By Nick Carman, Founder, Velop
Early in my career, I ran interviews the way most people do. I booked the room for an hour, skimmed the resume walking between the printer and the door, and opened with “so, walk me through your background.” I thought I was good at it. I was reading the room, trusting my gut, making the call. What I was actually doing was having a pleasant conversation and then hiring the person I liked the most.
Over roughly 20 years and hosting more than 5,000 interviews, I learned that instinct is the least reliable tool in the room. The interviews that led to great hires and the ones that led to expensive mistakes often felt identical while they were happening. So I rebuilt the way I interview from the ground up, trading gut feel for structure. This is what that structure looks like, and why it makes your hiring decisions more resilient and far more likely to reveal a candidate’s true potential.
Here is the uncomfortable part: most hiring goes wrong before the candidate ever sits down.
Build your scoring matrix before you shortlist
The best interviews are decided in the preparation, not the room. Before you write the job description, define the core problems this hire actually needs to solve. In my experience that’s often 2-3 problems, if you are writing 5 or more maybe this is not one hire but two. Then work backwards to the skills and experience required to solve them exceptionally well. Those become your scoring criteria, the fixed measures you apply to every candidate equally, whether or not you went to the same school, share a contact, or both follow the same team.
Once you have your criteria, split them into two columns: skills you need from day one, and skills the person can develop in the role. This one distinction prevents the two most common hiring mistakes I see. Managers either reject strong candidates over a gap that was trainable, or they hire on raw potential without being honest about what the seat demands on the very first morning.
Use the 15 minutes before the room opens
A well structured interview can be run in 45 minutes, but tradition dictates you book the full hour. So use it. Book the room for an hour and start the interview at quarter past. Spend that first 15 minutes re-reading the resume, reviewing your shortlisting notes, and reminding yourself why you invited this person in the first place.
The best interviewers do not walk in cold. They walk in with a hypothesis they are trying to confirm or disprove. Those 15 minutes are where you form it.
Act one: who they are at their best
The candidate sitting opposite you wants to show you their best self, so give them the space to shine. “Walk me through your resume” is information you already have, and it makes them recite an answer they rehearsed and delivered time after time. Open with something that puts them in the driver’s seat and makes you more memorable:
“I’ve read your resume, so if it’s alright with you I’d like to jump straight in. What do you think is your most relevant experience for this role, and why?”
You are listening for two things at once. Do they understand what this role genuinely requires, and do you agree with their read on themselves? A candidate who misjudges the role is not automatically a weak candidate. Sometimes it is a communication gap you can correct in the room and move on. Then follow the thread:
- “Why did you choose that example over the others?”
- “What were the conditions that let you perform at that level?”
- “Is that typical of how you work, or was it a one-off?”
This act is about performance and culture fit together. You are testing for self-awareness and for the conditions in which this person does their best work, because that tells you whether your environment will bring out the best in them or slowly grind them down.
Act two: how they actually work
This is where most interviews stay too shallow. Managers ask what a candidate did, when what matters is how they did it and who else was in the room. Real estate is a team sport with high stakes and long timelines, so you need to know how someone operates when a deal goes sideways, not just when it closes. Strip the veneer:
- “Tell me about a deal or project that did not go the way you planned. What broke down, and what did you personally own?”
- “What is a decision you made that your team disagreed with? How did you handle it, and what happened?”
- “Describe a time you had to deliver bad news to a client or investor. How did you approach it?”
Listen for specificity. “We had a tough quarter but pulled through as a team” tells you almost nothing. Push for the individual thread inside the team story: “What was your specific role in that?” and “What would you do differently now?”
This is also the moment to lean on your matrix. For every core competency you defined before the interview, you should already have a question ready and a clear idea of what a weak answer sounds like. Do not improvise here. The matrix exists precisely so a compelling personality or a familiar story cannot pull you off course. Score each competency independently, on a simple one-to-four scale tied to evidence, and do it before you compare notes with your fellow interviewers. The moment one person shares an overall impression, it anchors everyone else, a well-documented bias that quietly costs firms strong hires every year.
Act three: now it is their turn
The questions a candidate asks you are often the most revealing part of the whole interview, so do not rush this section or use it as a means to wrap up the interview. Strong candidates have done the work. Their questions are forward-looking and specific: what does success look like at 90 days and how is it measured, what is the biggest challenge the team is navigating right now, how does the team handle disagreement on strategy. Candidates who ask only about start dates and benefits are not necessarily weak, but they are telling you they may suit a structured execution role more than one that demands initiative. It is vital knowing which one you are hiring before they start.
Where the assessment data comes in
Everything above works with no tools beyond your own discipline. But there is a limit to what you can build a hypothesis from when all you have is a resume, which tells you what someone has done and almost nothing about how they think, what drives them, or how they will fit your team.
This is the problem I built Velop to solve. We run personality and cognitive assessments at the very start of the process, before the first interview, so by the time you are in the room you already know which competencies to probe, where to push harder, and which assumptions to test. If the profile flags lower emotional resilience, you know to explore how the candidate manages pressure, not as a gotcha, but to understand it. A low score is never disqualifying on its own. A low score paired with no coping strategy is a much clearer signal. The assessment turns a vague hunch into a targeted question. The interview turns that question into evidence.
What the best interviewers do differently
A great interview is neither an interrogation nor an unstructured chat. It is a disciplined investigation that gives the candidate a chance to shine, they will remember and thank you for this. Your matrix provides the structure, your questions provide the evidence, and, if you have it, your assessment data tells you whether the person can do the job, wants to do it, and is likely to thrive in your environment.
Candidates who are a poor fit will sometimes interview brilliantly. Candidates who are a great fit will sometimes interview badly. Your job is to build a process resilient enough to reveal the truth in both cases.
Download the guide
I have put everything above, including the full interview matrix with competency weighting and a worked example for a real estate acquisitions role, into a single Hiring Manager’s Interview Guide. Download it here and use it to prepare for your next interview.
And if you want to walk into that interview already knowing more about the person than most interviewers ever find out, that is exactly what we do at Velop.