Two Things You Can Do to Reinvent Your Hiring Process
It doesn’t matter if you have a great idea, or a great product or you have access to great customers. If you don’t have employees that do great work, your other “greatnesses” won’t last for long.
Hiring the right people for the right role is one of the biggest challenges for scaling companies.
A SHRM Human Capital Benchmarking Survey indicates that it takes an average of 1 ½ months to fill an open position – although we have all had experiences of critical roles that have taken 2- 3 months to fill. Their data also shows an average annual employee turnover rate of 19%. With the amount of time and resources we invest in hiring, shouldn’t we hold ourselves up to a better outcomes?
I have interviewed hundreds of people over the course of my career. And I’ve been interviewed many dozen times. I’d like to think I’ve learned how to do both much better as I’ve gained more experience. What I have definitely learned is that the standard corporate hiring process is broken and in bad need of re-invention. And by reinvention, I don’t mean introducing AI into the process – there are enough articles on AI in hiring – and the jury is still out on whether it makes the hiring process better, or just faster.
The standard corporate hiring process is broken and in bad need of reinvention.
Most hiring processes look roughly the same.
First, you encounter the recruiter hurdle
Unless you are getting in through a connection, you must first make it through the recruiter hurdle. Depending on the role and the recruiter, this step is more akin to playing roulette than jumping hurdles. Some recruiters develop expertise in a specific set of job functions, such as technical recruiting. Even then, most rely on LinkedIn profiles and resumes, neither of which are correlated to whether a person is qualified for the specific role the company needs.
I’ve been employed by 10 companies throughout the course of my career. Only the first two jobs resulted from blind applications to the companies. I quickly learned my lesson. The rest all began by seeking out connections to the company and getting warm introductions.
That’s far from ideal. Hiring through connections usually results in a dearth of diverse hiring since people mostly tend to know people similar to themselves.
If you get in the door, you may be subjected to a “hard” skills assessment
Sometimes this step is as shallow as reviewing a resume and conducting a background check. Yes, the person held the roles they said they did at all the places they named. Check. This is about as effective as hiring based on a resume or LinkedIn profile.
At the other extreme, companies pride themselves in taking the poor candidates through some sort of 12-unit skills assessment process, complete with take home projects, “in class” tests, oral exams, and case study analysis. If I’m applying to be a NASA astronaut or some other coveted and critical position, I’m all for this. But when Average Co makes a candidate go through all these hoops, they tend to be left with Average Candidate, because the good ones will get scooped up faster by someone smarter and less ego driven.
Next comes the “soft” skills assessment
Most of the time, this is an unstructured discussion with people on the team you’ll be reporting to or working with. We don’t really believe that talking to someone who is on their best behavior for 45 minutes will help us determine whether they are the best candidate for the job. But we go through the motions anyway.
With the AIpocalypse, a plethora of AI-powered interview tools have hit the market. Some are survey-style questions that analyze you on a spectrum – organized-to-spontaneous or reserved-to-social. Others are open ended questions that analyze your responses, tone of voice and perhaps expression. Many articles raise concerns that using these AI-powered solutions simply replace human bias with machine bias or error. Some AI-powered solutions have been shown to take into consideration things like a person’s tone of voice (which can be affected by background and culture), whether they are wearing glasses or jewelry, or even their background on a video call. If a person made decisions based on these criteria, we wouldn’t put them on the hiring team.
We don’t really believe that talking to someone who is on their best behavior for 45 minutes will help us determine whether they are the best candidate for the job. But we go through the motions anyway.
Two documents that should be prepared for every open req
The key to hiring well starts well before the recruiting process. It starts with the job description. Most hiring managers approach job descriptions this way.
I need to hire a Director of XYZ.
I search online for job openings with titles similar to “Director of XYZ”.
I copy the job descriptions and merge them into something that hopefully makes sense.
Or I just ask ChatGPT to create a job description for me.
