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The Problem with “How Are You Doing?”

Every leader knows the routine. You sit down for a one-on-one, smile, and open with: “So, how are you doing?”

Nine times out of ten, the response is just as predictable: “I’m fine.”

It comes from a good place, but it is a shallow question that invites a shallow answer. And when managers default to surface-level questions, they often miss what really matters.

The truth is simple: the quality of the answers you get is shaped by the quality of the questions you ask.

Why Better Questions Build Trust

When people trust their manager, they are more likely to speak honestly, even about difficult topics like conflict, frustration, or job searches.

And the research is clear:

• Trust is slipping. Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer found that 68% of people believe business leaders deliberately mislead them.

• Engagement is sliding too. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024/25 shows global engagement has fallen back to 21%, matching the lowest levels since the pandemic. Manager engagement is even lower, at just 27%.

• Managers make the difference. Gallup consistently finds managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. In other words: if you want trust and openness, it starts with how you lead.

Story: The Question That Changed Everything

I will never forget a meeting I had with a senior leader on my team. We went through all the usual motions: How are you doing? What are you working on? How can I help?

For an hour, we covered projects, priorities, and progress. By the end, I was ready to wrap up. Everything sounded fine. But something in their tone did not sit quite right.

As they were about to leave, I asked: “What is it that you are not telling me?”

At first, they brushed it off: “No, that’s everything.”

I pressed again: “Okay, you have told me all these things. What is the one thing you are not telling me—the thing you wish you could?”

That one question turned the meeting upside down. The next hour was a completely different conversation. This high performer, someone I thought was engaged and thriving, admitted they were struggling so much that they were considering leaving. The issues were not abstract or unsolvable. They were things I could help with. But I had almost missed them entirely.

Shallow vs. Deep Questions

I nearly missed it because I was asking the wrong questions. They were standard, repetitive, and shallow, and the answers reflected that. I wanted to dig deeper, but all I uncovered was the surface.

The striking part is how small the gap really is between an ordinary question and a great one. Yet that small shift can completely change the conversation.

So what separates questions that skim the surface from those that open the door to honesty?

Giving Permission to Be Honest

Ultimately, people rarely want to conceal anything from their manager. They want to share. They just are not always sure it is safe.

One of the simplest and most effective techniques I used with my team was a phrase: “Permission to speak freely.” I would use it when I sensed the team was giving me the runaround or telling me what they thought I wanted to hear instead of what was really going on.

It became a cue that they could be open, without judgment and without fear of fallout. The effect was subtle but powerful. People started saying what was really on their minds.

You do not need to use that exact phrase. What matters is building systems that signal safety: thoughtful questions, consistent listening, and a commitment not to punish honesty. Those small signals go a long way in creating trust.

Why It Works

When leaders ask deeper, more specific questions, they signal: “I want the real story, not the polite one.” That small shift builds psychological safety, the belief that it is safe to take risks and tell the truth. Harvard’s Amy Edmondson showed in her original 1999 study that psychological safety is what allows teams to learn faster and perform better.

What is less known is how this plays out in practice.

• A study of 43 software development teams in Norway found that psychological safety enhanced team reflexivity - the ability to pause, reflect, and improve their collaborative work. Teams with that reflexivity significantly outperformed those without it.

• Research on virtual teams has shown that creating explicit “permission to share” cues increases satisfaction, candour, and people’s willingness to keep working together. Asking thoughtful, specific questions works the same way. It becomes a built-in cue that honesty is expected and valued.

And in 2025’s hybrid and remote world, where casual hallway chats are rare, leaders cannot afford to rely on surface-level signals. Polite nods and standard updates do not reveal what is really happening. Deeper questions restore the visibility that distance takes away. They uncover risks earlier, build trust faster, and remind people their voice matters.

A Toolkit of Better Questions

Here are a few prompts you can use in different contexts:

One-on-ones

• If you suddenly had my job for a week, what would you change first?

• When was the last time you felt truly energized at work, and what made that moment different?

• Is there anything I am doing (or not doing) that makes your job harder?

Performance reviews

• What achievement this quarter made you feel most stretched, and what did you learn from it?

• If you could redo one project from the past six months, what would you approach differently and why?

• What feedback have you not received yet that you wish someone would give you?

• What would you want to be able to list on your LinkedIn page as a result of your work this year?

Career conversations

• What kind of work makes you lose track of time?

• Looking ahead 12 to 18 months, what would make you proud to say, “I have grown here”?

• Imagine you left this company in two years. What would you want to be true about your experience when you look back?

These questions do more than gather information. They open the door to real conversations about motivation, risk, and growth.

The Payoff

Better questions lead to better answers. Better answers build trust. And trust is what drives engagement, performance, and retention.

So the next time you are tempted to ask “How is it going?” pause. Reframe. Go deeper.

Better questions do not just change the conversation. They change the relationship.

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I frequently come back to a phrase a former CEO and Founder I reported to used to say when he wanted to rally the team around a problem that was solvable but was proving intractable:

“Running 100m in under 10 seconds is hard, but simple.”

While he wasn’t talking to a group of elite sprinters, his point was taken. 

This pithy phrase always seemed to help unlock the team in two very powerful ways. It first reminded us that what we were tackling should be hard but that the resolution should be relatively simple. In other words, the more complicated the solution started to look, the further off the answers were likely to be.

This is how I think about managing teams. It’s hard but simple. 

The reality is that great teamwork remains a frustratingly elusive thing in many companies for a wide array of reasons, some of which we have a degree of control over and others where we have very little.

When it comes to focusing on the things we can control, one of the best (and seminal) studies on this topic was by Patrick Lencioni, a prominent author of books on business management, who wrote the best-selling book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”. 

If you get a chance, it’s well worth a read but I’ve pulled the main themes below that I come back to regularly with teams and share context that I hope will help you with your teams. 

His primary conclusion is that “organizations fail to achieve teamwork because they unknowingly fall prey to five natural but dangerous pitfalls”. Critically, he adds that these are not independent issues, but should be looked at as an interrelated series of issues that need to be addressed collectively and comprehensively. 

The 5 Dysfunctions of Team

They are described as follows in order of least to most problematic:

Absence of Trust

The most foundational part of any team is trust, and to build trust you need to be prepared to be vulnerable. When teams don’t feel comfortable talking about wins and losses or strengths and weaknesses, it’s near impossible to build any form of trust.

Fear of Conflict

Without a foundation of trust, you’ve now set the scene for the next dysfunction: fear of conflict. When you have a fear of conflict, you don’t challenge or debate issues rigorously enough and almost everything important is left unsaid. 

In these situations, teams are prioritising a sort of “artificial harmony” rather than saying what needs to be said. 

Lack of Commitment

When people don’t feel heard they’ll never really buy into a plan. This is why conflict is important - people need to be heard and to debate - and in the absence of this, you create a very weak bond between the team and their commitments. 

Importantly, this is not about consensus. However, it is about getting everyone’s input and acknowledging their contributions whether you take their advice or not. 

Avoidance of Accountability

One of the most critical - and healthy - signs of a high-performing team is a team that is comfortable holding itself accountable to each member.

While simple, it’s actually quite hard. We naturally like to avoid conflict so when you see a peer do something that doesn’t sit well with you - such as miss a deadline or get back to a customer slowly - it’s not in our nature to be immediately comfortable addressing it. 

What makes holding your peers accountable even harder? A lack of commitment. If you haven’t bought into a plan in the first place you’re going to be even less likely to hold someone accountable for delivering on it. 

As you can see, each of these dysfunctions builds and fosters further dysfunction. 

Inattention to Results

This is what Lencioni considers to be the “ultimate dysfunction”. 

What he describes is the tendency of team members to seek out individual recognition at the expense of the results of the team. This is when you’re no longer operating as a true “team” but rather a collection of individuals focused on their own careers, promotions, and accolades. 

This is made possible when there’s no accountability and an “everyone for themselves” culture begins to develop and thrive.  

How to Pinpoint Dysfunction 

While the descriptions above may well resonate with you, it can often be difficult to pinpoint some of the challenges by working “top-down” from these definitions. 

To help provide more tactical guidance, Lencioni also shares tactical examples of how these dysfunctions often surface “bottoms-up”: 

In other words, if you think your team is artificially harmonious then there’s a good chance this is being driven by a fear of conflict. If the team is comfortable with low standards, then it could be driven by avoidance of accountability. 

The High-Functioning Team Model 

The natural question that comes from all of this is that if this is what a “dysfunctional” team looks like, what does a high-functioning team look like?

The good news is we’ve already got a clear model to work from:

1. They trust one another

2. They debate, challenge, and disagree.

3. They commit to decisions.

4. They hold one another accountable for their commitments.

5. They focus on collective results.

It sounds simple because it is. However, just like the sprinter running 100m the difference between the theory and the practice is where the difficult work needs to take place.

If you’re struggling to align your team to a model like this the first step is practice. You are rarely going to change a team overnight - for instance, trust in particular takes a long time to build - so the first step once you’ve pinpointed the gaps is to start to get your team to make progress in these areas by giving them the opportunities to build the right habits. 

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Much has been written about managing effectively, but most of it focuses on tenured leaders. It’s a shame because, in my experience, one of the hardest transitions to manage is when someone is promoted from an individual contributor (IC) role to a managerial role for the first time.

All of a sudden you go from being able to point out all the things your “boss” should be doing to being responsible for figuring those very things out for your team. It’s a big change and it’s completely different from the technical skills that are required to complete the role of an IC.

Few organizations do much in the way of helping to support this transition, so I’m hoping the below will help provide some guidance on the things you as their leader can over-invest in during those early days to help them build up a picture of what a great manager does as well as the confidence that while they may not be there day one they will get there soon (with your help!).  

There’s a litany of things I could cover, but I think the most helpful way to approach this is to look at the things that almost all new managers universally struggle with in those early days, weeks, and months of taking on a new team. 

With the knowledge of where they’re likely to struggle, you can build your coaching and feedback habits around them. 

Managing Ambiguity 

In my view, this is one of the most important and underrated skills of any manager (let alone a new one). The ability to manage the expectations of a team when you don’t have the answer can be stressful but what’s important is to acknowledge that it’s going to happen (and sometimes frequently). Did we get that new headcount approved? Not sure. What about the additional budget we need for that client project? Don’t know. 

If you don’t help coach new managers on how to handle these situations with their team, it can lead to some very unhealthy (and even toxic) habits. For instance, I’ve seen new managers speak ill of an organization or even their manager as a way of explaining away delays to their team. This feels like they’re saving face in front of their new team, but is eating away at their credibility and is challenging to earn back. 

The best approach is to acknowledge that these situations are going to happen and reassure the new manager that the expectation is not that they will have all the answers. 

