Here at First Round, we’re always searching for advice that gets overlooked or goes unshared, hoping to find the stones that company builders don’t even know to turn over. 

Whether it’s through in-person events, online discussions on First Round Network (our internal Quora-style platform), or the articles and interviews we share here on the Review, we’re driven by an ambition to create the space founders and startup leaders need to exchange that “

And in those spaces, we’ve seen time and time again how the conversation inevitably drifts back to a single topic. Whether it’s a 

There’s no shortage of challenges that could benefit from a dose of outside perspective, from 

When you’re scaling quickly, moving at warp speed, and sitting on 

 hiring panels, interviewing can seem like a task you just need to get through. 

But it’s worth pausing to remember that the decision to hire someone is an expensive and far-reaching one. And since you’re forced to make it after spending (at most) a few hours together

, maximizing what you can learn about candidates in those precious few minutes becomes all the more crucial.

Of course, we’ve shared a fair amount of interview best practices in the past here on the Review. (Two particular must-reads come to mind: 

the seven characteristics that help you hire a top performer

interview questions previously scattered across the Review archive

But given the high-stakes nature of every hire, interviewing chops are always in need of sharpening. And that means our hunt for a crazy-good interview question is never over. We’re endlessly fascinated by the go-to inquiry in everyone’s back pocket, the kind that makes you want to steal it for your own hiring toolkit.

To that end, we’ve spent the past few months reaching out to some of the smartest and most thoughtful operators in our network to pose a simple question:

 What’s your favorite interview question and why?

The responses we got back were first class. What follows is an exclusive list of 40 interview questions, sent to us by the sharpest folks we’ve met or just outright admire. Some of the questions are (deceptively) short and sweet, some are probing and unexpected, others hinge on targeted follow-ups. Broken down by topic, they tackle everything from how candidates understand the role and process feedback to their first summer job, worst boss, and the last time they changed their mind. Most importantly, these incredible founders and company builders break down 

 they lean on these questions — and what to look for in the answers you hear.

We hope this collection serves as a rich jumping off point that you can leverage as you design your own process, whether you’re building it from scratch or looking to give it a refresh as you double-down on hiring. Let’s get started.

Got a favorite interview question of your own? Tell us on Twitter or

. We’ll compile the best submissions and share them with

First Round Review newsletter subscribers

QUESTIONS TO HELP UNPACK PIVOTAL TRANSITIONS:

1. What do you want to do differently in your next role?

 usually sees two kinds of responses — and there’s one camp that the best candidates usually fall into.

“I find that the best answers highlight what they’re running 

 in their current job. If they launch into what they don’t like about their boss or current company, that tells you a lot. It tests whether they’re a positive person and how they handle adversity,” says Mullen.

“I also can often pick up on what interests them about our company specifically, and get a sense for how much research they’ve done. Finally, it gets into motivations — if they bring up how they’re looking for a more challenging opportunity, you can probe how they want to make an impact or the types of problems they’d love working on,” he says.

2. Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now?

 is a favorite of ours for a reason. The VP of Product Design at Facebook quite literally 

wrote the book on how first-time managers

 can approach building out their teams. She’s graced the pages of the Review before as well, sharing her well-honed perspective on 

essential (and unique) questions every manager

“At a growing organization, hiring well is the single most important thing you can do,” she writes in her book. “The most important thing to remember about hiring is this: 

 to be solved but an opportunity to build the future of your organization

When we followed-up with Zhuo recently to find out what floats to the top as her favorite question after 

 over the years, her response had a similar focus on the future. “Asking a candidate to describe her vision for her own growth in the next three years helps me understand the candidate's ambitions as well as how goal-oriented and self-reflective she is,” says Zhuo.

3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?

 likes to walk through a candidate’s recent career history with a unique lens. “I love this question because it helps me understand how they think through big decisions,” says the co-creator of the 

 crytpocurrency and VP of Product for Calibra at Facebook.

