Hiring Success: Effective Engineering Phone Screens • Josh Mottaz

Engineering hiring is tricky business; an exciting project idea or a solid roadmap isn’t much good without people to materialize it, but hiring the wrong people is effectively self-sabotage. At Canary, our pipeline for engineering interviews has the following stages:

Resume Review → Phone Screen → Homework → On-Site → Hiring Decision

Of those five steps, the phone screen has always appeared most perfunctory. Earlier in my career, I probably would have told you that I felt phone screens were simply an “unnecessary social call.” I’ve learned turning phone screens from a chore into a tool is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to hire great people.

There’s a lot of value in being purposeful about how you approach phone screens. I hope this helps folks, especially engineers newly involved in the hiring process, to be successful.

Goals

What can we accomplish during a phone screen?

Learn about the person (elaborated below)
Sell the company and culture - Interviewing is bidirectional. You want to learn about the person, and they want to learn about what you do.
- Product - What’s compelling about your product? What might they find interesting? If the answer to either of these is “nothing”, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your own employment.
- Opportunities
  - Interesting tech - Sell them on your technical stack. What could they learn and contribute to?
  - Upcoming projects - What are the major stops on your near-term roadmap, and how would they be involved? Prepare this list beforehand.
  - Ownership - Emphasize the impact they’ll be able to have as they settle in. Will they have a say in future technical choices? How will they drive the design or implementation?
  - Mentorship - What needs do they have in their career, and how can you help them grow? What resources do you offer for this?
- Social & Cultural - Highlight the team. Who and what are great about them? Talk about how your team works together. How does engineering and product interact?
- Engineering - How do you ensure projects are designed well and thoroughly thought through? What isn’t going well, and how are you improving? Do you budget time into sprints for technical debt? Do you prioritize rolling projects out the door as quickly as possible, or do you restrict scope in order to do things the right way.
Create talking points to follow up on during in-person interviews
Learn their history - Always ask about things like short stints in work history, gaps, etc. They should have a good answer.
Location and work restrictions, title and salary expectations, visas, and sponsorships - This just greases the pipeline. If you’re on the fence as to whether to bring a candidate in, consider their situation. Your opportunity cost might be worthwhile if the candidate is local, while paying for a flight and hotel might not. Note: ideally the candidate should have already given salary number or a range already from the resource you’re pulling from. If not, find these out now (don’t ask their current salary, though - it’s both scummy and illegal in many states, including New York).

Non-goals

Similarly, there are certain things you shouldn’t try to use a phone screen for.

Technical trivia - Way, way too common. Unless the technical question is specific to something listed on a candidate’s resume that they absolutely should know, skip it. Trivia isn’t a good way of determining someone’s skill.
Disqualification - On the surface, this is counter-intuitive. You shouldn’t be pushing candidates along who will just fail during a later stage. I would argue, though, that if you’re disqualifying a substantial amount of candidates at this step, you are probably not doing a thorough vetting job when reviewing resumes. Occasionally, though, a candidate won’t be a good fit even though their resume looked promising. Maybe their personality or interests or skillset just don’t align; at that point it’s fine to terminate the process.

“How do I determine if a person is a good hire for us in 30 minutes?”

Impossible. Despite your best efforts, someone who appears to be an amazing fit is occasionally going to not be. It’s happened more than once to me, and it’ll happen to you. This is a best effort game! Towards this end, I have a set of questions in the back of my mind I’m trying answer during each call, even though I don’t ask most of these outright:

Does anything about our interaction ring alarm bells? - I want to hire smart, pleasant, hardworking people. No assholes, no divas. Is this person condescending? Do they cut you off? Are they disparaging about former coworkers without provocation? You’re looking for soft skills, not just engineering prowess.
Why are we interested in this person? - Expound upon their resume, particularly recent work. Something about their resume caught your eye, so talk about it. Ask what they’ve worked on, and how it relates to what you’re doing.
- Will this person be happy here? - Figure out what this person likes working on. Do they have a passion for documentation, or metrics and visualizations, or whatever.
- Will they have room to grow? - Good engineering isn’t about stagnation. Look for folks who want to learn and grow, and suggest areas they might find exciting (tied into “Selling the company”, below).
- What level is this person technically? - The goal here is a rough estimate, you can’t (and shouldn’t try!) to answer this over a brief phone call. As they talk about past projects, ask questions about the design and details. Were they just in the room, or did they have a hand in the architecture?
Is this person thoughtful? Introspective? - Learning from mistakes is crucial. Delve into the things that didn’t go well during recent projects.
- What design decisions would you make differently?
- What didn’t work out the way you expected?
How does this person learn in their free time? I hate the idea that an engineer absolutely needs to be contributing to open source, or coding on the weekends, or always be reading programming-related news, to be great. However, if the candidate has hobby projects listed on their resume, they’re proud of that work! Delve into the architecture and the design choices!

My Process

Do research beforehand

About five minutes before the call starts, I review the resume. I make a copy of my template, and populate it with the candidate’s name and today’s date. Here, I note any points of interest on the resume I’d like to ask about. Lastly, I jot down their phone number (it’s amazing how many times this isn’t included in the profile).

Be (a tiny bit) late

I like to call exactly a minute after the scheduled call time. This is personal preference, but I like the give the candidate time to be settled and ready to talk. If they don’t answer, I leave a voicemail, wait three minutes, and give them another call. If at that point there’s still no answer, we mark the hiring profile as a no-show and reach out to them to see what happened.

Refer to their resume

Keep a copy of their resume handy, and use it to drive the conversation as necessary. Prioritize recent experience and projects.

Keep on track

From time to time a candidate’s mind will wander. Be ready to steer them back on course, or kindly but firmly move on to your next question. It’s imperative you control the flow of the call.

Be respectful of their time (but be available to go over)

Be aware of your schedule. As you approach the 30 minute mark, be sure you hit all the points that are absolutely necessary, such as next steps, contact information, etc. If you’re having a good conversation, and you feel like extra time learning about the candidate would answer additional questions - ask! At the very end, offer e-mail contact as avenue for any questions they might not have had time for, or think of later.

Be excited

Your excitement translates. If you don’t want to work there, why should they?

Template

Lastly, here’s the template I created:

# Phone Screen - <date> - <full name>

Location: <current location>
Work Eligibility: <visa status, sponsorship, free to work in the US>
Phone Number: <PHONE>

Resume Points of Interest:
* <populate before screen>
* ...

1. Introduction
  a. Who I am, title and position, tiny bio
  b. Is now still a good time to talk?
2. Allow the candidate to introduce themselves <- this should be the bread and butter of your conversation
  a. Tell me about yourself
  b. What you like doing
  c. What are some things you've enjoyed working on recently?
3. What are you hoping do next and learn at your next job? Why are you looking for something new?
4. Role periphery - what other hats have they worn? How interested are they in these kinds of tasks?
  a. Experience with DevOps - How was it managed at your last company? What did you do?
  b. Opinions on QA + testing - what's your personal testing mentality? Experience at prior companies?
6. Company
  a. Product and business model, finances if appropriate
  b. What "platform" (or your team) is responsible for, stack, broad overview
  c. Team and culture, engineering vision
  d. Roadmap and upcoming projects of interest
8. Next steps in interview process (If you're going to disqualify a person, indicate you'll be in contact and skip this section entirely)
  a. Small takehome project - 2-3 hours, send <point of contact> a rough estimate once you've had time to review it 
  b. Interview process - takehome, meet the team w/ round of interviews in <office location>
9. Last questions? If not, forward questions to <point of contact>

I create a copy of this and fill it out for each and every candidate.