Delegating

Perhaps not surprisingly, new managers find it difficult to delegate. They’ve gone from a role where they are entirely responsible for getting the work done to one where they’re responsible for the people doing the work.

However, it’s an essential skill to develop early on. New managers are often prone to burnout in those early days because they try to take on everything so when you’re reviewing workloads with them help highlight opportunities where their team can step in and take something on. This “small step” approach will help them build their confidence and show them a path to how they can do this on their own. 

Big Picture Thinking

The temptation to focus only on what’s immediately in front of them is another (and very common) challenge that most new managers face. Again, this is rooted more in the habits formed from being an IC over many years and does not speak to their natural aptitude to lead - it’s simply something they need to be coached on. 

The way I like to think about this is in terms of allocation. When you’re an IC you allocate 100% of your time to executing tasks. But your role is no longer to execute what’s right in front of you, but rather anticipate the needs of your team. This means you need to spend some portion of your time thinking several steps ahead. There’s of course no hard rule around what this allocation should be, but the point you should make to your new manager is it's not 0%.

Another way to articulate this to new managers that has helped in the past is to think about this in terms of time. When you’re an IC you’re forced to think in short increments of time by design - say, days and weeks - but a manager needs to think about months and quarters. 

For example, what will my team need a month from now if we’re successful? If we’re not successful what will need to be true next quarter? This fundamentally alters how people think about their responsibilities. 

Building Confidence

Don’t underestimate how much confidence plays a role in your new manager getting off to a great start. Whenever someone is promoted, there will be a very short and very important window at the beginning where all eyes will be on this person to see if they hit the ground running or not. If your new manager does not project confidence then it will be difficult for others to want to follow them. This can easily lead to a negative spiral: Low manager confidence means the team isn’t inspired by the new manager, which leads to lower confidence, etc.

In the past, I’ve made a point of putting new managers in a position where they can deliver quick wins that are highly visible. They don’t need to be big, but they do need to project to the rest of the organization that this is the right person at the right time to lead this team. Think about ways you can help new managers deliver quick wins within the first 30 days of taking over a team. It will make all the difference.

Conflict Avoidance

Lastly, you’ll need to coach new managers on the importance of giving straightforward feedback. It’s a natural human tendency to avoid conflict but this can become very problematic in a team setting. As the saying goes culture is what you do and if you don’t provide feedback and you let issues fester this is the shape the rest of the team will take. It won’t be long until you have a much larger issue on your hands.

Your new manager will likely avoid having tough conversations with their team not because they don’t want to but because they don’t know how to and they may not even be confident that it’s their place to do so.

The first critical piece to establish is that you expect that they will have the hard conversations with their team when needed and that they’re responsible for upholding a certain standard at work both in terms of what gets done and how it gets done.

The second piece is to give them the tools they need to deliver feedback and instruction on how to broach difficult topics. This, of course, starts with you. Do you create an environment for the team that encourages feedback? Do you give regular feedback or do you avoid it? Be sure that you’re doing this yourself first before you expect the team to do it.

In terms of more tactical guidance on having hard conversations, I often share the following with new managers:

• Leave emotions out of it: When you’re having a hard conversation it’s easy to let emotions (on both sides) overshadow the actual conversation. If you don’t feel like you’re in a place where you can have a calm conversation, wait until you do. 

• Be specific: When delivering hard feedback you need to be specific. There’s nothing more frustrating and, frankly, jarring, than when someone is giving you hard feedback but there’s little to no substance. It will always sound more like criticisms if you’re vague and it will mean your point is completely lost. 

• Be thoughtful on timing: There’s very much a “time and place” element to this conversation. Be deliberate and choose a time and place where the individual will be receptive (and not distracted). 

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I’ve probably interviewed close to a thousand people (where does the time go?!) at this point in my career. This includes the full spectrum of role levels - from entry-level specialists to board members - as well as geographies (North America, Europe, and APAC) and while there are lots of nuances within each you would be surprised by just how much advice can apply to every interview.  

The ability to interview well is an essential skill, whether you’re looking to move internally or you’re looking to land a new role at a new company, it has a huge impact on your future career progression and earnings. 

The below is an effort to distil some of the lessons I’ve gleaned over the years into practical advice that can help set you apart in an interview process. 

Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: Kathryn Cant, (Talent Operations Lead, StackAdapt), William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale), Justin Krulicki (People Business Partner, Masterclass), Joyce Wallace (VP Human Resources, Unchartered Software), and Roland Mascarenhas (Consultant).

It’s not about you.

The most important thing to remember when you’re interviewing is it’s not about you. This might sound like odd advice, but bear with me for a moment. 

To perform well in an interview you need to understand the context behind why someone is hiring in the first place. If a company is hiring they in all likelihood have a problem (or problems) that they could not solve internally with their existing resources. The more you understand what those problems are and who they impact the better you can prepare and the more you’ll be able to tailor your responses. 

By far the most common approach I’ve come across - which you should avoid - is to approach an interview as an opportunity to simply go through your resume and academic experience point by point. As you can imagine, this will rarely if ever touch on the specific problems the company and the hiring manager are trying to solve. 

Instead, when you’re preparing for an interview you’re interested in try answering the following questions:

• Why are they hiring for this role (e.g. team bandwidth, outside expertise needed)?

• Why now (e.g. new funding, geographic expansion, sales growth, customer feedback)?

• Who benefits the most if this hire is successful (e.g. hiring manager, department lead, CEO, investors)?

The information you need to help fill in these blanks is hiding in plain sight. For example, you can glean from LinkedIn how big the team is today and how many people work in a respective function. It will also tell you how many people the company has hired over the last 6 months. 

What’s more, you’ll be able to get context from reading any press releases, media spotlights, or customer reviews online to get a sense of why now. 

You don’t need to be right but by simply asking yourself these questions you will start to empathize with your interviewer and it will give you a better base through which to both ask and answer questions. 

Go out of your way to try the product.

This will be much harder if you’re interviewing for a B2B role, but there are always two types of candidates that stand out early on in an interview:

• The candidate who has made 0 effort to try the product

• The candidate who has made every effort to try the product

Who do you think is the more compelling one? 

When you interview a lot of what drives decision-making from an interviewer is credibility. Do I believe this person not only can do this role but will thrive here long-term? 

If you position yourself as someone passionate about the company’s mission - say, helping solopreneurs build their business online - but you haven’t signed up and explored the company’s product that does that very thing then you don’t sound very credible. This lack of credibility significantly hurts your ability to move forward in the process. 

Several years ago I was hiring an entry-level role on our growth team for an app that made it easier to group funds online together. We had an overwhelming number of applications - somewhere in the region of 100 - but there were two that stood out right away.

Which ones? They had started their own campaigns using the platform and were actively using the product. This meant that when we interviewed them they already had a keen understanding of the advantages of the product and the areas of friction that would need to be overcome to grow it. In other words, they were credible. One of the two ended up landing the gig. 

While there will be plenty of instances where you won’t necessarily have ready access to the product or service, there are many ways around this (e.g. talking to your network) that will help give you some powerful insights and help you stand out. 

In fact, the harder it is to get access to the particular product or service the more you’ll stand out if you come to the interview having done some background research already. However, the reverse is also true: if the product or service is readily accessible, it is even more imperative to have tried it.

Solve a problem before you’re hired.

Firstly, I don’t think you should do “free” work for a company as part of the interview process nor should companies expect you to. 

What I do encourage - within reason and commensurate with the role you’re looking to get - is to build credibility with the hiring manager (or team) by identifying opportunities to improve their product, service, or process. For instance, if you’re looking to join the Talent Acquisition team do you have any suggestions on how they currently write their job descriptions or where they typically distribute them? Do you even have specific profiles of people from your network you could refer?

Several years ago, as we ventured into a new market and sought a Country Manager to lead our expansion, one candidate stood out. During the interview, he presented a concise list of 'keys to success' in that new market, highlighting the differences from our existing markets. While we had considered many aspects, his insights offered fresh perspectives. We left those interviews impressed with his ability to grasp our goals even before joining. Unsurprisingly, he got the job. 

The more you can translate your innate skills into practical and tangible examples in an interview, the more it goes a long way in building credibility with a hiring team. What’s more, it starts to showcase a whole series of skills that most teams highly prize, including the ability to move with urgency.

Understand what your future workplace values.

“I think it’s important for candidates to understand the company’s values and be able to articulate how their values align with that of their prospective employer.”

~ Joyce Wallace, VP Human Resources at Unchartered Software

One prominent factor that hiring teams will screen for - sometimes at the very top of the list - is how well your values align with those of the company. While the term “values” is sometimes used interchangeably with others - for instance, they’re called Leadership Principles at Amazon - the intention is still the same: understand how you get work done. It’s less about what you’ve done (that comes later) and more about how you’ve gone about doing it that’s of interest.

This part of the interview often puts candidates at a disadvantage. Companies have had ample time to think through their values, iterate on what works and doesn’t work, and codify processes for scalable hiring. In contrast, a single individual will have had exposure to only a fraction of this.

Despite this, it's crucial for you to take the time to reflect on what you genuinely value—not just to secure a job, but to find the right one. The 'values fit' question is significant for employers as it aids them in determining whether you'll thrive in the long term or if you might leave within a year. This aspect holds just as much impact on you as the candidate.

I recall making a values-based mistake early in my hiring career. We were establishing a new customer service organization and searching for senior leaders to guide junior employees through the myriad of requests. I had someone fantastic recommended to me, but while we highly valued speed in response, it became evident she was more of a perfectionist, preferring to take the time to ensure everything was right before sharing a response. Despite recognizing this misalignment, I still hired her. Unfortunately, she left within three months because she wasn't comfortable responding quickly and encountered conflicts with her peers.

In reality, some companies prioritize the quality and accuracy of a response over the response time. That's where she eventually worked—and was very happy! Meanwhile, we found someone who preferred to move quickly and address any discrepancies afterwards. It's a subtle difference, not a matter of right or wrong, but it significantly influences how work is executed. The truth is companies can differ significantly in their preferred approaches to getting work done.

Be clear and succinct in your communication.

If you ask Talent professionals where candidates start to go off track in interviews, one of the single most common responses is a lack of clear communication. 

Here’s just a few quotes when I recently asked the question to my network:

“I find one of the areas people go off track is their communication when answering questions.”

~ Kathryn Cant, Talent Operations Lead at StackAdapt

“The candidates I am most likely to move forward are direct and clear. They're willing to take a minute to pause before responding to think about their answer instead of immediately saying whatever comes to mind first”

~ Amanda Nagy Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale

“If candidates want to improve by at least 50% they should practice clear and succinct communication. An answer should be no longer than 30 seconds unless it’s a more complex question, then it should be a max of 1 minute. Make sure to sense what the interview is asking and answer clearly.”

