So we have had quite a few people who

are in the process of interviews right now. And this

is a weird time of year for a lot of reasons. But right

after the first of the year, it seems like there's this big boom. A lot of jobs are posted.

And so a lot of people get interviews quite quickly. That actually overwhelms the

team. And then things move really slowly. Not to mention, we've got JP Morgan.

We've got ridiculous numbers of holidays. And we've got, if you're

in the Northeast, snow days and sick days. So it's actually a

really messy time of year to move the process forward. I

can tell you from a recruiting standpoint, the number of times we

actually have to cancel interviews or move them, or how difficult it

even is to get them scheduled on our part from

the company side, things are moving slowly. It's

not like you're going to have your first round with the recruiter, the next day

you're going to meet with the hiring manager, and two days later you're going

to meet with the full team. That's not a realistic expectation. So

the questions that we get quite often are, when should I

be following up after an interview? How long should it be? And

kind of what does that follow up look like? What is the best way

to follow up? And so there's no one size fits all answer because

you really have to use your common sense here because it depends on the day of week. And

is it a long weekend? And is it JP Morgan week? And there's like a lot of things

to note that we talk about as caveats, but in general,

I like to recommend a thank you note to

anybody you spoke with within 24 hours, a

maximum of 24 hours. If you have a conversation with a recruiter or

the hiring manager in the morning, send them a thank you note that same day. If

it's more toward the end of the day, pushing five o'clock, send it the next morning.

Make sure, though, that you are sending a follow-up thank you note that

is complimentary, that says, thank you for your time. Thank you

so much for telling me about this fascinating thing. And

that should come right away with then an open-ended question

about the next steps so that they have the

Yeah, I think that open-ended question part is really key. Because

otherwise, sometimes what we see is someone will say, oh,

they didn't reply. And we say, OK, well, show us what you sent

them. And there's nothing to reply to. And so you're back in the thank you

thing, where it's like, thank you, thank you, thank you. So yeah, perfect. Open-ended

questions. Also, don't overstress it,

too. Sometimes you just write the thank you

thing and send it and you've done your thing and

there's no point to agonizing over the timeline of when someone else gets back

There are two important things to note with thank you notes. There's probably more

than two, but I'm going to note two. Every

single interaction you have with a hiring team is important. So

the tone and the grammar and the spelling, that all matters.

It really, really does. If you can mirror the

tone of your interview, if it was a real chatty interview with

a chatty hiring manager, make your thank you note in the same type

of style. If it was more of a formal interview and

the interview team was a little bit more formal, a little bit more staid, and you got

the sense like, well, this is more of a formal company, make it

a little bit more cordial. However you slice it,

though, use a tool like Grammarly to

ensure that you have no errors in grammar, spelling,

or punctuation, because I don't care if it's chatty or formal, that

matters. That matters very deeply. And so that's such

an easy thing, especially with the technology we have today. There is no excuse.

There is no excuse to send less than a

Yeah, I think there's something to unpack there as well. So

yes, you definitely want to tailor your tone to how the conversation went. But

if you find yourself being like, oh, I'm having to sound so formal because they were so

formal and I'm not a formal person, is that an environment for

you? True. It's a really good time to reflect on did

you actually really like the impression you

got? Because if you're having to change your personality to,

you know, make an email sound right, maybe it's not right

for you. And I'm not saying that's your only point of, you know, thought when

you're thinking about, is this the right job? But it's certainly something to think about

because the person you presented during that interview and the person you

present in the thank you note and the person you present throughout this entire hiring

process is the person they expect to show up on

the first day of work and to be their colleague. So Just

make sure that's in line because I think it is really important that you

I love that point so much. We actually had

a pretty deep dive on that today during office hours because one

of our Accelerator members is in

an interview process and had a first interview. So

they skipped right past the recruiter and ended up meeting with

the department director, which would be their boss. And

it was a 45-minute, she called it an exam. It

was a 45-minute exam. And she said there was no banter.

There was no back and forth. And knowing this person,

my first question was, do you want to work for that person? Because

she's quite bubbly. So I'm seeing

like, OK, we all have had to take exams. But if that's your

first interaction with somebody and that's your boss, The question is,

is that how they manage, is it always going to be that intense?

