My transition from recruited to recruiter was lightning fast: I had my final round interview at Astranis on a Wednesday, signed my offer on Friday, and interviewed from the other side of the same table the following Monday.

For that first interview, I wasn’t calibrated on what makes great candidates great, I didn’t know how to ask good questions, and I definitely didn’t know how my interview fit into the broader recruiting process of sourcing, evaluating, and selling candidates. Even so, I loved being given the opportunity to learn on the fly — it was exactly why I wanted to join a startup! — and I learned fast.

After 2.5 years of helping Astranis scale from 50 to 175 employees, I’ve evaluated thousands of applications and interviewed >200 prospective hires.

Doing so has taught me a number of lessons about what it means to be a good interviewer and a good applicant. If you’re applying to a startup, you’ll want to take note of both the tips to applicants and the tips to interviewers — after all, you might transition from one to the other quickly if all goes well!

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1) Communication is important, but it’s not everything.

A classic mistake that new interviewers make is to rate good communicators too high and poor communicators too low. All recruits should effectively communicate, but it’s not game over if someone flubs a presentation — particularly if the role is internal-facing, or doesn’t require presentations in the normal course of business. (Similarly, smooth talkers shouldn’t be given preferential treatment if their roles don’t require smooth talking.)

One recent candidate at Astranis stumbled and bumbled through their presentation. A few of us on the panel (rightly) held those missteps against the candidate, but some of my teammates missed the content of the presentation… which was amazing! It was a fantastic example of what they’d be asked to do in their job, and I successfully argued that the results they presented spoke for themselves. (Plus, they were great in the one-on-one meetings, so it was probably just stage fright.)

✨Lesson for Recruiters: If a candidate is giving a poor presentation, note that down, but immediately start to look beneath their performance to evaluate them on the other criteria that matter. The same holds in reverse! Don’t let a great speaker talk their way out of giving you real answers.

✨Lesson for Candidates: Don’t freak out about your presentation skills. Great interviewers will know how to assess your skills independently, and even if you flub a speech, you can redeem yourself in one-on-one interviews.

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2) False positives are way worse than false negatives.

Another common rookie interviewer mistake is to pass people through the process who are good, but not great. I remember how it feels — you’re not sure whether to let someone continue interviewing with the company; you know that they’ll be bummed if you reject them; and you don’t want to miss out on a candidate due to your misjudgment of their awesomeness.

But in high-volume recruiting, you should care most about minimizing the odds of making a bad hire, which counterintuitively means that it’s totally okay to reject a great candidate. Bad hires are bad for company and candidate alike; the company spends tons of resources onboarding, offboarding, and restarting recruiting for the role; the candidate could have spent their time at a job that was a better fit for their skills.

It should be noted that not all startups agree on this point — some cultures, like Netflix, famously “fire fast,” which lowers the initial hiring bar.

✨Lesson for Recruiters: Only move candidates onto the next round if you have evidence of exceptional ability. My experience is that most candidates look about the same — some good, some meh — and it’s tempting to choose the local maxima when you’re still in that stage. But if you keep going, you’ll eventually find someone who is miles better than anyone you’ve interviewed before. You’ll know it when you see it.

✨Lesson for Candidates: Don’t take rejection too personally. I was rejected the first time I applied to Astranis, and I was rejected by literally dozens of companies before I found a perfect match. Companies aren’t saying you’re bad by saying “no” — sometimes, a no just means the interviewer asked poor questions and didn’t get good signal from you as a result!

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3) The goal of recruiting is to ensure there’s a match between the candidate and the company.

As I’ve written about before, there are many different kinds of startup, and each will be best for a different kind of person.

There’s no shame in preferring to join a rapidly scaling startup (a little more stable, a little less upside) over an earlier-stage, “drunken walk” of a startup. The goal of the recruiter is to find someone that will be great in the context of their company; the goal of the recruit shouldn’t be to get an offer, it should be to find a company that matches their style of working.