~ Roland Mascarenhas, Consultant

This of course is easier said than done. However, the good news is there are some great tools and frameworks you can use to address this. 

One of the most popular behavioural interview techniques used in recruiting is called the “STAR Method” which stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. It’s designed to help interviewers get specific answers from candidates, but it can just as easily be reverse-engineered by candidates as a way to practice clarity in their responses. 

For example, think about the kinds of questions you’ve been asked in interviews (or are likely to be asked) and practice going through them using the following prompts:

• What was the situation?

• What were you tasked with?

• What actions did you take?

• What was the result?

When done well, you’ll leave the interviewer with a clear description of what you did, how you did it, and the result in a fraction of the time it would typically take. 

Proactively address any gaps in your experience or resume.

Your career will be filled with experiences, yet when you're interviewing for a new role, it's highly probable that your background won't perfectly align with every aspect of the job description. Few hiring teams expect a perfect match; that's why they're interviewing you! However, what can set you apart is being self-aware enough to recognize potential gaps and proactively address them during the interview:

 “The best advice I ever got is to be … self-aware, auto-identify your opportunities and where an interviewer might have a question mark on your application and paint a story where you can demonstrate how you overcame that opportunity”

~ William Laporte, Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik

When done well, you can transform a lack of experience on your resume into a strength. For instance, if the role prefers prior management experience, which you don’t possess, you can emphasize experiences where you gained indirect management skills, preparing you for a direct management role. Furthermore, it might have been the case that you weren't ready for managerial responsibilities before, but now you are.

Lastly, few careers follow a straight line and are often intertwined with personal experiences at the time. For instance, you may have taken a break to start a family or needed to step back to care for a loved one, or even for yourself.

These real-life stories may not neatly fit into a resume, so take the time to narrate your experiences in your own words. The best companies to work for understand the twists and turns of a career and won't hold these things against you. If they do, it reflects more on the company than on you.

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Elon is not for everyone. He’s a very polarizing figure to many and (for what it’s worth) also cares very little what anyone thinks of him. While I don’t personally subscribe to his leadership style - and more specifically how he treats people - there’s a lot about how he approaches problems that we can learn from him. 

When you think about it, he’s likely one of the people in the world with the largest distillation of problems by volume and complexity in the world (by choice!) at any one time. From leading the electrification of the automotive industry to delivering global internet from space, he’s got to deal with more than a few intractable problems at any given moment. 

So how does he do it? It turns out that he has developed a particular system to enable him to cut to the core of many of his most challenging problems, and he uses it ubiquitously across his many companies.

In Walter Issascon’s biography of Elon Musk, he outlines what Musk refers to as “The Algorithm” and it’s full of practical insights that can be applied to any number of challenges you’re currently dealing with in your career.  

The “Algorithm” and what we can learn from it

There are five essential tenets of the algorithm. These were born from some of the most pressing and painful problems Tesla had to dig itself out of in its early days when it was close to bankruptcy.

1. Question every requirement.

“Each requirement should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from “the legal department” or “the safety department”. You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is.” 

This is fundamentally about digging deeper until you understand - almost at an atomic level - why something is the way it is. Similar to the “5 Whys”, the goal is to get to the root cause of the problem rather than be satisfied with surface-level explanations. 

The example that shines through as an effective use of this principle was when Musk was looking to dramatically shrink the size of the original Starlink hardware. The hardware needed to be sent into space so size and weight mattered a lot. They used this principle to dramatically simplify the design.

For example, the satellite’s antennas were designed to be separate from the core because the engineering team said there was a risk of overheating. The executive in charge questioned this and asked to see the test data that showed this was the case. After continuing to press the engineering team on why, the team eventually admitted that it might work and tried designing everything as a single integrated component.

The result? One simple, flat satellite that was half the size of the original. This meant more than twice the number of satellites could be sent up into space in each journey. 

This is a great reminder to not take things at face value and that you should always press several layers deeper before accepting something as fact. 

The risk of course is that you could create a culture of confrontation that’s unhealthy so to mitigate this make sure you’re open with your team about instituting a process like this and channel it as a way to constantly evolve and improve rather than blame. 

2. Delete any part of the process you can.

“You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.”

This is all about making sure you’re working with only the most essential pieces of the puzzle. While you can simplify a process (see Step #3), you don’t want to simplify a piece of the process that does not need to be there in the first place.

Isaacson retells a story from the factory floor in Nevada where they were making the battery packs to be fitted into Teslas. When each battery pack was fitted they included little plastic caps to protect the prongs that plugged into the car. When the battery packs made their way to the Tesla car assembly line in Freemont they were removed and discarded. 

The problem was that they sometimes ran out of the plastic caps and it would delay deliveries between both plants. True to form, Elon used Step #1 to question the requirement in the first place. When no one could come up with the name of the person who created the requirement or could provide evidence that the prongs were being damaged, he asked that they remove all plastic caps going forward. 

It turned out they never had a problem with damaged prongs and things continued to hum along without delay. 

3. Simplify and optimize.

This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.

Once you’ve deleted every unnecessary part of the process, you can then be confident that what you’re simplifying and optimizing is well worth your time. 

True to his brand, Elon takes this to the extreme and seeks to remove almost everything while injecting an almost irreverent approach to questioning. At the Boring Company - his company that’s looking to transform cities by enabling point-to-point transportation via tunnels - the engineering team was struggling to keep pace with their delivery timelines. When he asked what was slowing things down, the engineering team said they had to dig a vertical shaft at the beginning of the tunnel to lower down the tunnel machinery.

Elon’s response: “The gopher in my yard doesn’t do that”. 

The team ended up redesigning the tunnel machine so it could be simply aimed nose down while it started burrowing into the ground. 

4. Accelerate cycle time.

“Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.”

The next step in “The Algorithm” is to accelerate the cycle time once you’ve got a process that’s simple, optimized, and has no unnecessary parts. This is likely one of the hardest parts to execute given that when you speed up new things start to break that were working before. This puts you back in a constant state of questioning, deleting, simplifying, and accelerating. Yet this is where the compounding benefits of all these iterations start to materialize and the gains become big.

When Elon was confident the team was in a place to start installing more solar roofs at Solar City - now Tesla Energy - he went into “accelerate” mode. This meant going onsite to roof installations and climbing up on the roof to understand how they could move faster. 

He realized they couldn’t move any faster given the current design and process and so they began back at Step #1. In this case, that meant getting engineers onto roofs to help with the installations themselves so they could understand what was going to work and what was not going to work. 

5. Automate.

“That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.”

This is probably the most well-understood part of improving a process - automate what you can where you can - and something with the rise of AI that will become increasingly common. However, I believe the real lesson to be learned here is that just because something can be automated it doesn’t mean it should be. 

“The big mistake” he references at the Fremont factory was automating too many things too quickly and the issues with this approach surfaced almost immediately. While his original vision was of an “alien dreadnought” factory with few if any humans, it just wasn’t working. 

One day while walking the factory floor and already starting to come to this realization, he stopped next to a workstation where a robot was sticking cells to a tube. The robotic arm was struggling to grip the material and align it. Musk and the team did a quick test to see if a human could do this faster and more reliably. Then they quickly calculated how many humans they would need to replace the robot.

They started to de-automate! 

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While we might be enthralled with the advances in AI, the reality is that we’re all still very much in the business of people. This is true whether you’re making software or sponges. 

For that reason, you need a strong foundation in how to influence how humans think and process information rather than machines. 

Yet most people fundamentally misunderstand and undervalue the power of persuasion in the context of their professional (and sometimes even personal) lives. 

We’ve gone from a top-down, hierarchical-driven environment where the emphasis was on the “What should I do” to one which is centred on the “Why should I do it.” 

To answer the “Why” question compellingly, you’ll need to learn and develop the art of persuasion. While there is no shortage of books and articles on this subject, one of the best resources that I’ve come across and relied on in my career is from an article called “The Necessary Art of Persuasion” by Jay A. Conger that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1998.

I’ve pulled out the key themes and research from his article below and shared some examples from my professional career that will hopefully help sharpen your own skills of persuasion.

Establish Credibility

The first critical pillar involves credibility. Specifically, yours. If you’re going to advocate for a new project, idea, hire or equivalent the question becomes whether you’re qualified to take such a position. Your team will weigh the risk of supporting your idea with the relative strength of your perceived credibility. 

Herein lies the challenge: most managers considerably overestimate their credibility.

When it comes to developing credibility within an organization, it typically derives from two sources:

• Expertise: Do you have a track record of making strong decisions as it relates to your proposal or do you have a particularly in-depth understanding of the subject matter? Even better if you have both! 

• Relationships: When it comes to relationships, people with high credibility in an organization have demonstrated (often over a sustained period) that they have a high degree of integrity, consistent performance, and trustworthiness. These are typically people who put the team or goal first and are not known for politicking. 

If you’re looking to develop one or both of these areas, Conger’s research pulled out several practical steps you can take.

If you’re looking to grow your expertise, you can:

• Leverage your internal network: Gain more specific knowledge about your position from others who’ve done it before. You can also be asked to be placed on projects where there’s an opportunity to bolster your experience in a short amount of time.

• Hire for complementary skills: You can either hire someone full-time on your team to complement your own skill set or bring on a consultant or industry expert on a more short-term basis. 

• Start small: You pilot your ideas to small groups to provide initial proof of concept or early results that can provide the learnings and justifications to go bigger. 

When it comes to bolstering your relationship gap, consider:

• Meeting one-on-one with everyone: This is the “meeting before the meeting” and gives you a chance to understand people’s perspectives and where their objections might come from. 

• Involve like-minded coworkers: This is a more targeted approach, but seek out people who already have a strong rapport with your audience and either enlist them to join you as part of the pitch or leverage their insight to better tap into their mindset.

Frame Goals Around Common Ground

While your credibility may be high, you’ve still only solved one piece of the puzzle. At this stage, you’ve got to make sure that you can articulate the benefits of your position in a way that makes the advantages of it clear. This is sometimes easier said than done given the benefits might not be shared amongst everyone. What may benefit you, may not benefit someone else. 

I once joined an organization as a senior leader and realized that we needed to make a pretty drastic change to our existing roadmap. While I had credibility as a senior member of the team, this alone wasn’t enough to sway the minds of the many cross-functional teams it was going to impact (including our parent company). 

To move my proposal forward, I anchored it to something that everyone could agree on: improving our customers' lives. We had an internal measurement of this and it had been going down slowly, so my position was that we weren’t delivering on our mission! If we continued to do the same thing we were doing we were not going to be successful as an organization.  

We were all in on the company mission so this had a disarming effect on the discussion. Rather than instant scepticism, this was replaced by a real debate and discussion about what we could potentially do as a team. This meant that the original proposal was much improved, given all the additional input from the rest of the team. 

