How to interview marketing candidates quickly and carefully

This is part I of a series of posts focused on hiring marketers and building marketing teams. Other posts are about ignoring interviewing rules and my favorite interview questions for marketing candidates.

“Hire when it hurts.”

Have you heard this advice? It’s great, and I generally agree.

Except there’s one part people don’t talk about: When you hire only when it’s urgent, well, it’s URGENT that you find someone to fill a role immediately. This puts more pressure on you to find good people and vet them quickly, yet carefully.

You don’t have time for several rounds of interviews and months to decide on candidates. This means you need to be even more efficient and effective with your interviews.

NOTE: These tips involve video, but this is not about technology/tools. The tools will change, but the mindset of interviewing efficiently stays the same.

Don’t flatten candidates to what they appear on paper. Ask them to record a short 1–2 minute video.

I barely look at resumes. There’s just not enough context with resumes for them to be useful. So what should you do instead?

Ask the candidate to record a short video. The great thing about videos is the context and subtext. Videos are dense. You get a lot of information in a relatively short period of time.

You can tell a lot about a person’s sense of judgment.

• How much excitement do they have when talking about their work? 

• Can they express their thoughts clearly? 

• Are they aware of their background, lighting, and sound quality? 

These are details that show if a candidate is savvy and has emotional awareness. You want to hire people who seem like they have their life together.

With video, you can read between the lines and get this context.

Narrow or broaden your top of funnel by adding “hoops” to jump through.

In terms of implementation, you can either put the video at the top of your recruiting funnel or as the second step.

If you have too many applications and want to weed people out, include the video requirement in the first step of the application. In other words, you’ll only read applications with the video included. This extra ask means some people will feel too lazy to do the video, or realize they don’t want the job that much. This is good for all parties because you want to weed these people who didn’t care enough about the role to begin with.

If you want to encourage more applications, ask for videos after people have applied. You want to reduce as much friction as possible. This can feel more welcoming because it feels less like jumping through hoops for the candidate, and more like the company saying, “We like what we’ve seen on paper and we want to learn more about you.”

I like asking for videos from almost everyone who submits an initial application. Why? Because there are hidden gems who don’t look great on paper, but can be fantastic hires.

I’ve hired some incredible people who had mediocre resumes and LinkedIn profiles. But in their video and subsequent real-time interviews, it was clear how much they brought to the table. I would have missed out if I only screened using their resume.

Make sure to include a question or two that the candidate can answer in their video. This helps create consistency across candidate submissions and gives candidates enough structure to fill in the blanks. 

Record your real-time interviews to save time, reduce bias, and ensure high quality interviews.

The main benefit of recording interviews is it saves time for everyone. Plus, you get to see primary data on the interview.

Primary data is the actual document, video, interaction. Secondary data is that information filtered through the lens of another person—which means it’s a layer removed.

Instead of me describing a candidate to you, isn’t it better if you could see the video footage yourself? Even if you watched 15 seconds, you’d have more information than if I spent 15 minutes describing what happened. You’d also be able to form your own opinion rather than hear about the candidate through my filter. Some tools, like Loom, even let you watch on 1.5 or 2x speed. 👌

Plus, it helps avoid bias because you and other team members can refer back  to the same footage. (Every interviewer does not have to watch every other interviewer's video footage. That doesn’t save time.)

You can point out certain behaviors/actions/words. You might say, “This person said this, with this tone, and my interpretation is X.” I can look at the same footage and say, “That’s interesting. I see that, but I’m thinking the person meant Y.”

An added bonus is you can give your team feedback on how they interview. It means your team has to be on their best behavior when interviewing. They can’t just phone it in. 

If you’re a candidate interviewing for roles, embrace (or create) opportunities to show what you bring to the table.

On the flip side, if you’re a candidate, I encourage you to welcome any videos or short essay questions a company might ask for. You can either see this as a barrier or an opportunity. You don’t have to spend an enormous amount of time making the video perfect. It’s simply a chance for you to share how you can contribute.

The worst is being just another resume in a digital stack of resumes. That’s just demoralizing. So if there’s a chance for you to stand out and get the attention of a real human on the other side of the screen—this is your shot to get noticed.

PS How have you used videos in your hiring process? If you’re asked to do a video, how do you put your best foot forward?