Job descriptions have become generic, and often just a grab bag of every responsibility and skill that could apply to a role with that title. When they are broad and generic, they aren’t useful for recruiters or AI solutions. They also aren’t useful to a candidate is considering whether to apply for the role. And you can’t use them as interview guides.
The first step reinventing hiring is creating a company-specific, role-specific, team-specific, and outcome-specific job description (a CRTO JD) that both the hiring manager and the candidate review and agree upon. This takes time and effort – and that’s why managers don’t do them. But a well done CRTO JD can accomplish many things that traditional hiring processes don’t accomplish.
It could (perhaps) be more useful for recruiters as they have real requirements to review with candidates, rather than the generic responsibilities in most job descriptions.
More importantly, it can help hold hiring managers accountable as they bring in their friends and neighbors for job interviews – as recruiters, executives and team members will have more specific measures to assess these connections against.
It can form the basis of an interview, with each interviewer responsible for covering part of the job description with the candidate.
A proper CRTO JD will have a team-specific section. It may read something like: “Collaborate with 5 team members, covering the following responsibilities: [LIST PRIMARY RESPSONSIBILITY OF EACH MEMBER OF THE TEAM]. Team members are located in [virtual / office?] and prefer communicating using [communication platform]. The more a candidate is made aware of the team they are working with, the more their expectations will be appropriately set and they can assess their own fit for the role.
A proper CRTO JD will have some 30 / 60 / 90 day outcomes in the job description. Some roles will lean towards 30 days; others will lean towards 90 days. The goal is to include measurable outcomes, so that the hiring manager is equipped with the ability to make fast decisions if the new hire is not meeting the outcomes within the expected period.
With a specific and company, role, team and outcome focused job description prepared, the next reinvention in the hiring process is creating company specific case studies.
Most “soft skill” questions ask candidates about a scenario they encountered in the past. Smart candidates (that may or may not be good fits for the open role) have learned to create 3-4 stories that can be unpacked to answer most of these scenario-focused questions.
Company Case Studies flip the scenario from a candidate experience to a company experience. Company Case Studies don’t test technical skills like, for example, coding exercises might. They should be designed to give the candidate a close-to-real scenario of a challenging situation the group executive has faced and give the candidate an opportunity to reflect on how the candidate would handle the situation.
Company Case Studies should be designed to give the candidate a close-to-real scenario of a challenging situation the group executive has faced
Because they are close-to-real scenarios and because they are not role specific but executive level situations, they accomplish three things (where traditional soft skills questions usually accomplish nothing). By providing the candidate with a company-specific executive challenge:
The candidate is reacting to a new scenario, not just spouting out a rehearsed one.
The candidate is responding to a company-specific scenario, allowing the interviewing manager to consider the candidate’s responses in light of the company’s actual environment.
The candidate is responding to an executive-level challenge, creating more empathy for the decisions that executives must make, which should drive better engagement and appreciation if the candidate joins the company.
Beginning your hiring process with a well prepared CRTO JD and one or two Company Case Studies will fix some of the biggest problems with today’s hiring process.
Recruiters will have specific responsibilities to screen for.
Your interview team will be more aligned
Candidates will have a clearer understanding of the role, near-term expectations, and whether they are a fit
The interview process will become more streamlined, reducing candidate frustration
Your “soft skills” assessment will be tangibly connected to challenges your organization actually faces
Both CRTO JDs and Company Case Studies take time to prepare properly. In an active hiring environment, hiring managers at fast-scaling companies won’t want to spend the time creating them. Delegating the responsibility to someone else is abdicating your role as a hiring manager. If the material ends up being inadequate because someone else prepared it, it’s as good as if you didn’t do the work in the first place.
In high-growth companies, the job of HR teams is not to do this work for their managers. It is to design an organization where managers are trained to be able to prepare and act on these hiring materials, and have the time to do that – because they are an important part of the job of management. Having made several hiring mistakes over the course of my career, investing my time in hiring better is one of my biggest priorities as a manager.
What approaches do you use to ensure you hire well? Share your comments below.