Maybe it's not going to be, but my advice to her was, even

if so, if they're skipping steps in the process, it's a small company, it's not

unheard of to get an offer after just speaking with a hiring manager

at very small companies. There may not be that many more people in the company to

even interview with. It is within your rights to ask

for another conversation because you are interviewing them

too. Yes. Yeah, because yeah, you're

right. You have to be authentic. You have to be comfortable with

I mean, I think that's really the key of the whole thing, right, is that show

up as the person that you want to be at work. Show up as, you

know, the colleague that you want to be and bring that person through your email

interactions and through your interviews because Yes, everyone

has bad days, but be the person you want to be, right? But

don't be someone you're not, because it's not going to work out for

you long term. You're not going to like it. You're going to burn out. And

it's just not worth it. So I think that's a really key thing. And

I think that was good advice you gave that person to reflect on, like,

if this is the offer stage next, you need

Yeah, absolutely. Just knowing her, I want

her to be her bubbly self somewhere. That's

really important. It's important to me too. And,

you know, thinking about how I interact and a lot of the advice I give

to candidates when we're workshopping emails that they're going to

send or, you know, interactions that they're having, people

get really wound up about this follow-up stage and when

do I follow up and how do I follow up and all this stuff. And often

when I'm helping to write emails, I have to say, well,

this is how I'd say it because I would inject like

a little bit of humor here, but if that's not you, then don't do it.

You know, so for instance, after a long weekend, we,

we know because we're on the hiring side. So we see the candidate requests and

emails come through. If you have an interview, this is where the common sense

piece comes in. If you have an interview on a Thursday before a long weekend, the

Friday before a long weekend, everyone's going to be checking out

mentally by midday. But before that, they're just trying to get

stuff done so that they're done and they can go enjoy their long weekend. That

Friday, you're probably not going to hear a whole lot in

a meaningful way because nobody's in the right frame of mind to

like move candidates forward, get interviews scheduled, all of that. You

might, but it's unlikely. And then let's say then the Monday's

the holiday. The Tuesday, everyone's just digging out

from their long weekend. So the best day to follow up

would actually be Wednesday or Thursday of that week. It feels like a

long time to you, but that's a long time in regular days.

That's not a long time in work days, and that's what we have to really operate on.

So then we have people who get really, really upset because they'll

say, oh, I made a mistake, and I followed up on Tuesday, and now they're not

going to see it, and I don't know what to do. I would reply, and I'd say, well, that

probably wasn't the best day to email you. I'm sure this got buried under 5 million emails.

I'm just popping this to the top of your inbox. That's the way

I would handle it, but that's totally my style. And to your point, you

I want to go back to something you said about Grammarly. I

think that's a really good point. And here's what I would think

about. If you are like, I'm just going to fire off this thank you note from my

iPhone and it doesn't even matter because I did the thank you note thing, check the button, whatever.

Just think about that that interaction, that email you send is

how people are going to see you as a colleague. So if you do it really fast and

they're spelling errors and it doesn't really make sense, that's not

necessarily someone I want on my team because I want to know that things are done correctly and

with some thought and well done.

So try to approach things from that thing too. Like,

yes, it takes a little more work, but you are really showing the level

of work and quality that you're going to bring to the job. So don't

Ultimately, we're making drugs. That's

what biotech is doing. We are making things that will go

into patients. And so the level of detail expected

of that, if we're thinking about filing INDs and pushing

things into the clinic and all of that, Yeah, it's

important. Detail matters. And so every interaction until they

get to know you really, really well, and they might know like, oh, well, she's on

vacation and firing off a quick email. So that makes sense. But

you don't get that privilege until you have shown who you are

and that on a day to day basis, you are that detail oriented.

You care that deeply. Then you

earn the right to have the occasional silly email that has the spelling error

Everyone makes mistakes. And of course, like, you know, we're all in Slack and

I don't always capitalize everything in Slack. Sometimes

you're just firing things off. But when push

comes to shove, my whole team knows that when something important is going

out, I'm going to be reviewing it and we're going to be running it through Grammarly. And

I'll probably even have someone else look at it because Grammarly is great.