Provide Evidence

“In God we trust, All others bring Data”

~ W. Edwards Deming

You’ll also need to provide data to support your point. There’s rarely a situation in today’s information-heavy workplace where a position supported by a “feeling” will take root.

Instead, you’ll need to present evidence that supports your position. However, what Conger makes clear though is that data alone won’t do:

“We have found that the most effective persuaders use language in a particular way. They supplement numerical data with examples, stories, metaphors, and analogies to make their positions come alive. That use of language paints a vivid word picture and, in doing so, lends a compelling and tangible quality to the persuader’s point of view.”

In other words, you’ve got to tell a compelling story to make the details come to life. One way to do this is to illustrate your point by using examples comparable to the one under discussion. 

For example, if you’re looking to make the case to launch in a new market, are there previous examples of successful market launches at your company that you can point to or similar examples in the market at large?

Several years ago I was responsible for making the case to launch a completely new product in a relatively new market. In other words, an uphill battle from the start. The team did an incredible job pulling both internal data that showed there was a demand for the product (as well as external data), but it was when we framed it as the “international” version of a very well-known and commercially successful app that everything clicked and we got the project approved. The data alone wasn’t enough, but together with the story, it was enough to help the team vividly imagine what this launch could mean for our users. 

Connect Emotionally

“In the business world, we like to think that our colleagues use reason to make their decisions, yet if we scratch below the surface we will always find emotions at play.”

~ Jay A. Conger

When it comes to connecting emotionally there are two important components to consider. Firstly, showing emotion is important. If you come across as sombre or disinterested, people will take that to mean you don’t believe in the very point you’re trying to make. Yet, if you’re too emotional you’ll leave your audience thinking you’re almost too invested and you’re not thinking objectively. 

Secondly, and more importantly, Conger argues, is that effective persuaders have a keen read on their audience’s emotional state. That is to say, they adjust their tone depending on the situation. What’s more commonly referred to as “reading the room”. 

In practical terms, this might mean adjusting your tone (from a whisper to coming on much more strongly) to maximise the emotional connection. 

To do this well, great persuaders will lay the groundwork for this well in advance of any meeting. They tend to be very good at picking up “signals” from their peers and colleagues in informal settings (e.g. lunch break, coffee run) or by understanding how previous pitches were received and making the necessary adjustments. 

What to Avoid

While the above will give you a very strong blueprint, it's sometimes as important to know what to avoid than what to specifically do.

From Conger’s research, he points to 4 things to avoid losing your audience:

• Don’t hard sell. Managers too often try to force their point of view through pure logic. This often just gives someone a big target to disagree with. Instead, focus on partnering rather than selling to get your point across.

• Don’t resist compromise. Your audience will want to know you’re flexible, which will add to your credibility. You’ve got to both listen to other points of view and incorporate them. 

• It’s not just about a great argument. As in the above examples, it’s not just about a great idea or great argument. You’re being evaluated on your credibility and ability to connect emotionally as well. 

• Effective persuasion is not a one-off effort. “Persuasion is a process not an event”. In other words, don’t anchor success around your ability to persuade your audience right away. It may well take several conversations (as well as iterations) to get there. 

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I started publishing relatively late in the year - my first playbook went live on October 31st - so this re-cap is a somewhat brief affair! 

While I only published six playbooks in total, I’ve shared which ones were the most popular. The series I dedicated to hiring took up most of my writing time, but interestingly the most popular posts were the two articles that were not about hiring! 

The Five Most-Viewed Articles

The five most-viewed articles according to pageviews:

1. How Amazon’s Unique Hiring Process Helped It Scale to 1.6m Employees Globally

2. How to run a great All-hands meeting from the companies getting it right

3. A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 1: Building the Right Foundation

4. A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 2: How to Become a Talent Magnet

5. A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 3: Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience

What’s to come in 2024

I’d like to continue to focus on the unique challenges facing people leaders and the future of work, but I plan to share more insights from other companies as a way to do this. The success of the article about Amazon helped highlight that real-life examples from other well-known companies are a great way to tell a compelling story.

I’d also like to continue to encourage feedback from this community on what’s most on their mind and where I can help. I’ve had a number of you reach out and suggest topics (some of which I’ve already featured) so I want to make this even easier now (see below). I can’t promise to get to everyone, but I will read and reply to every note I get! 

I’ve already got the first article for 2024 ready to go live, which will be about how to motivate your team and build lasting influence. 

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Welcome to Part 4 of 4 of my series on “A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring”. As a quick recap, here’s how this guide is organised:

• Part 1: Align. Building the Right Foundation

• Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet

• Part 3: Guide. Deliver a Superior Candidate Experience

• Part 4: Onboard. Setting Up New Hires for Success (← This Post)

When I talk about onboarding, I’m referring to the process of welcoming newcomers (new or existing to the company) and guiding them through a set of formal steps needed to make sure they have the clarity they need to succeed in their new role. 

This includes everything from their tech set-up and physical space to understanding why the company does what it does and what everyone contributes towards making it all happen.

Importantly, onboarding is not training (although many organizations conflate the two). While training involves imparting specialized knowledge on how a given process or tool works, onboarding is the process through which an individual is integrated into a team or company. In many cases, there may be some form of training incorporated into onboarding but they are different. 

While there is no shortage of stats that speak to the importance of onboarding, the most compelling one I’ve come across is that some 17% of employees leave within the first 3 months while citing a lack of proper onboarding as their number one reason for departing.

If your goal is to retain top talent in the long term, this is one of the most obvious (and easiest) areas to address to move the needle. 

This guide lays out the tactical steps you need to take to ensure you’re nailing onboarding and I hope it will play some small part in making your own onboarding experience a great one!

I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations that helped shape this article: William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale), and Sarah Sheikh (Business Operations and People Lead at Moves).

Define Success

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”

~ Oscar Wilde

In my experience, the most overlooked aspect of the onboarding process is a lack of definition of what success means. 

For example, can you answer these questions clearly:

• Duration: When does onboarding start? When does onboarding finish?

• Process: What steps need to be taken to complete onboarding?

• KPI: How do we know if the onboarding was successful?

The typical onboarding process is oriented around a checklist of tasks, rather than goals. In other words, it becomes about completing a list of items within a fixed amount of time (e.g. 1 week) then it is about actually being “onboarded”. 

You should not conflate a list of HR tasks (e.g. payroll, benefits sign-up etc) with empowering your new hires with the information they need to succeed.

In my view, the actual goal of being “onboarded” means that you clearly understand your company’s vision and mission, customers, products/services, and the unique role you and your team play in delivering on that mission. 

The litmus test is whether you’re confident to put a new hire (no matter what team they’re joining) in front of a customer to pitch your company. If the answer is “no” or “not sure”, then they haven’t been onboarded yet.

As you can imagine, this is hard to do in a day or a week. Yet, over 50% of hiring managers say that their onboarding is a week or less (Source: Career Builder Survey, 2022). 

You may well have extreme urgency at your company (particularly if you’ve been looking to hire that person for a long time), but you’re doing your new hire a massive disservice by saying they’ve been onboarded after just a week. 

Instead, here’s a better way to think about defining success when it comes to onboarding (and still solving for speed) that’s goal-focused rather than task-focused:

• First 30 Days → Small Win: As with so many things in life, it’s all about momentum. The hiring manager should work with the new hire to define a small win that they can deliver well within their first 30 days of joining. This could be a small bug fix for an engineer, a warm lead transfer for a salesperson, or identifying areas of efficiency for a finance lead. The important thing is it comes quickly and is relatively public so that they can quickly establish credibility with the larger team.  

• Within 60 Days → Mid-Sized Win: This is enough time to be more ambitious and to think through what could be achieved within the first 60 days and work back from there. 

• Within 90 Days → Big-Win: I’m a big believer that within the first 90 days, a new hire should be able to deliver a big win. This could be anything from landing a new client to shipping a new customer-impacting feature, but if you can point to this it means you’ve successfully incorporated your new hire into the company. 

While each “win” will depend on the company and the team you’re joining, by defining success this way there’s an instant focus on urgency and emphasis on applying the knowledge you’re learning (rather than focusing on it as a purely academic or checklist-type exercise). 

This also creates an environment where you can learn faster about your new hire and whether or not there’s going to be a long-term track record of success or not. 

Build on a Framework that Scales

“It’s even more important to have great onboarding when you’re 50 than when you’re 350” 

~ William Laporte, Director of Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant

While onboarding may sound like a luxury that only large companies can afford, don’t make this mistake. If you’re a small company, each hire you make represents a significant amount of your total leverage as a company and as a result plays a disproportionally large role in your success or failure.

The process of onboarding doesn’t need to be complicated. I would encourage you to build it around a relatively simple framework that blends the right amount of knowledge in each area with the space the person will need to deliver on their “wins”. 

In the past, I’ve used the following to do this well:

• Administrative Onboarding: Have you met the minimum requirements for them to fulfil their role (e.g. laptop) and to focus on their role (e.g. benefits, payroll)?

• Core: Walk them through the “nuts and bolts” of your company, the team they’re joining, and the individual expectations you have of them in this role.

• The 3Cs: Infuse the onboarding with what makes you unique as a company and build a feeling with your new hires through your culture, customers, and camaraderie. 

Administrative Onboarding

This will be very specific to the company and there’s so much written online about it that I won’t cover this in much detail. 

The main thing to keep in mind here is that this is just one part of the onboarding process, not the end goal. It’s also a minimum requirement for a new hire to start focusing on wins so if they don’t have the right tools or system access to do their job, then they’ll be significantly hampered in their ability. It’s sometimes surprising how long and difficult this process can take at some companies. 

What’s more, you should make sure you’re very clear with new hires when they’re getting paid, when their benefits start etc. because otherwise they’ll spend their whole time thinking about this rather than on what they were hired to do.

To do this well, I would recommend leveraging a checklist with an aggressive timeline to whip through everything on the list. 

Core Onboarding

When it comes to core onboarding, I think of this as the “nuts and bolts” of what new hires will need to know about your company, how it operates, and the role they (and their team) play in making it all happen. 

The majority of this information will apply to everyone, but with some nuances as you get more specific to the team and the individual.

In the past, I’ve seen this successfully organized into three areas:

• Company: This should typically be run by company leadership and is a great way to give new hires the story behind the company, the vision, mission, and values. Depending on the size of your hiring cohorts you can do these as one-offs or as part of a formal and frequent event.

• Team: The hiring manager should ensure they run through a deep-dive of the team they’re joining, how that team fits into the larger organization, what the team is currently working on, and what their goals are for the coming month/quarter. This is often most effectively done visually, where you can walk through an org chart and explain in real-time who does what at the organization. 

