How to Conduct Follow Up Interviews
Let’s talk about how to conduct follow up interviews. I’m going to give you a framework that you can
use. The first part I’m going to talk about is more about conducting a second interview. Bare in mind
that you can use this process for second, third, fourth or even fifth interviews depending on how your
process works.
The first part is, after they get through the first interview, you want to make sure that they’re going to
do homework in some capacity. Here are some examples.
If I’m hiring a sales prospector, I’m going to ask them to look for the email addresses of 10 people and to
create a screencast how they got these 10 addresses. This way I can see what tools they used, their
methodology, how they stayed organized. I just want to dive into their mindset and see how they think
in general and see how well they articulate themselves and what their deductive reasoning is. So the
screencast helps you do that and I can seethe result. From there I can dive in and ask why they did
something a certain way and how they could’ve improved.
The next two examples will be tied to online marketing. If I’m looking for someone that specialized in
search engine optimization, I would give them an example website, like Zappos or Amazon, and ask
them to complete a technical website audit for either of these websites. Obviously for any type of
homework assignment, you’re going to be paying for them. So you’re going to lay out what the
expectations are. You don’t want to get too detailed. If I’m asking them to do an audit, I want to see
how proactive they are. How have they been trained on their own? Some people might come back to
you and give you a two page audit with not much information and not much insight. That tells me
immediately that (1) they might not know as much as they made themselves out to be, (2) they’re not
detail oriented, (3) they’re doing a half-assed job and it’s giving me a lot of bad signals to go off of.
A really good piece of work would be detail oriented, action oriented, it’s not something that’s too fluffy
or full of buzzwords that provide no value. It’s something that would be useful to a client that you’d feel
good sending to a client. Ultimately you’re looking for quality work.
Same thing goes for paid advertising. I might tell them “I’m going to give you access to our account. I
want you to audit our paid advertising account and tell us what you would do. Make a screencast telling
us what you see and what you would do. Why you think there are gaps in certain places, why you think
we should do something another way. What other new techniques you know of that we could utilize.”
Ultimately they’re going to be pointing out the holes in your paid advertising account.
You probably don’t have an online marketing or web design business, ultimately, this is designed to give
you some ideas.
The fourth and final example is web design. It’s very simple with web design. In the past, when I was at
another company, we had a lot of people applying for a talented designer job. Ultimately the company
itself had world-class designers so it was really competitive. Someone was applying for a marketing web
designer job and this person didn’t just submit a resume but actually went out and started doing work.
This person did a brand new landing page explaining what their thoughts were around it. Ultimately,
they did the homework before we even asked for it. That’s what got them in the door. Then they started
doing other concepts as well. They did one landing page and started doing other landing pages as well as
they were going through the interview process. They didn’t even need to be asked. First off all the work
was quality. They were doubly proactive because they did even more work. It showed they were really
excited about the position in general. The quality of work showed that they could really align with our
brand and style guidelines. This person was hired.
You want to frame homework to test the candidate to the limit and bonus points for people who are
assertive and go out of their way to do things without even being asked.
Now for team interviews. You want to make use of the hiring scorecard template from this stage. Make
sure you watch that video as well if you haven’t already. The hiring scorecard is going to tell you how
you should assess each candidate as they go through each interview process. Whether you have three or
six interviews, you’re going to tailor this scorecard to the number of interviews you have. That scorecard
is very important.
Your team interviews are going to be put into that scorecard as well. Individual team members can score
each candidate in that scorecard on a scale of 1-5. You’re also going to share interview questions from
this course to give your team ideas. Think of it like this, your team members aren’t trained to do
interviews in the first place. If you can give them a framework to go off of and give them creative
questions to ask, and even run them through this course, it’s going to make your process that much
more effective.
Then you combine it with this third tactic, which is organize it with a CRM or project management tool.
If you’re communicating everything through email, it’s going to be very unorganized. You’re going to silo
conversations. If you have a project management tool and everyone in the process can see it, then
there’s going to be less disconnect. There’s going to be less overlap. And there’s going to be more
collaboration in general.
I’m going to show you an idea of what that would look like.
I have Trello opened up in Chrome. You can use Basecamp or a CRM. In this case, the candidate has
reached the interview with the team. You can put notes in here so you can tell everyone about the
person, including accomplishments and what this person is all about when it comes to learning and so
on. You can continue to add descriptions and checklists and attachments. If they sent over a cover letter
or resume or their homework assignment, you can attach those. Everyone can collaborate together.
From there you continue to move them to the next part of the funnel and so on. In this case, I’m leaving
them here.
So this is the Trello board we use to move people through the process. Each card will get everyone on
the same card. If you want people to collaborate and make a decision by a certain date, they’ll receive
an email about it. I won’t dive too deep into it. I just want to show you what we use to give you an idea
of how you can set up the process.