Weil finds he learns a lot about underlying motivations by unpacking why people leave and join companies. “What were they optimizing for that the career move maximized? Are they looking for safety, or are they eager to take risks?” he says. “Are they trying to develop new skills, or perfect existing ones? Has their goal been to scale their management experience, or dive back into execution to get their hands dirty?”

Weil recommends paying special attention to how candidates cobble an answer together. “It’s interesting to see whether they weave the answer into a narrative arc or outline a series of distinct decisions,” he says. “Do they think big picture? Are they a great storyteller?”

I find that it’s in the space between jobs when people have to make decisions entirely independently

,” he says. “There's no team member they can steal credit from or that can do work for them. It's the only time in their career when you can get incredibly deep insight into how they think and what motivates them. Then you can evaluate their answers against the characteristics you believe are required to succeed against the role.”

Get candidates to tell you about the transitions between jobs, rather than about each one. That’s a better window into what they value and how they make decisions.

4. Among the people you've worked with, who do you admire and why?

On its face, this question might not seem to be designed to uncover motivations. But that’s exactly what 

 is digging for when he asks it in interviews. 

’s growth and monetization team and co-founder of 

, Walter stays busy pursuing the causes he cares about — and he’s interested in learning more about the values that drive folks who want to join his team.

“I want to uncover a candidate’s values, but I’ve found that asking about that directly isn’t as effective,” he says. “This question pulls out those drivers in a more subtle, yet honest way. What they admire in others tells you a lot about what they find important.”

You’ll learn a lot more about a candidate’s values by asking her who she admires. It’s a telling glimpse into the qualities she’s striving to cultivate herself.

5. Tell me about a time you took unexpected initiative. Follow-up: Can you tell me about another?

 is something of a growth guru. As the former VP of Growth at 

shared the answers to the toughest growth questions

tailoring strategies from zero all the way to IPO

So it comes as no surprise that his go-to interview question helps him uncover those candidates who push the bounds of their own personal growth. “I’ve found that the best people on your team consistently take initiative, even when it’s not expected of them,” says Rothenberg. “

But after they give one example of initiative in action, it’s critical to follow up by asking for another

I want to see a pattern, whether it’s at work, school, or any other place

6. What’s something great about your current or previous job? Why?

 is a fount of company building wisdom. Across the course of her career, the co-founder and CEO of 

 (and former engineering leader at Reddit and Facebook) has shared insights on everything from 

troubleshooting troublemakers in startup culture

“Asking this question in interviews tells me two different things,” says Blount. “First, I learn what someone loves and values — what's important to them. Second, they nearly always follow up with a qualifier,” she says. “They’ll often say something like ‘But that doesn't make up for…’ and so they’re also telling me something they don't love. I find that second piece to be very instructive. It helps me understand where they feel uncomfortable, unsupported, or generally unhappy.”

, former Senior Director of Engineer at Coinbase (where he had front-row seats to the company’s wild ascent and came through the other side with a 

valuable collection of lessons on scaling

“On its face, it’s a simple question for the interviewer to ask. But it requires a tremendous amount of thought and introspection from interviewees,” says Srinivasan. “I’ve found the asymmetric nature of it unlocks valuable discussion. 

Great candidates will be able to articulate their intrinsic motivators and reflect on why they've worked at startups before — or upack why they want to break in. Less-than-stellar candidates won’t wade into that self-inquiry.

 They’ll provide surface level answers such as ‘I like hard technology challenges.’”

 opts for a similarly open-ended question: 

 “I find that asking questions like these makes the candidate pause and think,” says Braswell. “That helps drive a more organic and free-flowing conversation where I get to know the interviewee and what drives her on a deeper level compared to going through her resume.”

8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight?

, this question is more powerful than it seems. “It tells me what type of person they are, what matters to them and how they think,” says the former COO of Venmo and current EIR at 

“For example, if they tell me about a personal accomplishment, then I know personal career development is a huge area of focus. If they tell me about the accomplishment of a direct report or the team, then I know they care about developing people,” says Vaughan. “If they tell me about a company feat, then I know that they tie their own success to the company's success — which is a great mentality for weathering the early stages of a startup.”