• Individual: This is where the hiring manager takes the time to go through in detail the role, expectations, and goals of the new hire. This is a great opportunity for both the hiring manager and new hire to align on what’s most important and for the new hire to ask any clarifying questions. 

This together with the administrative onboarding typically completes what most companies consider to be the traditional “onboarding” process. 

However, I would encourage you to consider a third dimension that’s often missed. While it can feel less tangible than the previous two sections, it’s perhaps the most important and won’t magically happen if it’s not encouraged. 

Cultural Onboarding

This is more about a feeling than anything. While you can complete the previous steps, you also want your new hire to feel something about the company, the mission, and the team they’re joining. 

To do this, I leverage the “3Cs”:

• Culture: Involve your new hire as early as possible in as many of the company or team cultural events that you organize. This could be anything from “game night” to books that your team loves to read or recommend. The sooner that they start to feel like an “insider” and not an “outsider” the more successful they’ll be. 

• Customers: This is often overlooked, but customers are a great way to anchor the “why” you do what you do. They are a powerful way to align as well as inspire a team and you should make the most of this opportunity. I’ve had new hires get on phone calls with customers to understand why they use our product (or listen to previously recorded calls/videos) as well as send them the products these customers make as a welcome gift.

• Camaraderie: As the hiring manager, you’ll want to foster and encourage camaraderie early on. This can be especially difficult when teams are remote, so if it’s consistent with your company culture I would encourage you to get everyone together as early as possible. If it’s not possible, then setting up intros with key team members and inserting the new hire in projects mid-stream where you think they can add value will go a long way to helping this early on. You want to create healthy “collisions” early on between team members.

Communicate Early, Often

“Even the transition from offer to actual onboarding, it’s really important to keep communication flowing. The further out someone is from starting the more important it is to have regular touch points.”

~ Amanda Nagy, Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale

A good rule of thumb to keep in mind is to minimize surprises when it comes to onboarding. There should be very few (if any) surprises for new hires when they join your company. This means everything from the big and obvious (who they report to) to the small and perhaps less obvious (when they should come to the office on Day 1) needs to be detailed and outlined to each new hire.

I was once in an early morning meeting when someone walked into the room and introduced themselves. I had no idea who this person was or what they were doing in the meeting, but later learned they had been hired for one of the open roles at the company. 

The problem was no one had any idea and this person immediately got that impression, despite our attempt at “winging it”. I can’t imagine a worse onboarding impression than being excited on your first day only to walk into a room full of people who don’t know who you are or why you were there. What’s more, this was a relatively senior hire and therefore highly impactful to a range of different cross-functional teams (including my own). 

Perhaps not surprisingly, this person left within their first year.

The good news is this can be solved by clear communication with the candidate before and after they join the company. There are a few core communications I recommend sending, although this is by no means a complete list:

• New Hire Packet: This should be sent as quickly as possible post-signing and include everything they would need to know about joining (first day, where to go etc.) as well as basic onboarding information (e.g. payroll, benefits). Ideally, this should also include a calendar for their first few weeks. You should look to have this person’s first week (at least) fully booked and orientated around as quick and as smooth a process as possible. There’s nothing worse than an empty calendar, especially if you’re remote.

• Welcome Email/Slack: This should be sent by the hiring manager either a week before or (at the latest) the morning of Day 1. It should articulate why they’re excited about them joining, what they’ll be doing, who they’ll be working with, and include any key cross-functional leaders. I typically did this the week before so it would give everyone lots of context and get the person excited. More often than not, there’s a “love bomb” response from everyone to the individual about how excited they are to have them.

• “Working with Me” document: As a leader, I’ve leveraged this time and again as a way of setting expectations with new hires and cutting through the formality of when someone new joins. I use it as a way of clarifying how I work, including my management style and preferred methods of communication. Depending on who they’ve reported to before, they may be used to a very different type of leader (e.g. hands-on vs. hands-off, Email vs. Slack etc) and therefore it’s a good opportunity to share that all up-front. It should also be a two-way street and when your report is comfortable it’s helpful to get them to share their style and what works best for them. 

• Key Company/Team Artefacts: It’s also helpful to share recent decks or memos that your team has produced including past All-hands to give this new hire context on what’s been going on. 

Peer pairing (aka “Buddy System”)

This is often a feature of most onboarding programs, but I wanted to reiterate the importance of having some formal process for pairing someone new with someone who knows the company well. While I dislike the term “buddy system”, because it makes it sound unimportant, I digress. 

The reality is you’ll have plenty of gaps in your onboarding process - no matter how good - and what a peer pairing program can do is both create a fail-safe for anything that falls between the cracks and create a safe space for someone to ask seemingly obvious questions without any fear of looking uninformed. 

For that reason, I would suggest pairing your new hire with someone from an adjacent team and having them set up formal meetings at least a few times within their first 30 days. 

Onboarding New Leaders

While most onboarding should be relatively standardized, I would recommend several extra steps when onboarding new leaders. 

When you onboard a new leader you are instantly entrusting a team (sometimes large, sometimes small) of people to take their direction from this person. We know from all the data that managers have a disproportionate influence on team engagement and therefore you’re either going to drive their engagement up (or down) with this new leader. 

For this reason, you’ll want them to have everything they need to succeed because their success (or lack thereof) is factors (i.e. New Hire x Number of Direct and Indirect Reports) more important than just onboarding a single person with no team.

Here are a few things to consider:

• People/HR: The CPO or senior people leader should give a walkthrough of the core people elements the company runs on (e.g. interviewing, hiring process, feedback style) as well as a walkthrough of recent employee engagement surveys. There is a lot of context here that should be shared early with any new leader.

• Finance: Deep dive walkthrough of financials by CFO or senior finance leader to give a grounding of where the company is to plan and what sort of latitude they have within their current budget. The new leader will likely almost instantly be asked questions related to budget and the more informed (and empowered) they are the better that initial trust meter will build. 

• Coaching/Feedback: This can be done by HR (or an external coach) but it’s important early on for any new leader to receive a steady stream of feedback from across the organisation (peers, reports etc). This is important because you don’t want people sitting on feedback just because they are new or there is a real (or perceived) power imbalance. What’s more, as the company you’ll want to make sure that this new leader is exactly as advertised and running the team in a way you would expect. This information will go a long way to course-correcting behaviours or providing the context needed to make a quick decision on an early exit.  

Feedback Loop  

Similar to the above feedback loop for new leaders, every onboarding program should have a clear mechanism where feedback is collected to improve the overall system.

There are two critical feedback loops you need to create:

• Feedback for the new hires: Too often, early feedback is missed that could have course-corrected behaviours that were inconsistent with the company’s expectations. While you’ll get some hiring decisions wrong, there should be a documented way for new hires to get feedback in a non-confrontational way that helps them improve rather than create a situation where the organization writes them off. In the past, I’ve sometimes engaged HR to run a few calls to collect this and then share it back anonymously. In my experience, this exercise typically yields very positive feedback and therefore has the effect of emboldening this new hire even more. If the feedback is anything but positive, you can immediately become more hands-on to better understand and support. 

• Feedback for the company: While many companies run onboarding feedback surveys, it can sometimes be challenging to get impartial feedback here from people who are both new to the company and in the “honeymoon” period. If you want to improve the onboarding process, it’s typically better to ask cross-functional team members how well you think new hires were onboarded (e.g. ask engineering if the product hire was onboarded well or vice versa) or to look at the win columns for the 30/60/90 days of new hires. If you’ve hired 5 people in the last 30 days and you can’t point to very many wins these news hires have had, then there’s likely something wrong with your onboarding process. 

A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring 

That’s it! You’ve now read the last part of this 4-part series. If you’re interested in what came before, here’s a quick re-cap:

• Part 1: Align. Building the Right Foundation

• Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet

• Part 3: Guide. Deliver a Superior Candidate Experience

• Part 4: Onboard. Setting Up New Hires for Success (← This Post)

One-on-One Coaching

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Welcome to Part 3 of 4 of my series focused on helping you build a more comprehensive approach to hiring. 

In Part 1, the focus was on building the right foundation for hiring and Part 2 walked through how to become a talent magnet.

For Part 3, we’re looking at how to build a superior candidate experience throughout the process.

As a quick recap, here’s how this guide is organised:

• Part 1: Align. Building the Right Foundation

• Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet

• Part 3: Guide. Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience (← This Post)

• Part 4: Onboard. Setting Up New Hires for Success

The way I define the candidate experience is every interaction a candidate has with your company from the job post to offer acceptance. For this article, I’m going to focus the majority of attention on the key interaction points after someone has already applied given we covered much of what happens before this in Part 2. 

The candidate experience runs parallel to your recruiting efforts, so you should think about the two together rather than as independent from one another.

By focusing on a great candidate experience, you’ll give yourself several advantages in your hiring process. You will not only hire better and faster, but you’ll drive word of mouth about your company that candidates will tell their friends about (even if they don’t get the job!).

Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale), Sarah Sheikh (Business Operations and People Lead at Moves), and Leah Hilts (People & Talent Manager at ThoughtExchange).

Pre-qualifying Candidates

Now that you’re driving a steady stream of traffic to your open roles thanks to Part 2, your goal is to now narrow down the number of candidates.

One of the most obvious and most missed pieces of your candidate experience is to not qualify candidates at this stage. That is to say, letting everyone and anyone apply without asking some simple but important qualifiers before they can submit their application. 

“By asking even a few direct questions you’re ensuring you’re raising the overall qualification level of every applicant”.

~ Amanda Nagy, Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale

The qualifiers you ask could be as simple as whether you have the right to work in the respective jurisdiction or more detailed including whether you have the requisite number of years of leadership experience or compensation expectations. The point is to make sure you’re qualifying (or disqualifying) based on important criteria. If you’re not excluding anyone based on your questions, you haven’t been specific enough.

The reason why this matters (aside from overloading your team) is that when someone applies to your company you are setting a key expectation that something will happen after they apply. Every action has a reaction, right?

Not so it seems in the world of job applications. The vast majority of companies spend enormous resources to attract candidates, but then simply ghost them once they’ve applied.

If you are receiving so many applications that you can’t reply to all of them, it means your process does not have enough pre-qualifiers. When you have enough qualifiers, it means you should have enough time to reply to everyone who applies (even with a short note). 

Screening Candidates

From this pre-qualified list of candidates, the next step is to screen the initial list of applications to see which ones most closely match the skills and competencies of the role.

You’ll likely be in a position to immediately disqualify several candidates and this is where you should avoid the temptation to simply reject them without any note or communication. If you’ve set up the right process, these should still be relatively qualified candidates and a top-notch process means you let them know where they stand. This will ensure you leave the door open to hiring them for another role potentially down the road as well as leaving them with a strong overall impression of your company.

Your note doesn’t have to include specific feedback at this stage, but it should be clear and timely.

