fair. I'm sold on the notion of the three lines at the top of the resume, not being a summary, but being a narrative of the through line. It solves for a similar thing and yeah, fair. Fair enough. Do what you want.

Shannon Ogborn (39:20):

We reached to compromise.

Heather Doshay (39:23):

I like it.

Shannon Ogborn (39:25):

Amazing. Well, I think we are coming up on our time here. Where should people go to learn more about you and SignalFire?

Heather Doshay (39:33):

Oh gosh. Well, I am not on Twitter, so you can find me on LinkedIn and I'm just at linkedin.com/in/doshay, like my last name, D-O-S-H-A-Y. And then you can learn more about SignalFire at our amazing team at signalfire.com.

Shannon Ogborn (39:49):

Amazing. Well, like I said earlier, this has been a very full circle career moment for me. I am so appreciative of your support over the years, and I'm so glad that we got to do this. So thank you for joining us on Offer Accepted, and thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time.

Heather Doshay (40:06):

Thanks, Shannon.

Shannon Ogborn (40:08):

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