9. What are you really good at, but never want to do anymore?

, is a fan of this question because it gets candidates to do three things:

•Reflect on what they've learned about themselves.

•Test their ability to speak with humility about being “good” at something

•Talk about stuff you may find valuable on their resume, that they in fact no longer want to do.

“It’s amazing how often people answer saying they never want to do exactly what I’m hiring for in this role,” he says.

There are incredible candidates who excel at exactly what you’re hiring for. The trouble is that they don’t want to do it anymore.

10. What’s the difference between someone who’s great in your role versus someone who’s outstanding? 

 is on the lookout for a keen understanding of the difference between A+ performance and what he calls “A+++”.

“I always follow-up with: 'Can you give me some specific examples of this in your career and the results you saw?' I look for how they answer the question just as much as the content of the answer itself,” he says. “The best candidates can answer almost immediately, maybe even with a wry smile because they know exactly what I’m getting at and they’re proud of doing something that was truly above and beyond.”

11. How did you prepare for this interview?

 is testing for three things: proactiveness, resourcefulness and passion.

“Those qualities are critical for almost any position,” says the CEO of 

 (a First Round-backed company). “I also like that this multi-purpose question is so open-ended. It gives room for candidates to show how concise, creative, and clear they are.”

12. What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world?

 and former VP of Product at Spotify) typically asks this question at the tail-end of an interview cycle.

“I like it because candidates reveal their individual motivations, creativity, and commitment to our mission all in one response,” says Rajaraman. “Often, they haven't really thought about our company or capabilities deeply. The answers here can be revealing as to whether we are truly the best fit. It also helps cement that we are a special place for the person to thrive. Most importantly, if a candidate is able to articulate her ambitions and how we can help her achieve them, we are one step closer to closing her.”

Questions about why someone wants to work here and take on this particular role may seem routine, but they’re incredibly important. Often, candidates are fleeing something else and haven't thought deeply about what they want next.

As the Corporate Communications Manager at 

put tremendous thought and care into bringing new people on board

 similarly recommends digging into what makes candidates passionate about the specific opportunity in front of them. “I always ask candidates, ‘

 someone is drawn to your company and believes they’ll succeed in a given role are often overlooked. It’s incredible how many times I’ve seen people fall down when it comes to answering these questions in interviews.”

13. What are the three most important characteristics of this function? How would you stack rank yourself from strongest to least developed among these traits?

 is hiring for WeWork’s Product team, he’s hunting for candidates that have both a deep understanding of the function they're in and an appreciation for the spots in which they still need to grow.

“I use this question when hiring product managers, but it can work for other functions,” he says. “I’ve found that it forces the candidate to be introspective and provide examples of how they’re a student of their craft.”

14. Tell me about your ideal next role. What characteristics does it have from a responsibility, team, and company culture perspective? What characteristics does it not have?

’s seller and developer business units, 

 has her hands full, so the ability to quickly uncover alignment — or misalignment — in the hiring process is critical. Rather than asking directly about a candidate’s interest in a particular role, she’s found it helpful to abstract out to their 

 next role, a scenario that captures what they’re really after.

“This two-part question helps determine if there’s a match in expectations for the role. Particularly when you hear the answers to what they’re 

 looking for, sometimes you realize that the candidate is actually a better match for a different role,” she says. “But my favorite part is that it gives you the selling points you need to hit on when it comes time to close the candidate. You already know what they value, which makes it easier to tailor your pitch.”

15. It's September 5, 2020. What impact on the business have you made in the year since you’ve joined?

 wants to get candidates talking about the future, what the world will look like once they get the job, settle in and start making an impact.

Here’s what he’s able to learn from this question:

 “I’ve found that it provides visibility into how long the candidate thinks things should take,” says Desai. “Folks coming from larger companies assume things take longer than they should, while someone from a smaller, scrappier startup might want to go faster than they should.”