For the candidates that pass the initial screen, the next step is for the Hiring Manager to schedule calls (~15 minutes to ~30 minutes) with each of the shortlisted candidates. 

While some companies will advise spending more time in these initial screening calls (e.g. 1 hour), I would prefer to speak to more candidates for a shorter period than fewer candidates for a longer period at this stage. 

This is because it takes the pressure off trying to be “right” too early on in the process and gives you the chance to speak to as wide an array of people as possible. The main question you’ve got to ask yourself is “Do I want to hire this person?”. If your answer is not a resounding “yes”, there’s no point going forward and involving the larger hiring panel.

When it comes to rejecting candidates at this point, you should include a more specific note to the candidate given you’ve spent time with them on the phone. A more general rule of thumb I like to use is to make your level of response proportional to the time the candidate has spent in your process. 

In other words, the least amount of time is spent responding to those who have been disqualified at the very outset and the most amount of time is spent responding to those who have gone the distance in your process but did not get an offer.

When it comes to the final number of candidates you’re going to move to the “in-person” interviews, you’ll want to keep this number small because of the time commitment but keep in mind that your offer acceptance rate will never be 100%. That is to say, you should ensure you have several very viable options. This will not only help improve your selection (given you can compare and contrast different candidates) but also ensure you’re left with another option if a candidate rejects your offer.

Building a Hiring Panel

One of the most important steps in the candidate experience is the hiring panel. When I say hiring panel, I mean the specific group of people that each candidate will meet along the way to receiving an offer.

When building your hiring panel, keep in mind the goal of the hiring panel is to dramatically increase the chances of making a stellar hire that will hit the ground running. In my experience, the best people to include in your hiring panel are culture carriers as well as other peers this person will interface with as part of their role from Day 1. While most hiring panels will include very senior leaders (e.g. Founders), they are unlikely to interface with them regularly so it’s important to think through the day-to-day teams that will rely heavily on this person to succeed.

The right hiring panel will provide the hiring manager with critical inputs into their decision, but they should not make the final decision. The final decision should always sit with the hiring manager. 

The hiring manager needs to take the lead on defining and communicating what each member of the hiring panel will be responsible for assessing in their respective meetings.

The typical process I’ve seen many companies follow is what I like to refer to as “real-time interviewing”, where there’s no clear panel and the hiring manager simply pulls people into the process as they go in a sort of ad-hoc way. 

This is a terrible experience both for the candidate and for your colleagues and should be avoided at all costs. 

The ideal size of the hiring panel will depend a bit on the role and culture of the company, but typically it should fall somewhere between 5 and 8 people. There is clear evidence to show that beyond 8 people there are diminishing returns and each net new person adds very little to improving decision-making accuracy. 

While 5 to 8 people might sound like a lot, think back to the last few people you’ve hired at your company. How many people in total did they meet with by the time an offer was extended and accepted? You might be surprised. 

In my experience, the number tends to be closer to 8 than 5 and some have even been into the double digits. Whatever you decide, you need to make sure your candidate experience is built for both speed and accuracy.

Scorecards

When it comes to clarifying what each member of the hiring panel should be asking, this is where a clear scorecard can come in very handy. 

“The scorecard is a very big one for us. I think it’s the most important piece of our process because it’s what helps maintain alignment and consistency across the team and candidate experience.” 

~ William Laporte, Director of Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant

Without something structured and clear like a scorecard, you’re essentially rolling the dice on the experience of every one of your interviews. 

This is problematic for many reasons but most importantly, it will mean you dramatically lower the quality, consistency, and rate at which you make successful hires at your company.

A scorecard is a simple way to align your hiring experience across the vectors that are important to you as a company. While each company will have their unique scorecard, they should all be built on the same core building blocks. 

It should include a section that addresses the unique aspects of your company’s culture. In Amazon’s process, they are well-known for making this a particularly important focus of their process. From there it should get progressively more specific until you’re looking at the most important need to have attributes of the specific role. 

A critical attribute of the scorecard is standardization. That is to say, you’re asking the same questions and using the same evaluating criterion when scoring the candidate. 

When I say standardize, I don’t mean literally asking the same question a dozen times. Rather, you strive to ask the same types of questions in different ways to control both the experience as well as to ensure the quality of the data is as high as possible.

For example, if you’re looking to assess company values you can have different members of the hiring panel ask questions related to different values. Alternatively, you can also ask different questions related to the same values.

Depending on the size of your HR team, this is a good place to engage them as many companies will have question banks that include a pre-set list of questions that make it easy for hiring managers to pull from rather than making them up on the spot.

What’s also important as it relates to the standardization of the scorecard is not just the question but also the actual scoring itself. If you have different ways of scoring the candidate, it will be very difficult to compare notes at the end and to deliver a clear recommendation. 

While there are many different permutations, you’ll want to solve for a straightforward and clear way to evaluate the competencies themselves and a way to provide an overall recommendation.

The below is a good framework for scoring individual competencies:

When it comes to the overall recommendation, the main goal here is a clear recommendation and you should avoid providing options that leave some sort of middle ground (e.g. “Maybe”).

Here’s a good example for an overall recommendation framework:

Interviewing

The first place to start here is that interviewing is a learned skill that comes with training and practice. You can’t simply throw people into interviews and expect that to have a good outcome for you or the candidate. 

One way to think about this is if you’d only picked up a tennis racket once in your life, how good at tennis do you think you’d be? The same reasoning applies to interviewing.

There are many ways to address this from training to coaching, but what you can action today is to have more junior team members shadow your more seasoned interviewers. In some cases, you may want anyone new to the company to shadow your more seasoned interviewers because you’ll want them to know what interviewing looks like at your company. In fact, Amazon uses a similar technique through their Bar Raiser program.

If you’re confident in your team's interview experience, the next question you’ll want to tackle is what interviewing technique (or framework) you want the team to follow. Much of this will depend on the role (and in some cases you might employ a combination of these), but by and large, you’ll want to subscribe to one technique that works best for your company and follow it. 

Here are a few examples:

• Structured Interviews: These interviews follow a predetermined set of questions, and the interviewer asks each candidate the same set of questions in the same order.

• Unstructured Interviews: The interviewer has more flexibility to ask open-ended questions and explore topics in-depth, allowing for a more conversational and natural flow.

• Behavioural Interviews: Focuses on the candidate's past behaviour in specific situations, aiming to predict future performance based on past actions.

• Situational Interviews: Asks candidates to respond to hypothetical scenarios relevant to the job, evaluating their problem-solving abilities and decision-making skills.

• Case Interviews: Common in consulting and certain technical roles, candidates are presented with a business problem or case and asked to analyze and solve it.

While there are arguments for each, the one I’ve seen be the most effective in the widest range of scenarios is behavioural interviewing. It’s used at scale at companies like Amazon, but more importantly, there’s a lot of research that supports it as a powerful and accurate way to predict future performance. 

This is because while other techniques focus more on hypothetical scenarios (e.g. Situational), the behavioural interview focuses on experience. This means any information supplied can also be easily verified through follow-up questions, a resume review, or even a reference check.

To ensure you’re getting specific enough in your questions and follow-ups, you can leverage the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result):

• What was the situation?

• What were you tasked with?

• What actions did you take?

• What was the result?

This will ensure you avoid “generalized” answers from candidates and you’ll instead get a very specific and detailed understanding of their past experience and contributions. 

Debrief Meeting

Once the hiring panel has completed its interviews and all of the feedback submitted, it’s worth scheduling a debrief meeting. This should include everyone and it should be done in-person or live through a video connection. 

This should be the first time everyone on the panel can see and discuss the rest of the team’s feedback (i.e. to avoid bias), so it’s worth asking at this point whether anyone on the panel wants to change their decision. While it may sound counter-intuitive, each interviewer now has access to information they didn’t have before so there should be flexibility here to change your opinion and is a feature of the debrief meeting (not a bug). 

The result from this meeting should be a clear “go hire” or “do not proceed” mandate from the hiring panel. If it’s the latter, I would recommend the hiring manager (or recruiter) pick up the phone and call the candidate with the hard news. If someone has got this far in your process and invested this much time, you owe it to the candidate to give them the news personally with a rationale for why the decision was made. 

If it’s a positive, then it’s time to check references and start to get an offer ready!

Reference Checks

It was not long ago that this was considered an essential step in the interview process. While for many companies it still is, there’s a somewhat surprising push by many to drop professional reference checks for most roles. 

The most consistent argument I’ve heard to drop them is that rarely (if ever) does a hiring decision change based on a reference call. Therefore, the time and effort required to complete them are simply not worth it.

While you’ll have to make your own decision on this, I have to say I’m in the “yes” camp. In my mind, the worst-case scenario from a reference check is that you’ll confirm information you already have and in the best-case scenario you’ll uncover something that gives you pause and may reverse a hiring decision.

At the end of the day, if you’re looking to hire someone that you’re hoping is going to stay 3 to 5 years with your company at a minimum some of the best information you can get is from people they’ve already worked with! 

I sense that the main issue with reference checks is more the way they’re being done, rather than their overall utility. The way I’ve seen this done most of the time is to simply call the supplied references and look to confirm information that’s already been supplied. If this is how you’re doing reference checks, then they’re likely not worth doing.

Instead, here’s a better way to complete reference checks in a way that they’ll add value to your process:

• Don’t let candidates choose their reference list: The standard practice here is to ask for 2-3 references that the candidate then supplies. You should proactively identify the references that you think are most relevant and request those. It may not always be possible to speak with them (e.g. they may have lost touch), but you can learn a lot if there’s any hesitation or a general lack of contact with past professional relationships. This in itself can tell you a lot.

• Ask quantifiable questions: If you ask open-ended, qualitative questions like “What did you work on together?” you won’t get much insight. You should ask quantifiable questions that help open up other avenues of questioning. For instance, one of the most effective questions I’ve used is to ask the reference where they would rank this person on a list of people they’ve worked with. It’s easy to answer soft questions with soft answers, but you’ll get revealing answers to hard and specific questions. If someone says they’re in the Top 20 of people they’ve worked that’s not something to get excited about. You can follow up with why they wouldn’t put them in the Top 3 or Top 10.

Making an Offer

If you’ve made it this far through the process with someone, you’re at that special place where you get to extend an offer. There’s a lot here to consider beyond the traditional “check-box” items and a great place to continue to elevate your candidate experience. 

The first mistake to avoid is to make this an impersonal moment. I’ve seen a lot of companies send a stock email from the HR team about an offer - pick up the phone or book a live meeting! However, before making the call make sure you have all the relevant details of your offer clear, correct, and confirmed. 

