The interview process: how to avoid hiring the wrong people

Course content (16 lessons)

In this lesson, learn Shopify's 'secret sauce' that we look for in talent during the interviews. We encourage you to create your 'need to have' list for talent you want to hire.

The interview process. You should be creating an interview process that is reflective of your company culture, and that suits the needs of each department. So you'll be creating different types of interview styles for different types of departments. You may have one consistent culture interview style and then a number of skills and experience-based questions that you'll want to learn from candidates.
Ask yourself who on your team needs to meet the candidates and at what stage? Remember, candidates are interviewing you as much as you're evaluating them. I'd recommend no more than five people meet a candidate. And each person should look for different things. You don't want a candidate to have the exact same conversation five times. As I mentioned earlier, you may have one consistent culture-based interview type, as well as many skills and experience-based interview types.
Now, the concept of fit has a bad rep and rightfully so. If not done right, hiring for fit can mean that you hire all the same people. People that you get along with. Some describe it as a shield for discrimination when hiring for fit means recruiting like-minded talent. In our very early days-- now, we're talking under 50 employees-- we thought of fit along a similar shallow note, too.
When hiring, we asked ourselves questions like, would I want to spend a long flight seated next to this candidate? It wasn't too long before we realized we were absolutely missing out on some great talent and hiring people who weren't right either. So, of course, we changed our approach. Culture is still very important in how you hire. So we established our four predictors of success.
Now, these are characteristics that transcend dimensions of diversity like race, gender, expression, or age. They are the characteristics that our most successful employees embody. And you can train your recruiters to look for them in an interview. Our predictors of success and culture values are unique to Shopify. Yours, too, should factor in what's important to your organization and its goals. Our predictors of success are authentic in interactions.
We look for candidates who are themselves and not putting up a persona or a facade. But we also know that candidates may come in with nerves and learned behavior around how one should act in an interview. This is why we put the onus on our recruiters to make our candidates feel comfortable so they can be their most authentic selves. Fully engaged. Engagement shows up differently for different types of people.
We've come to equate engagement with high care. The most successful employees at Shopify have a high degree of care for what they do, both at work and outside of it. And that's consistent across different backgrounds and personality types. Our interviewers are taught to dig deep to get a gauge at one's level of care, regardless of their personality type. Engagement is not just an extroverted trait.
Impact-driven. People who are needle-movers. These are the types of people who don't just take their role for what it is, but create something larger than what it was when it all started. We also know that impact is described differently by different people. So we ask the right objective questions to get a sense of one's impact, and how it will translate into their work at Shopify. Quality of experience is more important than years of experience.
Self-aware. Self-awareness is about having an actual sense of reality and the ability to move yourself and your own self-interest from everyday interactions. This predictor of success was born out of a philosophy that we don't hire assholes. This view evolved as we realized that we actually do hire people who can be assholes. But the key is that successful people know when they've been an asshole, and they learn from it.

The interview process: how to avoid hiring the wrong people

Course content (16 lessons)

Module 1: Where do you find top talent?

01 |Module 2: Acing the interview process

02 |Module 3: Hiring a salesforce that helps you scale

03 |Module 4: Creating a culture where talent thrives