I completely agree with the statement that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. However, a company can only foster culture; it cannot impose it on all employees. To establish a healthy and positive culture, it’s essential to have a well-structured hiring process.
Although many people may think that building and running a hiring process is easy, it can actually be quite challenging. Interviews are not simply a set of questions, and the outcome is not merely based on personal preferences like “I liked her” or “I didn’t like him”. The hiring process is more akin to a series of experiments aimed at assessing unobservable traits, such as knowledge and competency.
In this post, I will share some principles and techniques I’ve employed while working for startups. These strategies are geared towards recruiting the best talent for tech teams, in other words, individuals who have a variety of employment options.
First things first
An structured hiring process
Everything starts with a structured and well-designed hiring process. To create this process, the company needs to comprehend all the key areas in which the candidate must be evaluated. Next, consider the abilities that must be tested at each step, whether it’s an interview or a test. Finally, initiate the process and continuously refine it until you attain the desired success metrics.
If your company lacks a structured process, it can begin implementing one right now. Many other aspects discussed in this post are based on this foundational step. For inspiration, you can examine the GitLab Hiring Process.
Don’t assume you are smarter than the candidate
When you have a structured hiring process, each step serves a specific purpose. For instance, in some of the places I’ve worked, we had a step to assess management skills and planning abilities. This included various aspects such as project management, stakeholders alignment, communication, adaptability, escalations to leadership, and more.
To evaluate these skills you need to formulate questions that measure different levels of knowledge related to them. Typically, candidates are expected to provide examples from their past experiences to demonstrate their proficiency in these areas. Crafting effective questions is challenging and it takes time to become well-calibrated.
Even if you are an expert in the field of the interview, avoid assuming you are smarter than the candidate. For instance, exercise caution when asking questions like “Why are you applying to my company?” because:
- Smart candidates often have well-prepared responses;
- Sometimes, the question is intended to assess the motivation to join your company, but it ends up assessing the candidate’s storytelling ability;
- The candidate might provide an answer that aligns with your preferences, potentially biasing your evaluation.
Well-calibrated questions with thoughtful follow-ups are often the best way to ensure you assess the right abilities and avoid biased judgments. In this context, excessive creativity is typically not advisable.
Life is too short to waste on interviews
Some interviewers don’t understand that the process is designed for hiring, not for rejecting candidates. In this context, it’s crucial to establish a transparent process and assist the candidate in being well-prepared. Avoid creating validity issues in your process, which means ensuring you have enough evidence to evaluate the candidate. There are simple steps that can help with this:
- Share the topics you are going to evaluate. Providing some example questions is helpful in this regard.
- Communicate the overall timeline of the process and encourage candidates to create their own preparation schedule.
- Don’t leave the candidate waiting. You don’t necessarily need to provide immediate answers, but keep them informed about what is happening.
- If something isn’t aligned beforehand or during the interview, don’t waste time. For instance, if you find that the candidate is ill-prepared, it’s better to postpone the interview (this is common in case interviews).
Lastly, the speed of the process can have a persuasive impact. It can make the candidate feel special. Take advantage of this, as it’s within your control.
The hiring process is a two-way evaluation process
Some companies have a wrong perception on the hiring process as a one-way evaluation. They just focus on candidate evaluation and let other way in second plan. As a result, this approach can lead to issues such as candidate abandonment, rejections, and, worse yet, employees leaving the company after only 3 or 6 months.
I recommend two strategies to mitigate these problems: (1) allocate 10–15 minutes for candidates to ask questions, and (2) provide insight into how the company operates following some initial questions or interviews.
While in the first strategy you can assess candidates based on whether they have done their homework and understand crucial aspects of the company, the second one becomes especially important when you receive answers that you’re uncertain align with the required proficiency.
Principles over Configuration
In 2000s, we saw a rise of great software development frameworks. One of most famous was Ruby on Rails, that followed the “Conventions over Configurations” mantra. In other words, if you followed the conventions, you didn’t need to add everything to the configuration files. It was great!
In the context of hiring processes, it’s common to see false-positives and false-negatives. This is because such processes are far from being fair and precise experiments. It’s also the reason that I strongly don’t recommend AI-based hiring platforms. This process is not a simple fair bar.
In this context, while configurations and process setup are important, it’s often better to prioritize clear principles over strict rules when evaluating candidates.
The company needs more the candidate than the inverse
When the company believes that they need more the candidate than the candidate needs the job, everything changes. You witness an environment where candidates are at the center, with more kindness and more opportunities for a fair evaluation. Interviewers strive to extract the best from the candidates, and the process can have a positive impact on both sides. Ultimately, you don’t see wastage.
Hire for strengths, not lack of weaknesses
For sure, one of the best books I’ve read in the startup environment is “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”. One of the greatest takeaways from the book is:
When interviewing, it’s easy to go with the well-rounded candidate who is good in many areas and doesn’t have any identifiable weaknesses. But this can be a big mistake. Instead of hiring for a lack of weaknesses, hire for strengths. So if someone has amazing technical capabilities and average communication skills, hire that person over the candidate who is good, but not great at either skill.