The second mistake that companies make is to be fuzzy about compensation details at this stage or even share the wrong numbers. Keep in mind even the most straightforward compensation conversations involve a lot of moving parts, from salary to benefits to equity. I’ve seen companies lose multiple candidates at this stage from junior roles right up to very senior ones. It happens far more often than most realize. 

At this stage in the process, there should be no surprises. For instance, if you don’t offer equity for this role now is not the time to bring that up. You should be qualifying compensation expectations as early as the screening calls and identifying other potential roadblocks to make sure you don’t come all this way to face an insurmountable gap. 

The best practice I recommend for how to handle an offer is to schedule a formal offer call where the hiring manager and (ideally) recruiter are present. In my view, one of the best candidate experiences is to present a visual walkthrough of the offer that covers 90% of the potential candidate questions, including everything from benefits start date to strike price (if offering equity). Once the call is complete, the deck can be sent to the candidate for their follow-up review. 

By having a personal walkthrough like this you can translate your excitement and alleviate any lingering questions. What’s more, you can also pick up very quickly on any big changes on the candidate's side. Are they still excited? Are there unanswered questions that need to be addressed? Were there any surprises?

It’s not always possible, but a personal call from a senior leader (or personal email) can go a long way to getting someone excited about joining. I used to ask our CEO and COO to send personal emails to candidates I was recruiting and regularly heard back through our recruitment team that this blew them away and made us stand out relative to the other companies in their process. It’s amazing how far even a little thought goes to making someone feel wanted.

One-on-One Coaching

Alongside writing, I coach a small number of leaders each year. Availability is limited, but if I don’t have room - or if I’m not the right fit - I’ll gladly recommend trusted coaches and point you in the right direction.

Get in touch

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Welcome to Part 2 of 4 in a series designed to help you build a more comprehensive approach to hiring. While Part 1 was focused on ensuring you’ve built the right foundation before you start hiring, Part 2 is all about how to build a strong talent pipeline. 

Here’s a quick recap of how this guide is organized:

• Part 1: Align. Building the Right Foundation

• Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet (← This Post)

• Part 3: Guide. Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience  

• Part 4: Onboard. Setting Up New Hires for Success

There are really two open secrets when it comes to recruiting the very best talent. The first is to really know what you’re looking for in the first place, which is covered in extensive detail in Part 1, but the second is that recruiting is a 24/7/365 initiative that starts the day you start your company or the day you join a new one. 

If you’re only starting to recruit once your job description is posted, you’re already well behind. What’s more, your competition has already been talking to (and perhaps signed) the very candidates you want to bring on. 

To truly attract the very best (rather than it be just a slogan at your company) you need to build a thorough, systematic, and always-on approach to building your recruitment engine.

The below is an effort to help you to help you answer the question of how to build a recruitment engine that helps you find your who.  

Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: Sarah Sheikh (Business Operations and People Lead at Moves), Leah Hilts (People & Talent Manager at ThoughtExchange), Kassy Kropka (Director, Global Talent Acquisition at Viral Nation), Jane Maguire (Head of Talent at Gadget), Martin Hauck (Founder, The People People Group), Kathryn Cant, Kim Benedict (Co-Founder & CEO, TalentMinded), William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale)

What does success look like?

The world of recruitment is no stranger to cliches. When speaking about the talent they’re looking to attract, companies will often refer to things like “A Players” or “Top Talent” yet these catchphrases are very hard to quantify and in most cases are extremely subjective. 

If you’re serious about hiring the very best, you need to take the time and define what that means at your company and build in some form of feedback loop to make sure that you’re making the necessary adjustments to your process along the way.

When there’s no objective metric of success, it becomes about personal opinions and not only does this not scale but it creates a toxic culture that promotes favouritism over objective contributions.

The way success is defined at your company will depend on many factors and will be particularly influenced by priorities. For instance, if you’re in a period where you’re looking to fill many roles in a short amount of time, Time to Fill may well matter most. Alternatively, if you’re looking to do more with less, Cost per hire may well be the right metric to work back from.

However, I believe one of the strongest metrics you should consider prioritizing is the retention rate of your hires. While other metrics are important (e.g. Time to fill, Cost per hire etc) the most important measure of success in recruitment is ultimately whether or not the people you are spending all this time recruiting are staying. If they’re not staying, this becomes the most important thing to understand and address before bringing on more people. 

To understand what’s going on at a more granular level, you should also consider splitting out the retention rate by cohorts and by time (30 days, 60 days post-hire etc). For instance, I’ve seen situations where the reported 12-month retention rate looks strong overall, but when you look closer there’s a huge drop in the first 30 days. 

In cases like this, this often points to issues around either candidate selection or less-than-stellar onboarding. 

Whether people stay or go is the ultimate test of whether you’re recruiting great talent. If they leave soon after joining did you ever actually recruit them in the first place?

Sidenote: It’s worth calling out a big assumption here. If you look at retention as the key metric, you’re assuming that you want to retain everyone at your company. If you have a high-functioning performance management process, this should be the case. Often companies will make a distinction between “regrettable” and “non-regrettable” departures and exclude “non-regrettables” from their calculations. Don’t do this. Every hire (regrettable or not) was a decision you made and if you’re exiting a lot of non-regrettables the question becomes why were they hired and why have they stayed. It makes more sense to look at voluntary departures and non-voluntary departures (i.e. they were terminated). 

Invest in the right, high-impact channels

The important thing to remember when building your recruitment strategy is that there’s no silver bullet. While many companies will tout the strength of their referral programs, the average company only sources ~22% of their hires from referrals and the very best only manage ~55%. 

In other words, you’ll have to make investments in a number of other channels. This isn’t a bad thing given if you consistently sourced from the same place you’d likely be building a relatively homogenous team and we know diverse teams perform better.

To understand where to consider making these investments, it’s helpful to understand where companies are on average sourcing the largest number of hires at their company. This is not because you should necessarily emulate what other companies are doing, but to build a better awareness of what others are doing (and not doing). 

While this will depend on the size of the company, one of the largest and most recent studies asked HR decision-makers what sources rank in their top 3 for hiring sources:

• Job boards (47%)

• Referrals (45%)

• Internal Mobility (42%)

• Social Media (39%)

• Career Website (36%)

In other words, 47% of respondents had job boards in their top 3 channels, 42% had referrals, and 39% had social media. 

Major Job Boards

While the results are somewhat surprising given job boards are not what most people consider to be a great (or unique) source of talent, it does point to the importance and effectiveness of job boards in driving a significant amount of awareness and volume. 

The combination of sheer volume these boards drive combined with a customer base of active job seekers means they play an important role when it comes to hiring.

However, the way I would look at job boards is as being an important part of your recruiting spend mix - even a necessary part - but not one that’s going to distinguish you long-term. What’s more, if you overly rely on this source your hires will skew heavily towards active job seekers as opposed to passive ones. 

Given the major job boards are already well-known and the tactics for employing them are well-understood, I won’t spend much time on it here. What is important is the role niche job boards can play in growing your talent pipeline and diversifying your pool of candidates, which is covered a little further down.

Referrals

What’s interesting about the data above is not just what it tells you, but what it also doesn’t tell you. While the major job boards may be the ones driving much of the volume in terms of hires, if you were to look at it from a return on investment standpoint it’s not even close. It’s referrals.

When you hire a referral, they perform better on almost every conceivable metric that you as a leader might care about:

• They are more likely to accept an offer

• They cost less to source

• They stay longer

• They perform better

The question then becomes how do you build a great program? If it’s not obvious, it really starts with a great culture. While we’ll cover a number of different tactical things you can do as a company to grow your referral program it really begins and ends with a place people love to work. Without that, you’ll have very little to work with. 

In terms of how to tactically build a referral program, there are definitely some basics you’ll have to cover first:

• Define the program: This should cover all the basic questions of how the program works. For example, are all roles eligible? What are the incentives for successful referrals and how when are those incentives triggered?

• Communicate the program: There should be an easy place internally to find out about the program and should be regularly communicated through official channels (e.g. All hands, Team Meetings etc) as well as through Team Leads. 

• Design the right incentives: For many companies, this is as simple as a cash reward for every successful referral who gets hired. You could have a standing amount (e.g. $3,000) but there’s often a case to tier the amounts depending on the difficulty of the hire (e.g. Technical Talent, Senior Leaders).

However, to truly stand out you have to operationalize this within teams and then scale it. It’s not enough to just mention the referral program once a month at the company All-hands. 

One of the most effective ways I’ve done this in the past is to make it part of my team’s OKRs. In other words, their success was tied to our ability to recruit referrals from our networks. The way we did this was to have a spreadsheet of the top 5 people we’ve worked with (or would like to work with) and track when was the last time we checked in with them.

The goal was to have a list of 2 to 3 people that we’d been in touch with within the last 3 months that we would drop everything we were doing to hire. This helped us recruit not just for new roles, but also for back-fills on the team. I would regularly check in on this list during 1-on-1s and we’d add new people as we went.

In my view, this is a mandatory requirement for senior leaders and I’ll often ask in interviews the specific names of people that they would want to potentially recruit if they joined and when was the last time they spoke with them. 

I once left a meeting where I’d accepted a job offer and one of the key requirements was going to be building out a team quickly. I had already sent a text to the first person I had in mind for one of the roles before I had even left the building. They joined and we thrived. 

As important as referrals are, they won’t always help you build a diverse team and we already know it can’t be your only source of hires either.

Sourcing 

Sourcing is an often misunderstood and underutilised channel. Yet, when done well it can become one of the best ways to build a differentiated, diverse, and cost-effective recruitment strategy.

You’ll find that sourcing often gets mixed up or confused with many other strategies, including referrals and larger umbrella buckets like “Social Media”. 

When I refer to Sourcing, I mean the process of proactively searching, identifying, and directly contacting candidates rather than simply waiting for them to see your job description and apply. 

You can “source” in a variety of ways, including using social platforms like Linkedin or Twitter as well as through more industry-specific platforms like Stackoverflow or Behance.

What’s important is it’s a group of people you would never have reached if you’d relied purely on referrals or job boards and it puts you in control of the criteria you’re looking for. 

Whether you have a Sourcing team (lucky you!) or you’re doing the sourcing yourself, it takes a long time to build a funnel this way but it’s absolutely worth it. If you don’t give it enough time, you’ll never see the results and you’ll conclude (too early) that it’s not effective. This is why the minute you have alignment on the role, a clear job description, and the approved budget you should start sourcing candidates immediately. 

One of the best hires I’ve made in the last 5 years came through Sourcing, but we almost missed her because she took 3 weeks (!) to respond to our initial outreach. It turns out our initial outreach went to an old email that she didn’t check as often, but we are only days away from making a different hire.