There's no substitute for someone else reading it and being like, I don't understand what

you're saying here. So just keep that in mind. These

little small things, they do make big impressions. So

Karina, have you ever reached out

to a candidate and things started off really, really well. And

then they just fell apart because like maybe their emails got

really weird or maybe you had a super strange interaction and you're like, this is bizarre.

What's happening here? Or have you gotten someone almost to the end and

So, so many. Really? Yeah. It's interesting

because I, I've used this a few times now, but like, Job

interviews are a bit like dating, right? And so

you're going to see people over multiple interactions.

That's why we structure interviews the way we do. There's multiple

points where you're going to interact with people at the company. And If

you are putting on some sort of a false personality, it's

likely to come out at some point, right? Even if it's an accident that,

you know, maybe the weird interaction we got was a

result of something that was out of your control. It's going

to just raise that little pink flag. It's like, is this person real?

Are they bringing their authentic self to this? So

yeah, every interaction ends up being a data point. And

You know, that's super interesting too, especially when people

are looking at remote jobs, I think. There

is a different dynamic to interviewing in person, I

feel personally, than there is to doing everything remotely,

where it feels like you're still not completely

reading the room and everything. So every interaction really does have that much more

weight. Every email is a little bit more like, okay, this is my

only correspondence with this person. I'm not going to meet them in the parking lot

and bring them in the building and have that casual chitchat. So here we

Yeah. That's a really good point. We have fewer

data points in this online world than we would in

the pre-pandemic world. We used to fly candidates out

all the time for interviews. They might have an interview with

me on the phone, and then they might have an interview with

the hiring manager on the phone, not Zoom, on the phone. We

weren't doing Zoom. And then we would fly candidates out

if they weren't local to meet the whole team in person and make

a whole day of it, including lunch. Like it was a

whole thing. We don't do that anymore. And so there are so

many fewer data points to get that read on people. So

you, you really have to think about pretty critically what

image you're putting out during your interview. You want it to be authentic, but you also

want it to be professional and in line with

the other things that you're. that are happening in your interview. So

if you send a bunch of really good emails, lots of professional emails,

no spelling mistakes, and then suddenly out of nowhere, this

weird email that doesn't make any sense, you know, terrible

You know, it's interesting. I'm sure most people have heard this and

it is just good advice. So like take this and run with it. But

the way that we used to talk about hiring in

previous companies was how did they act

with the first person they met? So if you are rude to

the person sitting at the reception desk, that would be the first question

I asked anyone, you know, right after we interviewed someone,

I'd go out and say, How were they? And sometimes for a lot

of my career, I was that person. I'd be like, they were great. Or I'd be like, oh, they were horribly

rude. And that dictated everything. It did not matter what

the response was after that. Like if they were like, they could have been the best

hire, but if they were rude to the people who they thought didn't

matter in their interview. That shows you everything

you need to know. So that's another data point that, you know, no

matter who you're interacting with, your initial phone screener has

a lot of sway. If they're like, they weren't polite and they were really

rude. Well, that's pretty

We just let a candidate go today because they were not

professional on the phone with one of our recruiters. We're

not sending them through to, I mean, I'm sure

that they were thinking, well, this is just the recruiter screen. It

does not matter. No, they will never be

seen by the hiring manager because we ultimately don't

feel that they're a fit for the company because that's not the culture

I think though it goes the other way, right? If you are interviewing

with a company. and you're getting weird signals

from their team, those are data

points for you as well. It's the same thing. You're not spending a ton

of time interviewing. You're not meeting everybody at the company. You're

not getting to sit down and have a meal with people necessarily anymore. So

you don't have a lot of data points to go on either. True. So

it's also within your rights to interview them back. So

At what point do you start getting pink to glaring

red flags when someone's like, oh yeah, I've been on eight

interviews with the same company? Or I've

had to do this crazy project for free because they want to see my

work. Like, where are you kind of like, oh boy, this is not looking

One thing that we see more inexperienced hiring

managers want to do often is basically

they don't trust themselves to make a decision. So they want everybody in

the company to sort of meet this person, back them up on it.

