I’ve noticed a troubling trend the more I’ve been interviewing candidates recently. About 50% of the time, candidates are showing up early for their interview. For a startup in a small office (usually without a reception area), this is very inconvenient. Yet the candidates seem to think that they have somehow made a good first impression by showing up early. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I’m here to tell you that being early to an interview is worse than being late.
As an interviewer we want candidates to be on-time — not late, but certainly not early. When you’re early, you create a series of problems. Let me provide you an example, using a case from this past week. In this case, the candidate was scheduled for an interview at 2:00pm. That day, one of our Board members was visiting the office. My meeting with the Board member ran over (no surprise) and that pushed lunch with the team back as well. It was important to me and the rest of the team to have our Board member spend some quality time with us as a group. I was hoping for a lively discussion during lunch with a question/answer session to follow. We started lunch around 1:15pm, and we gathered together in the front area of the office (in the same area as the front door of the office) where we typically eat lunch.
At around 1:35pm (20 minutes later), the front door of the office swung open, and in walked our interviewee. She was 25 minutes EARLY to her interview, and we had to interrupt our meeting to say hello. She was cordial and nice, but I was annoyed. There was nowhere for her to sit and wait. She was now standing over our meeting — as an un-welcome guest. I almost asked her to leave and come back at 2:00pm, but I didn’t want to be that rude. Instead, we tried to continue our meeting. The next natural pause in the conversation could have been the start of a question/answer session. Instead, with our candidate standing idly by, we ended our meeting so we could start the interview.
If it sounds like I’m ranting about a small issue, I’ll say two things. First, that’s part of why this blog exists. And second, this is a bigger deal than you might think when you are trying to run a start-up in a small office. It’s such a simple thing that can easily be fixed.
What should a candidate do if they are early to an interview? It’s pretty simple: Stay in your car! Wait until one minute before your appointed interview time, and then impress the heck out of us by showing up at the door EXACTLY on time. Simple, stress-free, and easy. Oh, and don’t be late.
October 5, 2009
hiring, startup 
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