Through my own experience and the collected wisdom of others, I feel like I’ve seen a pattern emerge. Great practitioners know which details matter, and how they matter.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve gotten a lot of insight into the world of surgery, for example. This theme crops up over and over. For gastric bypass surgeries, for example, staples are often used to help define and close the new smaller stomach. The placement and execution of those staples matters a lot, and can be the difference between a good, great, or bad outcome for the patient. Placing and executing those staples well doesn’t really take any extra time or effort for the surgeon, but you can’t do it if you don’t know how, and that’s the hallmark of expertise.
I’ve had a similar experience on my learning curve baking bread. The ingredient list for most of what I bake is tiny. When I’m doing loaves sur levain, it’s only flour, water, and salt. And it doesn’t really take any extra time or equipment or effort to go from OK to great. It does take expertise, though. Knowing what good looks like. The details that matter and those that don’t.
This week, I wanted to give a similar treatment to the world of hiring. In the same way getting the staple placement right in a surgical procedure makes a big difference, I think there are a few details that don’t really require a lot of additional effort, but that greatly improve recruitment.
These have an especially big impact if you’re hiring for a role that’s competitive. Great candidates have a lot of options. As a new venture, it may not be possible to give everyone the kind of white-glove treatment that, say, Google offers its candidates. But I think you’d be surprised how little extra work it takes to set yourself apart, and put yourself into the top tier of candidate experiences.
I’ll get into the detail of each of these ideas below, but I thought I’d try out some bullet points this week to preview what I see as the key steps.
Act early on easy screens: don’t waste time bringing in people who don’t meet your baseline requirements
Provide a roadmap: give people clarity on what’s going to happen and when
Prepare the hiring panel: give the candidate a consistent, coherent experience
Actually execute
Let’s start with the first idea: act early on easy screens.
Hiring is a highly imperfect process. As I’ve written before, no two roles are exactly alike. But it’s best to reserve the interview process for factors that aren’t easy to screen for.
For example, imagine you’re hiring a machine learning engineer for a music analysis product. I wouldn’t necessarily rule out someone who has experience doing signal processing in, say, the oil and gas industry rather than restricting your search to people with direct experience applying ML to music. At the same time, I don’t think you can figure out if that person’s experience will translate without talking to them in an in-depth interview.
By contrast, there are pieces that are extremely easy to screen for either on paper (before anyone commits face time) or in a very preliminary early conversation. If you have a specific compensation budget, stick to that and get ahead of it. If you have hard and fast requirements — say around industry experience or years of experience — stick to that, too.
This is all a question of commitment and detail. Treat non-negotiable requirements as non-negotiable. If you can screen for something on paper, do it, and don’t waste anyone’s time by bringing them into interview “just in case” or because you don’t have anyone else to interview. It sounds obvious and easy, but I’ve seen this fail to happen from the hiring and the candidate side.
I’ve given into temptation and brought in people I shouldn’t have for those reasons. It’s never a good idea. I’ve also been through hiring processes where, after hours of interviews, the company has decided to pass because I don’t have as much experience as they wanted. That’s completely their prerogative to set as a requirement. Not acting on it until I’m deeper into the process is frustrating, and wastes everyone’s time.
Likewise, it can be helpful to get certain low-ambiguity details out of the way quickly, rather than letting them derail the process at the last hurdle. I’m thinking here mostly about compensation. Ask early, and ask often. If someone is expecting $300,000 a year in base pay and you’re only offering $100,000, everyone is better off if you figure that out in the first conversation rather than what you hope will be the last one.
Next: give people a roadmap.
As I often say, it’s uncertainty that kills you. Giving people a sense of the what, when, and how of your hiring steps can go a long way to make the process better. Again, this doesn’t really require a whole lot of extra work. It’s the work of minutes to sketch out the steps and timeline for your hiring process, and then include them when you start running someone through your process.
This makes such a big difference from the candidate’s perspective. If they know there are three steps over three weeks and you’ll follow up every Friday, they won’t have to worry when they don’t hear back immediately from you.
If you don’t know what steps make up your hiring process, and that’s what’s stopping you from doing this, I might suggest you’re not ready to make the hire.
Third: prepare the hiring panel.
If you’ve designed a good hiring process, there will be a variety of different perspectives represented in the evaluation. For a frontend engineering role, you’ll of course want to have frontend engineers interview candidates. You’ll probably also want to have that person’s potential manager, maybe a more senior leader, and people from other disciplines, like the people team or product team.
While you want each of those people to bring their own experiences to the evaluation, if there isn’t any consistency at all, the process could be a car crash. You want to make sure, say, the people team talks about the engineering culture in an informed way, and that the engineering team talks about the broader company culture in a way that doesn’t completely contradict what the people team says.
Giving everyone guides and practice answering potential candidate questions — making sure everyone knows how to be interviewed as representatives of the company — can make a big difference.
Last: actually execute.
This sounds ridiculous, but it never ceases to amaze me how big a difference this makes. From the hiring side, I don’t think I internalized both the importance and rarity of this happening until candidates wrote back praising how well we did this. It’s such a low bar, yet many people fail to clear it. If you tell someone you’ll get back to them by the end of the week, get back to them by the end of the week. Or better yet, you’ve given them an overview of the process, and you give them decisions on the dates you’ve laid out in that overview.
Even more concretely, what might this all look like in practice? I thought I’d sketch out what it might look like to take these ideas and apply them to a hiring process. This is completely hypothetical; I’d hope you treat this more as a jumping off point than as gospel.
Before listing the role
Agree on truly non-negotiable requirements, like years of experience or compensation
Write down a candidate-facing guide to your interview process: outline who they’re talking to, in which order, on what schedule, for which reasons
Give everyone on the hiring panel material to help answer candidate’s questions, such as a consistent take on what the company’s goals for the next year are
When screening
Commit to your non-negotiable requirements and don’t advance anyone who doesn’t meet them
When a candidate advances to the interview stage, give them the guide you’ve prepared so they know what to expect in the process
Discuss compensation and any other basic parameters in the first conversation you have with the candidate
Stick to the plan: give decisions when you say you will and don’t change requirements mid-process
There’s of course a lot more to getting hiring right than taking these steps. I’ve written before about the importance of being clear about what you’re looking for and making sure everyone involved truly believes those are the right criteria.
It may also seem like these are incredibly trivial details. But therein lies the genius. None of these steps is that hard to execute. You don’t really need a recruiting team to do it. You can do all these steps in a day or two, and (if you need a system to remember on the execute piece) a to-do list. And — you’ll have to take my word for it — these little details make a big difference, mostly to the candidate’s experience in a tight market, but internally with your hiring team, too. The trick, as with the staples in the gastric bypass surgery, is knowing that these are the details that matter.
Bonus: Product versus Feature Teams
I really enjoyed this article from the product training experts at SVPG about the difference between “product” and “feature” teams. It’s a great illustration of the need for leaders to both let go, but also to provide enough vision, mission, and direction to keep that autonomy under control.
Enjoy this? Have an idea for something you’d like a perspective on? Drop me a line: I’d love to hear from you.