A Simple Approach to Better Hiring (Part 1)

Over the last few weeks we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the fact that the individual team members who comprise your team are the ultimate differentiator in your ability to be successful.

I firmly believe the above sentiment from last week’s post. The larger the team I lead, the more I’m convinced that the composition of its members dictates the success of the team. The question then becomes, what does good hiring look like?

There are 3 pillars to hiring world class team members:

1. The Process

2. The Traits

3. Your Mindset

In this week’s post we’ll talk about the first pillar, The Process visiting the traits to look for and your mindset next week.

The Process

Before talking about the explicit hiring process a note on the difference between recruitment vs. hiring and the combination of the two.

Recruitment vs. Hiring

One of the biggest mistakes I see leaders make is to focus on hiring exclusively, but ignore recruitment. The best leaders are, “talent collectors” who take an active approach to finding great talent themselves rather than simply relying on the applications they get through their job postings.

The best leverage you have in recruiting effectively is your own network. Stay in touch with people you’ve worked with previously, work to cultivate connections with peers in similar roles to yours at other companies, ask your network for referrals when you have an open position, and spend time adding value to others who you believe are talented even when you don’t have an open role yourself.

Cultivate a broad, interesting rolodex and nurture it the same way you would plants in a garden. This rolodex will become your greatest asset as you progress through your career.

Steps in the process

Now that you’re all expert recruiters it’s time to get to the blocking and tackling of the actual hiring process. While my experience here is biased toward Sales and Revenue Operations roles I think the following serves as a useful framework you can use to build your own hiring process. There are five steps to use consistently:

1. Initial screen

2. Mindset interview

3. Written assessment

4. Role related application

5. An outside opinion

Initial screen

If you’re working at a company large enough to have dedicated recruiting resources this screen can be done by your recruiting partners. They are your greatest ally in the search for talented team members. Trust them, work with them, be clear on what good looks like in this role and let them go do their work.

If you’re at a smaller company and need to do the screening yourself focus your discussion with a candidate on three avenues:

1. A “day in the life” of the role

2. The candidates motivations for pursuing this role

3. The candidate’s compensation expectations

Don’t overcomplicate things at this stage, ensure the candidate’s motivations for the role and compensation expectations are aligned with what you’re looking for and then move on.

Mindset interview

Often this interview is referred to as a “behavioral interview” which is fine, but falls short of what you’re actually trying to assess here. So much of a candidates ability to be successful and drive persistent, differential impact on your team will come from their mindset (more on that in the traits section next week). The goal of this stage in the process is to determine if they have the requisite mindset to be successful in this role and your organization.

Get a sense for challenging scenarios the candidate has been through in the past. If your company moves at a fast pace and makes changes often, how does this candidate respond to change? If your company emphasizes direct feedback and praises performance sparingly, will that work for this candidate? If you are a consensus driven organization, is the candidate okay with slowing down to bring everyone along?

Ninety percent of the hiring mistakes I’ve made had nothing to do with lack of skill; they are a mindset and energy mismatch between the individual and organization.

Tactically, I like for the hiring manager to conduct this interview though it can also be done by more tenured peers.

I used to allow any manager or any peer to conduct these interviews and then determine which team the candidate would join only after finishing the interview process, but this is a mistake. Each team within your organization has their own unique sub-culture. Know which team the candidate is going to join and have the manager or a member of that team be responsible for the Mindset Interview stage. This ensures alignment not only between the candidate and your company, but also between the candidate and the team they’re going to join.

Written Assessment

Once you’ve moved candidates past the Mindset stage it’s time to begin testing their role related knowledge. I like written assessments of some kind which mirror work the candidate will be doing in the role.

A former boss and mentor of mine introduced me to Alex Lieberman, founder of Morning Brew, and his approach to hiring, which is a great one. An important principle of his is to focus on, “what people say, not how they say it.”

It is easy for great communicators to hide poor thinking during a conversation because you get caught up in the back and forth of a good discussion. It is impossible to hide poor thinking in a written assessment.

I prefer memos to slide decks here as I find someone who can build a beautifully designed slide deck is just as capable of hiding poor thinking as a good conversationalist. It’s really hard to hide imprecise thinking when all you have is plain text on a page.

A favorite prompt of mine to use for written assessments is to pick a skill or two which are important in this role and ask the candidate to draft a lesson plan by which they would teach another person how to improve at that skill. Even for individual contributors this can be a powerful exercise as it will clearly show you if this person knows their stuff or not. If someone can teach another person how to do something, they’ve mastered the skill themselves.

Your mileage may vary when it comes to the specific prompt for a written assessment and you should use something that is most aligned with your team and company’s culture. The ability to step away from a face-to-face interview and reflect on a piece of written work from a candidate without any interference or biasing outside opinions is an invaluable step in your hiring process.

Hiring needs to be an exercise in slow, deliberate thinking. A written assessment facilitates this approach.

Role Related Application

Now it’s time to build on the written assessment by asking the candidate to bring whatever they wrote to life. If you asked them to write a lesson plan, have them now teach you the skill they wrote about. If you’re in a sales role, conduct a mock call where you’re the customer and the candidate plays the salesperson on your team. If you’re hiring for an Ops role and you asked the candidate to describe how they would teach someone to build a territory management process, have them now work through that problem live with you guiding the way.

The combination of the written assessment with the in-person application of that assessment is a powerful way to comprehensively test whether or not the candidate you’re looking to hire has well rounded role related knowledge to be successful.

Tactically, this can be either a panel style interview with the hiring manager and the hiring manager’s boss or another team member the candidate will work with. Be cognizant of the ratio of internal team members to candidate in this interview. If you have more than three internal team members the coordination among them gets very challenging and the candidate experience suffers.

An Outside Opinion

Now that a candidate has made it past the majority of your screening process it is time to get an outside opinion. Multiple companies I’ve worked for use this step effectively, but it is important that it is not simply a check in the box. Ideally you’ll ask a direct peer of yours, whom you trust, from a different part of the business to interview your candidate.

This outsider’s primary aim should be to pressure test against any biases which existed in your hiring process and specifically screen for whether or not they believe this person has the optimism, intellect, and energy (some foreshadowing on traits from next week’s post there 🙂) needed to be successful as a member of your team.

It is important that this peer knows you well and understands how you run your team. It’s their job not only to assess the candidate, but also to be a resource for the candidate as they look to assess whether or not being part of your team is aligned with their objectives and personality.

Conclusion

While it may be more fun to talk about the traits you’re looking to hire for than the tactical steps of running an effective hiring process, following a consistent process allows you to hire great talent repeatedly.

A well run process has a minimum of five steps:

1. Initial screen

2. Mindset interview

3. Written assessment

4. Role related application

5. An outside opinion

Execute these consistently and you’re on your way to building a great team.

Next week we’ll talk about the traits to cultivate when hiring as well as your mindset as a hiring manager within the hiring process.