 “You can learn a lot from how they describe their hypothetical impact. Are they results-oriented, using numbers to describe their impact?” says Desai. “Maybe they’re more process-oriented, describing their impact in terms of the systems they’ve successfully set up. Candidates who are more people-oriented will talk about how the org will have grown and how the team will have developed.”

 If a candidate is way off-base from your expectations when describing what they’d hope to achieve, that’s telling in a different way. “It tests the extent to which they have internalized this role and what the company is asking them to solve for,” says Desai.

The work to overcome other misunderstandings about the role and the hiring manager’s expectations doesn’t stop once a candidate officially joins the team. To continue strengthening relationships and getting to know each other, Desai relies on an incredibly tactical framework that provides a bedrock for productive employee/manager relationships — 

16. Tell me about a time you strongly disagreed with your manager. What did you do to convince him or her that you were right? What ultimately happened?

When we surveyed our network of thoughtful founders and operators, several mentioned this as their favorite interview question. Since they each had different points of emphasis and takeaways, we’ve combined a few perspectives here to highlight why this question packs such a punch.

 as the 28th employee and first business development hire. In addition to joining First Round’s 

, she’s since led multiple teams across Business Development, Financial Partnerships, Partner Engineering and Diversity & Inclusion functions — which means she’s done her fair share of hiring.

And this question has become her go-to in interviews for a few reasons. “It shows me how far someone will go in order to do what they believe is right,” says Cordova. “The way candidates choose to unpack the anecdote also shows me 

 they convince others in the face of obstacles. Do they use data? Do they gather support from others?” Asking about what ultimately happened is also particularly illustrative. “How they speak about not getting their way tells you a lot about whether they're willing to disagree and commit to execution,” she says.

Current Head of People and Development at 

 leans on this question as well. “I’m looking to see how candidates 

,” she says. “Do they openly address it and see their difference in opinion as a strength? Or are they unable to see the other person's perspective? Do they try to resolve it or silently let it bother them? This tells me a lot about their ability to communicate effectively and how they will handle disagreements with others at work.”

 is also a fan of diving into how candidates handle disagreements in interviews. “I like this question for a few reasons,” says Curtis. “First, it's hard to give a fluff answer to. I also find it gives me great signal on the candidate’s personality in a number of dimensions, and it serves up useful data points that can be used in reference checks later on.”

Curtis probes deeper into the topic with targeted follow-ups that really get into the weeds of how the disagreement with their boss went down:

•What arguments did you find compelling in favor of the decision?

•What was your reasoning and most compelling arguments against?

In addition to sharing more of his go-to questions (“Think of a time you had to cut corners on a project in a way you weren’t proud of to make a deadline. How did you handle it?”), Curtis lays out tips for focusing interviews on culture and character, as well as

advice for busting bureaucracy before it starts in this Review article.

17. Tell me about the best and worst bosses you’ve ever had, specifically, in your career. What was the difference?

Favorite Interview Questions.jpg

Given the high-stakes nature of every hire, interviewing chops are always in need of sharpening. We’ve spent the past few months reaching out to some of the most thoughtful company builders in our network to pose a simple question: What’s your favorite interview question to ask and why? Here are their answers.

40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know

The beginning of every year unleashes a frenetic rush of activity, from wrapping up performance reviews to finalizing budgets to starting on those plans for the quarters to come. Thankfully, the somewhat painful process of wrangling these inputs is worth the effort, as promotions, increased headcount and team building mandates are often just visible on the edge of the horizon.

But while many startup leaders are kickstarting these first few months with a refreshed focus on hiring, that tank full of shiny new year energy and enthusiasm often quickly runs out of gas. 

, old hats, and founders with fresh rounds of funding all eventually run into the same speed bump: hiring at early-stage startups is hard.