and it becomes a really disjointed process. Just because now

we can do things through Zoom doesn't mean we should spread the interview out

over days and days and days. It's still emotionally

and mentally draining to be interviewed. It

doesn't matter if it's on site or on Zoom. It's probably a little bit

less draining on Zoom, but You

still have that anxiety, that workup, that all of that. And

if you spread that over multiple days, that is hard. It's hard for

candidates and they don't like it. We've had that feedback specifically

from many different candidates. They don't like it. So it is still advisable

to keep the interview team small. to keep it tight because

really good candidates that are in high demand, they have

choices and they're interviewing you. And if

the only data points they have about your company are that the interview feels really

disorganized, they have to come back for lots of different interviews, they're

on different days, sometimes they get moved or canceled, what are

they going to think about the company? The only data points they have are that your

interview process was terrible. Are they going to think you're

an organized company, a good company to work for? It's unlikely.

So that is huge. The second thing

that you brought up was doing projects. We've had some

clients before ask us to put together what they

call case study interviews, and this in principle is

okay for some roles. But where it crosses into

not being okay is if we are asking candidates to

do a case study on actual work at the company that

could be used to further the company's interests for

free. That is not something that you should be

doing, and if you are asked to do that, please jump into the Slack community and

workshop that with us. We are happy to answer questions about how to turn down an

interview like that politely. But if you get

the suspicion that you're basically being asked to solve an

engineering problem for a company, that's probably

I would much prefer to go on site and meet people. I'm just

more drawn to being in person with people. And

so there's that element, too, that, like, it's exhausting no

matter who you are. And it is really, like, I

feel like it's personality dependent to an extent. But it's

just, just don't do it. Just don't make anyone sit

We revamped a process recently where they

had 13 people meeting with a candidate one-on-one.

Oh. They did it. I know. They

did it over a period usually of four or

five different days because they

couldn't get all 13 people who were mostly remote or hybrid to

be able to coordinate on a certain day or time. That's

just really tough. I don't care who you are. That is grueling. When

we started the process, we were working with some candidates that were working

through that process already. And we basically had

to go back to the company and say, this is the feedback we're getting. These candidates are

leaving the process because of this. I don't want to

see more than eight people throughout an entire process, which includes HR

The thing is, is that everyone has lives, right? You might be

looking for a job, but you're probably not just sitting there like being like, dude, dude, dude, I'm

totally available for interviews all the time. I mean, think about the childcare

element. If you're asking someone to do 13 interviews and

or if they are employed and you're asking them to step away from their job 13 times,

It is, in fact, pretty common practice with smaller

companies. What happens, it's pretty natural. You have

these really tiny companies, right, where it's actually fine to have

somebody meet with everybody at the company because they're six

people or eight people. It's a tiny company. Well, then the company grows

and they don't want to exclude someone from the process. And then pretty soon you've

got your 13 people at the company, your 15 people at the company. They

don't want to exclude anybody. But there is a point where you

just have to say, no, who is actually pertinent to making this decision? And

in the interest of time, who really needs to attend and just triage

it down. And you know what? The employees are not going to feel like

they're excluded. They're probably burnt out from doing so many interviews, too. Everyone

I actually think that's a super interesting a psychological thing

as well. If you're an employee and you're not included in the interview, okay, they hired

someone and you don't agree with it, you don't get along with them, well, like, whatever, you didn't weigh in on

that. So that was the way the cards were dealt. But

how bad is it if you're like, no, I really don't want to work with

this person, or like, no, I don't think they have the skills, or X, Y, Z, and

the company disregards that feedback? Because then you

are sort of in a position of being like, well, I had to take all this time to interview this person, no one

even listened to my feedback, And here we are. So I

think the smaller interview team is essential for several

reasons. One of them is you have too many cooks in the kitchen, then you're going to have

We can also mitigate that with creating a more scientific

interview process. And it's really interesting to me how a bunch

of scientists at a company typically don't treat

the interview process scientifically at all. And so one of

the things we like to do when we start working with a company is create

a scorecard system where everybody in total isolation fills

out a scorecard with their thoughts and their feelings about a candidate's fitness. And

then after everybody's filled those out, then compare.

