How to Interview Candidates When You Have No HR Team

You're on your third interview of the day, taking the call from your car because the office is loud, and halfway through you realise you asked this candidate completely different questions than the one from Tuesday. There's no one to check your notes against. There's no template sitting in a shared drive. It's just you, your gut, and a decision that affects the next two years of the business.

This is normal for most 10-200 person companies. You don't have an HR department because you don't need one most days — you need one for the four hours a month you're hiring. The problem isn't that you lack expertise. It's that everything lives in your head: what you liked about candidate one, what worried you about candidate three, whether "good communicator" meant the same thing both times. Memory is a bad database.

Here's how to get most of the benefit of a structured process without needing a department to run it.

Decide what "good" looks like before you meet anyone

Write down three to five things this specific role actually requires — not personality traits, things you can observe. For a bookkeeper: catches errors, works without being chased, comfortable saying "this doesn't add up." For a salesperson: handles rejection without deflating, asks questions before pitching, follows up without being told.

Do this before the first interview, not after you've already met someone you like. It's much harder to invent criteria that happen to favour your favourite candidate than to invent them in advance and then measure everyone against the same bar.

Ask every candidate the same core questions

You don't need twenty questions. Three or four that map directly to your criteria are enough. The point isn't variety — it's comparability. If you ask candidate A about a time they caught their own mistake and candidate B about their five-year plan, you're not comparing candidates. You're comparing two different interviews.

Keep two or three questions flexible to follow up on their CV or their answers. But protect the core set. Write them down and reuse them for every candidate in that hiring round.

Take notes during the interview, not after

By the time you're on candidate four, candidate one is a blur, and what you remember most vividly is usually the most recent or most emotionally charged answer — not the most useful one. Write down what they actually said, in their words, while they're saying it. It feels a little rude at first. It's far less rude than deciding someone's future based on a fuzzy impression three days later.

Separate "can they do this" from "do I like them"

These are two different questions and they get merged constantly, especially without a second person in the room to push back. Someone can be warm, easy to talk to, and genuinely unable to do the job. Someone else can be a little awkward on a call and be exactly who you need. Score these separately, even informally — a quick note on competence and a separate note on whether you'd want to work with them daily. If they conflict, that's worth sitting with rather than letting the more comfortable feeling win by default.

Borrow a second opinion, even an unqualified one

HR's real value in an interview isn't expertise, it's a second brain in the room that isn't yours. You can get this without a department. Ask a colleague from another team to sit in on one round, even if hiring isn't their job. Ask a co-founder to read your notes before you decide. Ask a friend outside the company to poke holes in your reasoning over coffee. You're not looking for someone to make the decision — you're looking for someone to notice what you can't see because you're too close to it.

Decide your dealbreakers before, not during

It's easy to talk yourself out of a red flag mid-interview because the person is likeable. Decide in advance: is a gap in the CV disqualifying on its own? Is being late to the interview? Is dodging a direct question about a past failure? Write these down before you start interviewing so you're applying a rule you set when you were thinking clearly, not one you're inventing in the moment to justify a feeling.

Write the decision down, even just to yourself

After you decide, send yourself an email: who you hired, why, what almost changed your mind. This takes two minutes and it's the closest thing to institutional memory you'll have without HR. Next time you hire for a similar role, you'll have a record of what worked instead of starting from a blank page and your gut again.

Where structure can carry some of the weight

One thing HR teams often do that's hard to replicate solo is give every candidate the same objective measure, independent of how the conversation went. If you don't trust yourself to be fair across a long day of interviews — and you probably shouldn't, nobody is — a calibrated assessment can do that part consistently, regardless of who's charming and who's tired. AssessFit works this way: candidates take the same test, scored the same way, and it's free for them either way. It won't tell you who to hire. It just gives you one less thing you have to hold steady in your own head.

What this doesn't fix

None of this replaces judgement, and none of it makes you immune to bias — it just gives the bias less room to operate unchecked. You'll still sometimes hire the wrong person. The goal isn't a perfect process. It's a process consistent enough that when it goes wrong, you can tell why, and fix that one thing next time instead of starting over.