More specifically, it's a time consuming, nose-to-tail process. As cold outreach emails fly out, applications pour in and onsite logistics multiply, the experience of running a hiring process quickly morphs from a side gig to a seemingly full-time endeavor that monopolizes attention and clogs inboxes. From crafting job descriptions and building balanced candidate pipelines to sifting through 

 and dialing up references, every step requires careful consideration — and presents plenty of opportunities for process to unravel and dream candidates to slip away.

It’s no surprise then that managers and founders are constantly on the hunt for hiring hacks to ease the load. To help out where we can, we’ve rounded up six must reads with thoughtful advice, intentional strategies and a smattering of unconventional tactics to present a package of practices for every stage of the hiring process.

Read on for wisdom from those who’ve beaten down the recruiting path and come out the other side with a fresh perspective. We hope you can draw inspiration from their habits as you tinker with your own hiring efforts and look to deepen your well of motivation for all the months that still lie ahead.

Go on a hike to set your hiring vision and give out tests, not pop quizzes

 spent six years at Google before moving on, first to 

 as Head of Engineering and then venturing out as co-founder and CEO of 

. But to this day, Pupius feels that he snuck through Google’s intensive interview process. And his experience recruiting others to join the tech giant validated this feeling, as he observed plenty of 

 (people who could have been amazing contributors) and 

 (candidates who checked all the academic and meritocratic boxes but weren't the right fit after all). That’s why he and his colleagues at both Medium and Range set out to craft meticulous hiring rubrics and remove blind spots from their respective recruiting systems. The unexpected part was that they ended up relying on the principles of product development along the way.

 is critical to the development of any product. For hiring, it’s just as important. But many founders start with a rather weak vision for team building, which kicks off a weak hiring process. There are the surface-level desires to build a "world-class team” or make the lists of companies with the best culture. But even seemingly more detailed statements such as "I want a team of focused, hard workers who fundamentally believe in our mission" are still too nebulous.

creating a comprehensive definition of the type of person who will succeed at your company 

. What is unique to your company and your mission? What unique qualities in people will building that type of company require? Ask yourself, will this vision repel people who aren't a good fit? If yes, that means it's not an empty statement. Most importantly, Pupius notes that the vision needs to consider your team as a whole — a single, coherent product.

Just like it doesn't work to build a product as a collection of features, you don't want to build a team that's just a collection of individuals, no matter how exceptional they each are.

At Range, the founding team took a hike together to forge the company’s vision for talent. "I find that physical activity really helps drive creativity, and being outside the office can help everyone look at themselves more objectively," Pupius says. In brutally honest fashion, they listed the traits and qualities that were already on the team, calling out their own and each other's particular strengths and weaknesses. This allowed them to identify what type of people they'd need to complement their shortcomings and extend their capabilities. (For example, they realized that they're largely a band of intuitive introverts who could really benefit from more process-driven extroverts.)

Their resulting hiring vision was not a statement, but a list of traits, values and skills that new recruits should have to succeed at the company, buttress the existing team, and maintain balance

. Now, each recruiting process starts with everyone involved reviewing this list so they're reminded that they're responsible for building a well-rounded, smooth-operating whole.

To implement this on your team, document your own vision as a group and think about what rules will get you there. Just as you want to have values, beliefs and guidelines that shape how you achieve your product vision, 

you need to have hiring principles that will help you make good decisions while eliminating bias.

 Write down what a standard recruiting process might look like, then ask yourself:

•Where and why might bad decisions get made?

•Where might people on the hiring loop have blind spots?

•Where and how might you fail to unearth qualities that would be awesome for your company to have?

Use your answers to these questions to create and enforce a set of principles that will help you find the people your vision describes. At Medium, for example, Pupius and his team came up with “

Provide candidates with several success modes

” as one of the principles. In practice, this meant offering technical candidates multiple choices to demonstrate their relevant aptitudes: whiteboarding, a programming exercise, a design exercise, building an app over the course of a couple days and presenting it to the hiring loop, or coming into the office to give a tech talk to junior employees.