There are many, many ways that startups differ, even beyond the stage they’re at. Some companies work really hard and others are strictly 9-5; some companies primarily promote from within and others recruit new leaders; some companies have tons of process and others have as little as possible; some companies companies have well-defined roles and others… don’t. You might never find a perfect match for your preferences, but both company and recruit should make sure every recruit knows what they’re signing up for before they join.

✨Lesson for Recruiters: Make recruits tell you what they didn’t like about previous jobs, about what demotivates them, and what sorts of things made them want to leave their last job. Candidates are often reticent to talk poorly about past employers (for good reason), so take care to create a positive, constructive, non-judgmental tone — and let them start with the positives, so they don’t feel like they’re being unfair or unkind.

✨Lesson for Candidates: Ask lots of questions during the interview process. While the “Do you have any questions for me?” portion of a big-business interview is often boring/optional, at the same portion of a startup interview, you should go into investigator mode. Ask about the company’s future prospects, ask about what your interviewer did that week, ask about what your interviewer likes/dislikes about the way their team works together, etc. Before your interview, you should know what you care about; during the interview, make sure the company is a good match for you.

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4) Detailed is better than comprehensive.

When I last interviewed for a job myself, I made a concerted effort to cover all of my relevant experience in every interview. I prepared detailed stories for all of the major eras of my career and life, and did my best to mention every single one over the course of an interview (even if it meant that I answered the interviewers questions like a politician). I similarly tried to be comprehensive in my early days of interviewing from the other side of the table — I would desperately try to get through my entire list of questions.

Over time, however, I learned that interviews are much better when they go deep than when they go wide. Interviewers really need to dig into the details of a story to fully understand it; they shouldn’t try to check boxes (e.g., “yes, he has experience negotiating”), they should try to understanding your skills (e.g., “he is the person Astranis called in when a mission-critical vendor proved unwilling to budge”).

Here’s an example interview story that I might have told in my college days:

At my internship with Target, I built an Excel model to predict how much inventory of any given order would go to waste. My tool could import the past few years of sales data and spit out an estimate of how much demand was likely in any given month, giving inventory buyers more information ahead of their purchasing. I rolled it out to all of the buyers in my segment, and they said it was a huge help because it wasn’t something they had before.

That’s a fine example for a junior in college — it might check the quantitative skills box, for instance. But if I was interviewing college Christian today, I’d ask him tons of follow-up questions to dig in deeper:

• Did you get assigned that piece of work, or did you identify the need for it yourself?

• Who was on your team? Did you work with anyone on the tool? How closely involved was your manager?

• What was the rollout of the tool like? Did you review it with anyone beforehand? Why did you choose to roll it out to your function, rather than a smaller or bigger group?

• Why didn’t Target already have a tool like this? What did buyers use before your tool?

• Do you know if they kept using the tool for the long run?

• How long did this take you to complete? What would you have done if you had only half of that time? What about if you had 10x as much time?

• What would you do differently if you were given this same assignment today?

✨Lesson for Recruiters: Go deep. Keep asking questions, keep digging. Well-spoken candidates will have great stories they’ve prepared ahead of time, but try to get beyond their preparation as fast as possible. If you sense that they’re talking around a detail, ask extremely direct questions to make them confront stuff they might be trying to hide/paint over.

✨Lesson for Candidates: Don’t be afraid to go with the flow, but be super careful in your selection of the first story you tell. Make it your best! You should follow your interviewer’s lead, and anticipate what they’re trying to assess as they ask about each individual story.

Thanks for reading Silicon Valley Outsider! I’m Christian, the Chief of Staff of Astranis, and I write this newsletter for folks who are interested in startups but live outside of the SF Bay Area.

If you want to join 500+ folks in getting an email from me each Monday, I’ll help you understand Silicon Valley using normal-human words.

Here are a few past editions that you might like if you enjoyed this one:

• 😱 Don’t be afraid of working at a startup

• 💼 How to find a business role at a startup

• 🚀 The many, varied stages of startup life