Imagine the scene, you have a job interview with the CEO of a great Startup for the job of your dreams.

You Potash like crazy all the questions that are regularly asked in interview. You know exactly what you'll respond when he or she will ask you to tell you this experience, your main qualities that you learned from your previous jobs etc ... Except that the first question you ask the CEO is " What can you bring us? "This is the kind of thing to be expected when you go to an interview in a startup.

Here are some differences between the interviews in a startup and a large group that can help you better understand these to get the job you want.

HR against CEO

Each major group who respects, must have a dedicated HR team. Indeed, the founder simply does not have time to pass job interviews with dozens of people a week because it must continue to lead the business in parallel.

In an interview in a large group, so you'll be confronted with recruitment experts, who occupy the HRD function and whose job it is every day. In comparison, the hiring process in a startup is very different. It is rare that the startup has a team dedicated to recruiting except when it is growing exponentially (type BlaBlaCar or Criteo).

 Generally, it is a founding member who will be responsible for conducting the interview. According postuliez you for a startup or a large group, so the interview will take place not in the same way, it will be to you to adapt your speech according to what your partner expects. Indeed, a CEO will focus more on the business and operational part while an HR attempt to dig more on the consistency of your professional and academic background.
 

A CEO will focus more on the business and operational part while an HR attempt to dig more on the consistency of your professional and academic background.

Standardized interviews versus customised interviews

When you have people fully dedicated to the recruitment of new teams as is the case in large companies, the interview process is often automated. Due to the large number of interviews and scientific studies on this subject, the big groups have standardized job interviews, asking for example, exactly the same questions to the candidates. This probably remains the most effective approach, the less discriminating.

Startup side, the CEO can ignore the best HR practices and therefore carry out a maintenance formal setting. The result is a recruitment process based entirely on the wishes of the founder, who will seek to focus attention primarily on certain details of your personality and your skills that will make you the ideal candidate to him. The startup side, each interview is somewhat unique because the people who make you spend the hiring process are not broken HR practices.
 

large groups have standardized job interviews, asking for example, exactly the same questions to the candidates.

Passive candidates vs proactive candidates

When job interviews are conducted by HR professionals in a large group, candidates become passive. Indeed, as they rely on lists of questions prepared in advance standardized, this leaves little chance for the candidate to take the lead in the interview. Usually, the only thing you need to do for this type of interview is to prepare yourself for a comprehensive list of sample questions. In startups, it is not uncommon for it to be the other way around. 

The CEO can start with 2-3 basic questions before gradually letting the candidate lead the interview and voluntarily leaving him a lot of leeway to see what he can bring to the company. These are two totally different approaches, in the case of large companies, we will seek to identify potential while in startups we will focus more on people who can be operational quickly with great versatility. During a start-up job interview, you must therefore be able to take the lead while being a source of proposals, otherwise you will miss out on the job!
 

When a job in maintenance startup, so you must be able to take the lead