Even more tactically, Pupius and his team at Medium sent their hiring rubric to engineering candidates in advance so they would know how they were being evaluated. "People were coming in feeling prepared, like they'd studied for a test rather than dreading a pop quiz," says Pupius. "This totally changed the tenor of conversation and their comfort level. You don't get anything out of people feeling nervous and on edge.”

Bring in more candidates by avoiding cliches and doing some (gentle) stalking.

A lack of diversity often stems from the unintentional, inherent bias that lurks within a startup’s recruiting process. As 

’s Global Head of Diversity and Belonging, 

standardizing how candidates were interviewed and evaluated

, in order to make sure everyone was assessed against the same technical bar.

But even with the right recruiting tools and interview system in place, it’s hard to have an impact if underrepresented candidates aren’t applying to open jobs in the first place. This is something Blanche ran up against at Atlassian. “In 2015, we had put all this work into redesigning our recruiting process for our graduate program and when we opened up the job applications, we received 

 female applicants in the first few weeks,” she says. To attract a more a balanced set of candidates, Blanche relied on these three tactics:

Tactic #1: Spell out your commitment to fair hiring practices, avoiding cliches like the plague.  

, the augmented writing platform that gives real time feedback about both the gender balance as well as the overall impact of job ads. And the tool’s data shows that job listings with strong equal opportunity language fill 10% faster on average across all demographic groups. “Adding an equal employment opportunity (EEO) statement to our job ads both improved the balance of our candidate pipelines as well as actual candidate quality,” says Blanche. “We tend to think of equal opportunity language as an American thing, because it stems from the Civil Rights Act. But what was interesting was that Textio’s data and our experiences have shown that EEO statements work even better outside the U.S. than inside of it.”

However, a perfunctory statement isn’t enough — it actually performs worse than postings with no EEO statement at all. “You have to customize it and call out that it’s a priority, in your brand language. It can literally be as simple as writing ‘We encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply,’ on your job ads. That really works,” says Blanche.

Aside from explicit EEO statements, the impact of language in job descriptions rears its head in other, more subtle ways. Certain words and tired phrases such as “rockstars” or “ninjas” have become embedded in tech jargon, even though they send up major red flags. “Using highly corporate language is often a signal to people of color that they won’t thrive, because that language was developed in predominantly White, male spaces,” Blanche says. “Get rid of it, say what you mean and be specific.” Here are some additional examples of cliches to look out for:

 What kind of results? Aggressive, flashy ones or thoughtful, meaningful change?

 If someone is reporting to their stakeholders, who are those stakeholders? Why not “agreement”?

 What if a fantastic applicant has outside responsibilities, or is seeking work-life balance and sustainable impact at your company?

“A big part of this is just being more thoughtful about the word choices you make. There are incredibly subtle language differences,” says Blanche. “For example, when you describe a position as 

, you increase the number of male applicants. For 

, it increases the number of female applicants. But 

 is more gender neutral, helping you get the largest, most balanced and most qualified set of applicants for your open role. Of course you’re actually doing all three, but tweaking the message changes the outcomes,” she says.

Tactic #2: Get creative (and do some gentle stalking).

Outside of choosing the right words, Blanche also credits her self-described “weird” sourcing tactics as a secret weapon of sorts. In her role at Atlassian, she actively seeks out underrepresented groups and encourages them to apply.  

“I’ve followed hashtags on Twitter that are associated with underrepresented people in tech and I tweet job ads at those participating in them. It sounds weird, but I’m completely serious. I say ‘Hi, you look like a great UX designer and we have these three open roles that you should take a look at,’” she says.“I’ve also gone on Amazon and looked at the technology books, read the reviews and tried to find out who wrote them, because women tend to write more reviews than men do. No one’s going to write a review of a Node.js book unless they know what they’re talking about

Tactic #3: Spot skills in non-linear experiences.

