How to Interview for Self-Awareness

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What makes a great interview question? There's a lot of components and it's different for different things. If I were to ask your coworkers about working with you, what would they say? What are you really good at? What are your growth areas? You can get a sense if someone has actually given deep thought to it or if it's the first time that they're ever thinking about what they could be better at.

Our guest today is Nadia Singer, Chief People Officer at Figma.

Nadia joined Figma in 2020 and has seen explosive growth in her own career alongside the collaborative design platform’s. Before Figma, Singer was a talent expert who has hired hundreds of talented folks at places like Quora, Facebook and Google.

In our conversation today, we dive deep into what makes someone a terrific talent evaluator. Nadia opens up her own recruiter playbook and shares:

Her personal recruiting trick, which is to study how a candidate reaches an answer, rather than what they say
Tactics interviewers can use to avoid pattern matching and other biases
The biggest mistakes she made in her early days as a recruiter
Ways that Figma tweaked its approach to culture so it could scale alongside the company

You can follow Nadia on Twitter at @nadsinger. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.