Interviewing: The Rule of Four
Haven’t we all been there?
You interview with the hiring manager and it’s GREAT. You walk away from the conversation even more pumped about joining the team. Then she wraps up the call with, next you’ll be talking to Brad in Product. You’ll just love Brad!!
GREAT! And you do! You can definitely see yourself working with Brad. Brad has his head screwed on right. You like the cut of Brad’s jib. All the things. The recruiter will reach out with the next step, he says. And wow, does she ever: it’s a case study and four more video chat interviews.
Good news, she says, after you’ve run the gauntlet and presented a slide deck that took you seven hours, including a crash course in using GIMP to make a tiny grayscale version of the company’s logo. You made it to the final round! …Next we want you to talk to the cofounder.
Well, you think. I guess I can do one more. I mean, I’ve come this far…
Then, after that chat, which you’re reasonably certain the cofounder took from his actual toilet, the recruiter tells you, I’ll have an answer for you as soon as the team debriefs.
You wait. And wait.
Listen, the recruiter says on a call 10 days later, I know you’ve done a few interviews already but there are a couple of things the team wants to clear up… can you do two more tomorrow back to back over lunch? You can’t help it, you groan out loud.
It can sound intuitive–even rational–that the more information you have, the better decision you can make. Right?
When it comes to interviewing, that’s not the case. The efficiency of interviews for gathering actionable information peaks at four interviews. After that point, you’re getting little return on the time investment your team is making in interviewing candidates. And your candidate is looking askance at her other offers thinking, if they’re not confident in my skills after seven interviews, what are we really doing here?
The methodology behind this conclusion isn’t complicated. The HR analytics team at Google, under Lazslo Bock’s direction, were tasked with measuring the impact of interviews on hiring.
They very simply considered the number of hiring decisions which changed after each successive interview and found that the four interviews were essentially as effective in reaching the same hiring decision as eight (or 10 or 12–we’ve definitely seen it get up there to double digits).
source: Google re:Work
What actionable insight can we take from this data?
A shorter, leaner process (where interviewers are focused on different core competencies of the job) of four interviews is the way to go–both for your team’s bandwidth and for the candidate’s experience– and you’ve still minimized the risk of making a hiring misstep. Google calls this the “Rule of Four” (which properly sounds like a discarded Game of Thrones spinoff but hey, it’s memorable!).
What about chemistry? In our experience, chemistry is best separated from the pressured interview situation–and taken off video chat altogether. Ideally a chemistry meeting takes place in person over a casual coffee or office tour either before or after the debrief/final hiring decision but before the offer. If it goes well, making the offer can be a really great cap to the chemistry meeting and sometimes will close the candidate on the spot.
If there are serious reservations after an in-person chemistry meeting (rare but it does happen), you can move on (and give the candidate feedback as to why it didn’t work out).
And another benefit to the Rule of Four: attractive candidates are often entertaining multiple offers (especially when the talent market is bananas, read: now). If you can beat the other companies to the punch, that puts you ahead–and with an exciting offer and strong close, you have a much better shot at securing them.