When looking at product manager candidates, don’t automatically dismiss those without product management experience. “

People don’t have career paths, they have growth paths. We need to get better at thinking for others about what useful skills they’ve gained from unusual, non-linear experiences

,” says Blanche. “So at Atlassian, we try to get at those behaviors during the interview process in a way that’s agnostic to your background. Maybe you got your project management skills from a previous role or maybe you got it from coaching and organizing your kid’s soccer team.”

playbook for stepping up diversity and inclusion efforts

 to read more of her thoughts on other topics ranging from intersectionality and unconscious bias to data and driving small experiments.

Every engineering leader spends time on building and rebuilding teams, but while at 

 obsessed on designing and refining an immaculate interview process. It was that craftsmanship that helped him hire over a dozen developers at Yammer, grow the Clover engineering team from one to 50, and start to scale up 

 Rogers’ tactic of using three person interviews to reduce bias and elevate the perspective of more junior employees. But what also stands out from his approach is that he’s designed a system that has gotten his technical teams involved — and energized — to interview their future colleagues. To him, interviewing is a 

 priority: engineers on his team who are seasoned interviewers can conduct 

This interviewing principle is one that Rogers has seen get pushback. “For some, it’s an issue of scope and something leaders and recruiters should be doing. For others, it comes down to a concern that not everyone can represent the company in an interview. People also say that it’s too costly to have everyone trained and involved,” says Rogers. “

But interviewing is a critical business activity. It's going to feel costly — and it should.

 It's like saying, ‘Hey, we're having engineers write a lot of code. That feels costly.’ That's kind of the thing we need them to do, and that's how I feel about interviewing. I need the team to help me understand if we are bringing on the right people. These are people you’ll be working with every day for years. I think that’s worth a few hours of your time periodically.”  

Your entire team should conduct interviews. Everybody. If you don’t want some people to interview, ask yourself why. If you’re worried about how they’re representing the company, there’s a bigger issue at hand.

As the engineering leader, Rogers sees it as his responsibility to develop this skill in his team. “I put myself in a position to evaluate how the engineers on my team are doing in interviews. In the early days, I pair myself with new interviewers in the three-person sessions. In those situations, I’m not only evaluating the candidate, but observe the engineer’s ability to interview,” says Rogers. “When we do a roundup with all the interviewers, I ask each person to reflect back to the group how the sessions went. I can ask more questions, probe and help them unpack what happened. This paves the way to offer feedback and suggest other ways to get through interview challenges.”

The other advantage in having everyone interview is that it’s easier to identify members of the team who are comfortable, confident interviewers — people who the engineering leader can tap to serve as mentors to make less experienced colleagues better interviewers. “I get to know which engineer is skilled with candidates, both from feedback from the roundup, as well as being in the interview with them. For example, I keep notes on who’s good at conducting the technical exercise or a certain series of interview questions that we ask,” says Rogers. “With that context, I have an understanding of interviewers’ strengths and who can help their colleagues improve their interviewing skills as they get more sessions under their belt.”

Look for insubordinates and turn candidates into cultural detectives

In the realm of startups, the initial act of founding a company is an expression of nonconformity. Founders must eventually convince others to join them, internalize that vision and will it into reality. But isn’t it counterintuitive to bring other nonconformists — who may buck their ideas — into the fold?

“Every leader needs followers. We can’t all be nonconformists at every moment, but conformity is dangerous — especially for an entity in formation,” says 

. “For startups, there's so much pivoting that’s required that if you have a bunch of sheep, you’re in bad shape.” That’s why it’s imperative for early-stage companies to recognize and recruit what Grant calls “originals.”

For example, in his research, Grant looked for people who had engaged in very visible acts of nonconformity — the 

If you're a hiring manager:

40 Favorite Interview Questions from Some of the Sharpest Folks We Know

Our 6 Must Reads for Hiring Tactics that Break the Mold

Atlassian Boosted Its Female Technical Hires By 80% — Here’s How

Adam Grant On Interviewing to Hire Trailblazers, Nonconformists and Originals

Hire a Top Performer Every Time with These Interview Questions

The Simple Numbers That Could Change How You Hire