What we see often, which if you think about it, we're talking about

a bunch of scientists. They would never do this in an experiment. They

would never do this. But they all interview candidates.

They sometimes capture notes. They chit chat in the hallway about it. And

then there's this process of groupthink that

happens because people are starting to have these sidebar conversations before

actual data has been analyzed. It's really

fascinating and something that I have always been just so confused

about. And then we introduced scorecards and they're like, oh yeah, this is a much

better way to do it. Well, you analyze your data like this.

That is so interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,

it's true. There's a lot of ways to mitigate a lot

of those pitfalls, but you kind of need someone who knows how

Well, if you're listening to this podcast and you are going to hire

some folks for your team, you can do a really basic, very

rudimentary scorecard using Google Forms. You

don't have to have a fancy applicant tracking system if you're not going public anytime

soon. You can absolutely do this in an easy way. and

collect that data and then have a good sit down with the blinded data

and have people come forward with their thoughts. But

after seeing the data, kind of see the data first. It's interesting, too,

when you point out, you know, the one outlier that maybe doesn't like the candidate,

they don't want to hire that candidate. Often when they

see raw data where it's like, okay, well, they were a

four and a half star on this, on this, and

there were, let's say there were 13 people and they were the one person who

marked him a one star and everyone else wrote, marked him a five star. That

is a lot more compelling to them usually than just

being overruled, but it's more of just like an argument. If

Yeah, well, you're taking the personality out of it, right? Like, going

back to your point, not everyone is going to like each other. That is just human

nature. But if you can't sit down and actually say, these

are the things that are pertinent to the job and can this person do

it and take the personality out of it, to an extent, I mean, you still have

to be a good person that people want to work with and be a nice colleague,

but you know, you can accomplish those things without being best friends with everybody.

And so I think that is really interesting. I could see that being super effective

It really is. Yeah. Before we revamp some processes with

previous clients. We heard feedback as

we were sort of starting up, and I would ask, well, what are your pain points with

the interview process? And often it came down to

this feedback session, which was a completely unformatted feedback session where

people had talked to each other earlier, formed their little opinions, formed little

clicks even, came in and brought that to this feedback session, which then

it's, I mean, that's not useful. Nobody finds that useful. And

I would hear things like, somebody would come and be like,

well, I didn't like their shirt. Somebody said that they

didn't like someone's shirt because it had a sparkle, like a

sparkly thing on the side, which I'm interpreting as an embellishment,

probably. Wow. How is that pertinent

in any way, shape, or form to their ability to perform the

job? So this is where we take that

element out of this process. And it's so easy to

do. It's just a matter of standardizing it. So if you are ever

confused about that, again, our Slack community, we do

a lot of work with job seekers, but if you're hiring somebody, come

in and ask us about that too. We love to talk about best practices

for hiring, and we can give you some really easy tips and even some templates

and things like that. I just got together, an interview cheat

sheet for a client. It has almost 200 behavioral-based

interview questions on anything you could want to interview for.

And I just have this in our drive. So if you're interviewing

people, jump in our Slack community and ask for that, because that is gold. That

Here's a thought. Can we also share that with Accelerator members

Already done. Yeah, that's actually in our interview module. Yep,

they should have no trouble, although it's a little overwhelming if you're like, oh, these 200 questions.

The nice thing, though, is that there are themes, right?

And so the questions are behavioral-based questions, which means you would provide

a story to go along with your answer. And

I can't actually imagine the need for more than about five stories.

Because the themes for those questions tend to

circulate around detail-oriented, communication,

teamwork, like there's a lot of the same themes. And so as long as you're pulling

together stories that paint those types of pictures, you

should be fine. They might ask you about teamwork and you'd

prepared a story about dealing with a challenging colleague, but that actually

is okay. You can pull it back to teamwork, right? There's a

lot of ways that you can mitigate the work that you might think that

Yeah, I think that's the whole thing. If you practice a few of them, it's

in your brain. It's more just thinking about like on the fly, it's so hard

to be like, oh, when did I work with a difficult colleague? And

then you just sit there silently, and every second feels so long. But

if you're like, oh, yeah, I kind of knew I should pull one of these out and one of these. And

at least then you've kind of made your brain go back in time as well, which I think is

And humans love stories. We connect over stories.

