Thank you for sharing your experience interviewing at Asana. Your review helped spark a refreshed dialogue around candidate experience here at Asana, and yesterday our co-Founder Justin Rosenstein sent the following memo to all staff. In the spirit of transparency and improvement, we wanted to share it with you. MINDFUL INTERVIEWING & ACHIEVING A GREAT CANDIDATE EXPERIENCE I’m honestly saddened that we contributed to such negative feelings and experience for this candidate. This is an opportunity for us to reflect on how all candidates perceive us during interviews no matter what the outcome is, and to remember that we are representing ourselves and Asana to the outside world in each of these interactions. It’s critical that we provide every candidate with a great experience. This is important as an end in itself: they are fellow human beings who deserve our respect, regardless of whether they’re a fit to work here. It’s also important as a means toward an end: if we develop a reputation for being arrogant or incompetent, then great people will understandably not want to work here, and our potential as a company will be severely limited. As we grow, we’re already investing in providing and developing more formal training around candidate experience. In the meantime, when we are conducting interviews, we encourage you to be mindful and remember these core principles of ensuring a great interview experience: - Empathize. Being evaluated is extremely stressful. - Be kind. Be compassionate. - Do whatever you can to make the candidate feel comfortable, at the beginning, middle, and end. - Be human. Make a human connection. How would you interact if you’d been friends for years? - Stay engaged. Make eye contact. - Smile. Use open body language, rather than leaning back or folding your arms. - Ensure you’re making the interaction a conversation, not an interrogation or feeling like one. If the candidate is struggling, encourage them and help find a better path to information exchange, rather than getting to a place of judging them. - Leave time to answer their questions. Even if you’re already sure you won’t be recommending that they advance to the next stage, maintain and offer the same enthusiasm you would give to someone who, say, had crushed their interview. Even if we do this perfectly, we may still occasionally get it wrong. But even these moments can still be a reminder to strive for excellence in our candidate experience. Thanks again for sharing and helping us improve. JR