Building a Portrait of a Candidate

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I think people think they know what they want and then typically as they start in a process, more unfolds for them. A lot of people that I talk to haven't done job searches in a few years. And so I always try to think about when I'm talking to candidates, how can I help show them a little bit more of what they might be looking for?

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.