Compelling Job Description: Draw in great candidates by telling them about your product, the type of people who thrive on your team, and how the job contributes to your mission or bottom line. Selling candidates on your team should be an ongoing process throughout the interview process, and a well-crafted job description is just the beginning.

Different Interview Focus Areas: To thoroughly evaluate a candidate’s skill set, it’s crucial to have a team of interviewers with diverse focus areas. This approach helps avoid redundancy in questioning while also ensuring that no crucial aspect of the candidate's abilities goes unassessed. By adopting this strategy, you can effectively assess different facets of each candidate and make well-informed hiring decisions.

Real-Life Scenario-Based Questions: Use interview questions that resemble real-life scenarios that someone on the team might work on, are easy to explain to a candidate in an interview setting, and evaluate the skills that matter most to you.

Engaging, Bias-Free Interviews: Showcase your company’s teamwork and culture by conducting engaging, bias-free interviews. Provide interviewers with training on how to reduce bias in their interviews and make sure that every interviewer’s goal is to provide a great candidate experience regardless of the outcome.

Rubrics and Scorecards: Use scorecards for a shared documentation framework and establish a rubric so that you’ll recognize a great hire when you come across them. Don’t compare candidates to each other or yourselves - compare them to the rubric you created based on what you need.

Debrief and Decide: Create a debriefing framework process for all interviewers to align on candidate performance. For instance, what is the performance criteria for deciding if you make someone an offer? Does someone need to champion the hire? It’s crucial everyone is using the same framework to make hiring decisions.

Effective Closing Process: After you decide you want to make an offer to a candidate, you need an effective closing process that provides the candidate with more information about your company and paints a picture of what it would be like to work on your team. It’s important to maintain consistency in your messaging throughout the interview process and ensure that all interviewers are aligned in their pitch to sell the candidate on the opportunity.

Competitive Offer Package: To hire top talent, you’ll want to provide a competitive offer package. For early-stage companies, you need to provide a clear explanation of the value of your equity as well as opportunities for growth and increased ownership within the company.