As a Hiring Manager, you must know which abilities are essential and which are desirable for the position you are hiring for. With that in mind, share this information with the interviewers to maximize consistency in the evaluation process. Avoid letting them search for weaknesses everywhere.
On a personal note, one of the main reasons I joined Amazon was the hiring process. I had the opportunity to meet remarkable people during that time. After joining, a Bar Raiser that interviewed me told me: ‘If you were hired, it’s because you are expected to bring something valuable to add to the team/organization.’ This made me reflect, and every time I spoke to a new colleague at Amazon, I sought the strengths that brought that person to our team.
Keep the accountability
A company cannot have two different sources when it comes from goals and rewards. If the managers are responsible for achieving the team’s goals, they should also be the ones to administer rewards, rather than relying on HR or other stakeholders.
Similarly, during the hiring process, it’s crucial to uphold the accountability of the hiring managers(HM). At the end, they will have their skin in the game as a result of the process.
During my time at GetYourGuide, I encountered a situation where a candidate received more ‘no’ evaluations than ‘yes’ evaluations, and I was the HM. Following a debrief, our leader let me to decide if we would hire or not that candidate. Since I had previously worked with that person, I had a high level of confidence in hiring her due to the strengths she would bring to my team. That was a really good example of accountability in a hiring culture.
Culture fit is different to Culture aligned
There are companies that believe culture is something static, there are others that take advantage from new people and evolve its culture. The first type of company don’t hire people don’t show almost all culture traits, whereas the latter welcomes those who are eager to learn and contribute to the culture’s evolution.
At Nubank (2020), there was a recommendation that we should understand if the candidates were aligned with the culture and had the potential to understand and improve it. This is perfect for me because it can be challenging to fully grasp all the values and principles before working for companies like Amazon and Nubank.
Continuous Improvement
Processes that have people in the center, such as a hiring process, should evolve over time. Certain events can contribute to this evolution. Let’s explore them.
Evaluate after undesirable events — Before hiring
Engage the candidate to get feedback at the end of the process. It’s essential to recognize that their responses might be influenced by emotions, so the feedback collection method should be thoughtfully designed, like a good survey.
Pay particular attention to potentially undesirable outcomes, such as candidates declining your job offers, dropping out during the process, or not even applying to your job postings. In such cases, your company should conduct a retrospective to facilitate the ongoing evolution of the process.
Onboarding is part of the hiring process
When you hire a candidate, it’s based on numerous assumptions derived from the tests applied during the hiring process. Onboarding and the ramp-up period serve as crucial timeframes to validate these assumptions and provide support to the new employee.
In complex scenarios, such as engineering and product roles in fast-paced startups, onboarding can become the real bottleneck rather than the hiring process itself. In the book ‘An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management’ the author discusses Uber’s experience when they were primarily focused on hiring and attempting to onboard new engineers. However, many of these engineers left the company before they could start generating real value. This issue might be attributed to a lack of accountability from the hiring team, which was not fully engaged in tracking and ensuring success metrics beyond the hiring stage.
Evaluate after undesirable events — after hiring
A great mechanism that I’ve seen at Amazon was the best I saw until today. The HM receives a survey every 1,3,6 and 12-months intervals after a candidate’s hiring, with a simple question: Would you hire this person again? The response options are ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ and ‘I don’t know.’
This straightforward question serves multiple purposes:
- It helps assess the quality of the hire;
- It gauges the effectiveness of the hiring process and whether it was properly calibrated;
- It offers insights into the quality of the onboarding experience;
- It identifies any potential issues in the process or with the interviewers, among other things.
At BHub, we conduct retrospectives when there is a significant departure, whether positive or negative. These retrospectives inform necessary changes to the hiring process.
Bonus
Right people, in the right jobs, at the right time
This is a dream and the goal!
Overhiring x Underhiring
Sometimes you should evaluate overhiring in order to prevent situations with “bus factor” equals one.
Lunch/Dinner with the Candidate
I would add it to the process if I can. I don’t know any remote mechanism that can replace it.
General important aspects to evaluate
Regardless of the position, I usually recommend assessing these aspects to your process:
- Structural thinking;
- Communication skills;
- Straightforward mindset;
- Alignment and project management skills;
- Collaborative decision making.
The beauty of building a great team starts with a hiring process. This is so impactful for early stage startups that as a leader is something that you need to evolve over time.
Any thoughts about this post? Let me know at twitter @marcelioleal or send an email — me at marcelioleal.com.
References
- GitLab has an amazing material for hiring. Take a look here.
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
- (Portuguese) Psicometria: Teoria dos testes na psicologia e na educação
- (Portuguese) Fundamentos da teoria da resposta ao item -TRI
- (Portuguese) Validade dos Testes
- American Psychological Association
- Recruitment Rejection: How to Bounce Back
- Article — Hire For Strengths, Not Lack Of Weaknesses