As a hiring manager, one should have a set of rubrics for the interview process, says Mallika Rao, Software Engineering Manager at Twitter. A well-structured set can help you to hire great talent. In the absence of defined rubrics, people default to their own criteria to assess candidates.

Rao goes further by elaborating her approach to hiring:

Clear rubrics make the hiring process more uniform

Rao believes that well-defined rubrics make the hiring process consistent. “If you have the rubrics and the call structure in place, and you know how you’re going to sell the vision, goals, or inflection points in the product, you’ll be able to get a lot more out of that call,” she explains.

Rao also says that candidates should have a good idea of the team before they go on-site. “Leaders and hiring managers,” she says, “should provide candidates with relevant information and get them excited about the team.”

Managers should be mindful of the levels they’re hiring for

For example, software engineering has various levels, software engineer 1, senior software engineer, etc. Leaders need to tune their questions for each of these levels carefully. Before the interview, they should mull over points like: Do they have a variety of questions for different roles? How do they level them? How do they write reviews?

Setting the correct expectations and calibrating the panel that can evaluate candidates for each level is equally important. “If the company is in a position to think about it, top grading can be a good idea,” Rao adds. Top grading is a 12-step hiring process designed to identify top talent from a pool of candidates for a particular position, even before hiring managers have had a chance to see them in action. Unlike standard behavioural interviews, top grading helps make informed and evidence-based recruiting decisions rather than solely basing them on job applications.

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