Even if you're not asked a behavioral-based interview question, there's

often a lot of wiggle room in your answers to

bring in a story. So one of our members asked

how they would respond to a question, which is

just a terrible question, but what's your greatest weakness? Which we almost

never hear that question in interviews, but that's the question everyone

fears because we've been told like, Oh,

just say, like, I work too hard or something. Like, no, that's not,

I'm a perfectionist. Like, I am so detail oriented. I

mean, it's such a bad question. It's a bad question. And no one's going to be like, oh,

I am like, I don't know. I swear like a sailor, like

no one's saying that. I mean, maybe they are. I guess if

we're telling people to bring your authentic self, I guess you could throw it out there, but don't.

My example today for the Accelerator member, she's

an immunologist. And I was like, well, it's not like you're going to come out and say, like,

I don't know immunology. It's a terrible question. I think

there's a way, usually, to turn around those questions,

even if they are kind of bad questions, to pull in

a story and almost turn it into a star-based question.

So my example for that is, for me, And

this is how I would even answer the question. I am aware of a weakness of mine.

I work on it all the time because it's something that's very present. I

generate a lot of ideas and I overwhelm my

team members with that because I will just,

in my ideation, I will throw out ideas. And because I

lead a team, some team members get stressed out about that. They want

to go into action. start enacting those ideas, but I've

not provided any clear framework for whether they're good ideas,

bad ideas, and frankly, many of them should not see the light of day, right?

So the way I have trained myself to mitigate this

is I try to write things down now, and I try and

sit on them for 24 hours. And then a lot of

them get crossed off my list. But the ones that I do feel are

good, I want to provide a little more context and framework before

I just throw them out in a meeting. This is something I work on constantly. I

know it's a problem. And it's something that I think is also a

strength of mine, but in the wrong context can really overwhelm a

But you see how I can take that terrible question and sort

of bring in a bit of a story. It's not a full story, but

it's a scenario. And it also shows my thought process. Here

are the steps I've taken. So in her case, I

advised her to think back to something she actually learned from

her last job, something that was a weakness. that she

was aware of. One thing I noticed in my last position was

that I was weak in X area, so I took XYZ steps to

improve. I'm still working on it. It's something I continually want

to work toward, but I am and this is what I'm doing. And so

Yeah, I think the ownership piece of that is what is like just super

critical. People love when you just say, yeah, I know and I own

this aspect of it and then following it up exactly like you

said, these are the steps I'm taking. No one is perfect

and I think very few people are actually really good at delineating

and owning their weaknesses in a way that you know, really shows

growth. Yeah. So I think that's a perfect answer. It's a lot better than

the time I interviewed at a company and I was asked what type of a tree

I would be. Oh, I know like four trees. I

think I said a palm tree because I like like the heat and being in Florida, which like the

job was in Massachusetts. So they're probably like, oh, this isn't going to work out

But that's a really interesting question

So early on, there was a client that

liked to ask wacky questions and that was something

I challenged them on was like, what's the utility of this question? They

were like, well, we just want to see how creative someone's answer is. Okay,

but we're a biotech. That's right.

I mean. Fine, but expect candidates

to be a little put off by that because you

can understand, even if it's a bad question, you can understand the

question, what's your greatest weakness? You can understand that they're trying to understand

something about you. The palm tree or the tree question, I don't know.

I mean, basically what I told them is that I only know four types of trees. I

was like, my tree knowledge is like, I don't know, Christmas tree, a

palm tree, and then a maple? I don't know. I'm kind of like

grasping here. So clearly they knew. And I wasn't

Yeah. They're nothing to do with trees. I'm married to a woodworker and I

would not be able to answer that question. I have no idea. I have no idea.

He's always like, I found the coolest tree. I'm like, cool. I

have no idea what type of tree. I could not walk outside and tell you what trees

Maybe that's my greatest weakness. I am very poorly educated on

I would say that's a huge weakness and something you should work on. Definitely affects