Never let a candidate bomb

At various times in my life, I've needed to interview people. Because my career has been varied, I've been lucky enough to interview people for a wide variety of jobs requiring radically different skill-sets. I've hired canoe guides, operations staff, bookkeepers and software engineers – and each of those roles have required different things of me as an interviewer.

From those experiences, I've come to be guided in my interviewing approach by a principle that I hold very strongly and believe applied across every one of contexts I've ever needed to interview in. That principle is that…

No candidate I interview should ever "bomb"

I barely need to explain what it means to bomb because all of us likely have experienced "bombing" personally, but in the interest of clarity; by "bomb", I mean fail the interview in such a way that the candidate feels like a failure, embarrassed, or awkward about their performance. In other words then, I mean that we need to decouple failing candidates, and making the candidate feel like a failure. The latter should never happen even if the former happens most of the time.

A lot of people like to pin bombing on the candidate, but in my experience, that's completely the opposite to where the blame for bombed interviews resides.

For a candidate to avoid bombing, they would nearly always need to have more skill, knowledge, and experience than they entered the interview with - something that they can't realistically correct during the interview. In the few instances where that isn't true, it will generally be other factors beyond their control. Perhaps they didn't get much sleep last night because of a newborn. Maybe they are making time for you during an incredibly busy tax season. My general point is that if a candidate starts to bomb, course correcting is not really an option for them.

An interviewer however, has far more control over the situation to come to the candidate's rescue. You hold all the cards in this situation, since you (should) know what a good answer looks like, what you're looking for and the subject matter inside and out. Since you hold all the cards it's easy for you to even out the deck by handing your candidate a few of them. If the interviewer is unable to course correct a candidate starting to bomb, there's likely a skill issue on both sides of the interview.

Generally, what this looks like is providing a struggling candidate with enough scaffolding for them to make their way through the question with what they feel is a good answer. The good news is that doing this effectively forces you into several other "best-practices" which make you an excellent interviewer.

First, in order for you to spot the early-warning signs of interview-bombing, you need to be engaged with and actively listening to the candidate. If you are not truly present with them, it's likely that by the time you've noticed how poorly they're doing, it's already too late. It shouldn't need to be said that you need to be engaged in the interview to get good signal on a candidate, but based on my experience as a candidate myself, it unfortunately does. Needing to be alert to bombing in order to correct provides a strong forcing function to be engaged in this way.

Once you've spotted any warning signs or missing information, you need to engage informal questioning that provides gentle scaffolding in the right direction. Scaffolding simply means providing subtle (or not so subtle) hints either explicitly or through leading questions, or adjusting the problem/question to make it more attainable.

This skill has several huge benefits for both parties in the interview. For candidates, a more conversational interview is much less anxiety inducing, which can help them to perform well (remember that it is your job and responsibility as an interviewer to get the best out of your candidates). For interviewers, being able to change the direction of the conversation in this way helps you move the candidate away from subjects where you already have "signal" and towards blind spots, which is an incredibly valuable skill.

You will often find that with a little scaffolding over a small hurdle, you'll discover that a struggling candidate can become a high-performing candidate. More commonly, some candidates can appear "high-performing" by using the same skill against you, moving to an area of strong competency and keeping you there long after you've learned that it's a good skill for them, effectively hiding their weak spots. If you can move these candidates on from their strong points as soon as you get good signal on them, you'll get a much clear picture of them.

Finally, as you guide them to providing a better answer/solution, you need to be able to participate actively with the candidate and build rapport. One of the most common sources of the feeling of having "bombed" is that the candidate developed no relationship with their interviewer. If you seem impassive, disengaged, and uninterested in the candidate, it would be natural for them to feel like they failed, even though in that situation, you failed them.

If you actively listen to the candidate, you can reflect on and dig deeper into their previous comments, which can help you direct the conversation more naturally. If you have a friendly, interested affect, it will be easier for you to subtly scaffold and direct the conversation. If you are shaping the conversation and participating, it is easier to listen to and hear the candidate. Each of these skills self-reinforces the others, and build a positive feedback loop that mutually improves your understanding of the candidate and their experience.

However, there's one more party in any interview that I haven't mentioned yet; the organization you are interviewing on behalf of. Of all the reasons to avoid bombed interviews, the one your organization cares most about is this one. Exceptional candidates fail your interview all of the time, exceptional candidates know other exceptional candidates, and a talented person telling other talented people how bad their interview with your organization was is a disaster for the entire team.

This year, I interviewed at a large legal-tech startup in Vancouver. I did terribly. I bombed. I crashed out. Yes, I probably hadn't prepped enough LeetCode, but I was allowed to leave the interview feeling like a failure, so I did. When I spoke to my software engineering friends at drinks and dinners for the following few months though, I simply told them how awful my experience had been, how disengaged the interviewer was, and how frustrated I had been. Every single one of them nodded their heads and said something along the lines of "that sounds awful, they probably don't have a very nice culture, good to know, thanks".

Was that fair to that company? Probably not. But those are the stories about the company you are interviewing on behalf of that bombed interviews generate. Always remember that when you are interviewing candidates, you are essentially hosting them in your company, and you need to be a good host.