The biggest change in sourcing as a strategy is the role AI is now making. For instance, you can now define the key attributes of a role you’re looking for and AI-powered tools will scour the internet and come back with hard-to-find profiles based on even very specific searches. What’s more, it will improve its ability to find candidates as you tell it more about what you’ve liked or not liked based on its past suggestions.

While there’s been an explosion of these tools in the last few years, here are a few that are particularly recommended by those I’ve spoken with:

• Hireflow

• Fetcher

• Findem

Internal Mobility

While often overlooked, you should have a formal internal mobility program as part of any high-impact recruitment strategy. It does not have to be an overly complicated one, especially if you’re a smaller company and the need for speed is at a premium, but you need to provide guidance (either way) on how your program works. This has the added benefit of also encouraging internal mobility in the first place.

There are a number of critical advantages to promoting internal mobility:

• Talent retention: An internal mobility program helps retain talent by helping to show employees a variety of career options at the same company.

• Skills development: It spurs continuous learning and helps build new capabilities.

• Knowledge retention: It’s often very hard to quantify, but when employees leave they leave with valuable institutional knowledge. If it's time for a change, much better that an employee makes the change internally and the organization retain that knowledge. 

• Onboarding speed: The ramp time for new employees (across most functions) can be close to ~ 3 months, but internal mobility means this number is significantly lower.

• Reduce “single points” of failure: This is similar to knowledge retention but with an added caveat. When you have the same people in the same roles for long and extended periods of time you can create (unwittingly) single points of failure. In other words, there’s only one person who’s held that role and knows how to do everything. When you move people across the organization you not only retain the knowledge but you now have two people (or more) who know how to fulfil that role.

A mistake I often encounter is for companies to assume they don’t need an internal mobility program and that it's only relevant to much larger (mid-market or enterprise) companies. The way to think about it is that if you are moving someone internally (either laterally or upward) more than once a quarter you already have a program, it just might be a very informal one. 

If you don’t formalize your internal mobility program not only will you not take advantage of the benefits it provides to your recruitment strategy, but you’ll also start to see a number of unhealthy issues start to manifest internally:

• Employee frustration: If you don’t provide lateral or upward mobility your team will become frustrated with a lack of opportunities. If you do provide some, but it’s not clear, they will also become frustrated because of a lack of perceived fairness and transparency around what it takes to successfully move through the organization. 

• Perceived “poaching” of employees: If left up to teams and hiring managers, they will make the best case to have the best employees move to their teams. This can create all sorts of issues internally from an overly competitive atmosphere to “brain drain” from certain areas of the company if you’re not careful.

• Administrative pain: Without a clear policy, it will become a heavy burden on your HR team to manage all of the questions and internal moves that will inevitably start to happen.

To capitalise on the opportunity that internal mobility provides, make sure you can help employees answer the following basic questions:

• How will internal job opportunities be communicated?

• How will internal talent be evaluated?

• Will any preference be given to internal vs external talent?

This will help give you a running start and ensure you make an internal mobility program a key piece of your recruitment strategy. 

Social Media

I think of many of the Social Media platforms as an inbound marketing channel for recruitment. This is a different tactic than leveraging social platforms for sourcing, rather, it’s a way to connect with an audience on their preferred platform to tell your company’s unique story and to build your own organic audience. 

As you can imagine, this is a great way to build a very potent audience of passive job seekers as your focus is less transactional (e.g. “Apply for X role”) and more conversational (e.g. “Look what we love to do on a Thursday with the team”). 

“I use our company Linkedin page with recruitment in mind and post twice a week, every week, even when we’re not hiring. This builds a picture of our culture and what we value and helps people better understand whether they’ll thrive here”. 

~ Sarah Sheikh, Business Operations and People Lead at Moves

The important thing here is to ensure you pick the right platforms to invest in based on your audience and content and that they work together. Many companies feel the pressure to be on every platform, but if you don’t have the ability to post regular and relevant content then it’s unlikely to be worth it. 

What’s more, while it will depend on your own employer brand and target audience, keep in mind that not all social platforms are created equal. 

LinkedIn continues to dominate the social platforms when it comes to recruitment. So while leveraging others can help you differentiate yourself, a massive amount of your energy will need to continue to be focused on it to make the kind of impact you’d like. 

Targeted Job Boards

While major job boards form part of almost every company’s basic strategy, you have a clear opportunity to really distinguish yourself by investing in targeted communities through niche job boards. 

This can be leveraged as a way to reach communities with particular skill sets (e.g. Engineers, Designers, Marketers) but it’s also a particularly effective way to build a more diverse workforce. The reality is you may already have a lot of Engineers or Designers on your team (maybe even your Founders are) but this may be less true when it comes to other aspects of your team (e.g. Diversity and Inclusion). 

There are so many great communities that focus specifically on building diverse and inclusive audiences and by partnering with them you can start to address gaps in your recruitment strategy that are holding you back from building the absolute best team you can build.

While the below is by no means an exhaustive list, it’s a live file that’s being constantly updated. A big thanks to the person-centric communities at Rands Leadership and The People People Group who helped me get this list started:

Review or download this resource

Campus Programs

The last channel we’ll tackle is campus programs. While you’ll need to understand whether a university recruitment program makes sense to invest in for your company, they are not just for high-volume recruitment nor are they just for larger companies. 

A campus program is a great way to build a long-term high-quality and cost-effective talent pipeline. It’s also a great way to diversify your workforce because many campus programs help you reach students from a variety of backgrounds. 

While many aspects of campus recruitment are relatively standardized (e.g. Co-op programs, Career Fairs) and I won’t repeat here, there are a number of creative ways you should consider to ensure you’re getting the most out of your program, including:

• Hosting Networking Events: There are often opportunities to host networking events on-campus and these are a good way to meet a lot of candidates in a short amount of time. These can be formal (i.e. through the university) or informal (i.e. organized off campus), but they tend to be a better and more personal way to talk to candidates about your company than a career fair.

• Building relationships with Alumni Offices: By building better bridges with the Alumni team you’ll begin to understand less obvious ways of working with them. In my experience, they’re constantly looking at ways to engage their alumni (even the most recent graduates) and will be open to working with you on your goals.

• Sponsoring Events: This is another tried and true method and can extend from hackathons to mixers. 

• Engage Clubs & Societies: There’s likely a club or society that targets the very audience you’re looking to engage. It can be a fun and informal way of building up a relationship with soon-to-be graduates and much less transactional than a career fair. 

One important thing to note when considering campus recruitment is how to resource it. When the program gets big enough based on your hiring needs, it makes sense to have one or multiple people on your team focused on it. 

However, given the cyclical nature of campus recruitment, you won’t typically need a full-time hire to focus on it.

Build a comprehensive destination for careers

Now that you have all this high-signal interest in working at your company, you need to make sure that you have a place where you can direct all these potential candidates. It’s important that you paint a clear and compelling picture of what it means to work at your company - the majority of career pages rarely address this in a way that entices the right people to apply.

My contrarian take at this point is to resist the temptation to paint an overly rosy picture of your company. It’s actually a great opportunity to discourage people as much as it is to encourage people to apply. That’s because not everyone will thrive in your culture and there’s no sense in glossing over those details to convince someone to join just to have them disappointed. 

Stripe is actually a great example of this. If you visit their careers page, you’ll notice several sections where they specifically call out the things they haven’t figured out yet and where they’re struggling. They’re actively discouraging you from applying!

Except, what they’re actually doing is discouraging those who they think won’t work out long-term from applying. 

It just doesn’t work when you over-promise and under-deliver. For instance, if you’re a remote work-friendly culture by all means sing that from the rooftops. If it’s more of a recruiting slogan and something that - in practical terms - is not all that encouraged, then say that instead. 

I heard from someone recently who had accepted a senior-level role at a company that touted a fully remote workplace, but once they accepted this same company then requested mandatory attendance for a week of onboarding and asked them to attend a number of other follow-up in-person team meetings within months of joining.  

It’s absolutely within the company’s right to ask and require that, but it’s not consistent if you’ve just sold the candidate on your fully remote workplace. This individual in question has now gone back and declined their offer. What a waste of time and resources. 

You should think of your careers page as your front door, it should set the right expectations about what candidates will find once they pass through. The reality is they’ll find out one way or another and the right people long-term will thrive but your job is to make sure they get there in the first place!

A note about sources

As part of this research, I spoke to some phenomenal leaders in this space (mentioned above) but also reviewed a number of books and articles that I want to highlight below.

• 2023 Employ Recruiter National Report

• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson

• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 by Elad Gill

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Alongside writing, I coach a small number of leaders each year. Availability is limited, but if I don’t have room - or if I’m not the right fit - I’ll gladly recommend trusted coaches and point you in the right direction.

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In 2007, Amazon employed 17,000. By 2021 that number would grow to 1.6m employees worldwide, representing a staggering 9,000% growth rate.

 There are few companies in history that have grown faster for longer or across more disparate industries than Amazon, which now includes everything from Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence to Logistics and Groceries.

Given this extreme level of growth, they had to develop a unique hiring process that could meet their hiring targets without sacrificing the quality of candidates. 

While few companies will ever have to hire at the pace of Amazon, there are a lot of lessons to be drawn from their process that can be applied whether you’re hiring 2 people or 2,000. 

On the surface, their process will look familiar to many other companies and even leverages many of the same terms (e.g. Resume Review, Phone Screen). However, the way each step is managed and comes together is what makes it so unique. 

Before we dive in, I wanted to give special thanks to a number of current Amazonians who helped give me an inside look at the company and how this process works. I also relied heavily on a great book called “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” by Bill Carr and Colin Bryan. If you’re interested in how Amazon has become so successful, I highly recommend it.

The Bar Raiser

The most important and unique aspect of their process is what’s internally referred to as the “Bar Raiser” program. It’s both the name of a larger process as well as a group of individuals, known as the “Bar Raisers”. 

The Bar Raiser program was built in response to the many problems they started to encounter at Amazon as they scaled, including:

• Culture: Originally, Jeff would meet with every interviewee to ensure they strengthened the company’s culture, but this quickly became unmanageable.

• Consistency: As the company grew, it was difficult to even rely on the existing leadership team given the pace. They were in a position where new people were hiring new people, with little to no baseline of what a great hire at Amazon looked like. 

• Speed: There was intense pressure to meet hiring goals, because if you didn’t meet those goals you were at risk of missing out on your commitments for the year. 

Given the pace of hiring showed no sign of abating, the team took a typically Amazonian approach to solving it: they built a new system to fix it. 

While some have attributed this innovation to Jeff Bezos, it emerged internally from the early leadership team and sought to codify a systemic way of hiring top talent that matched Amazon’s culture.

The Bar Raisers are a group of cross-functional leaders who are steeped in Amazon’s culture and have demonstrated a consistent track record of hiring successfully at the company. What’s more, all Bar Raisers receive special interview training and are even identified in Amazon’s internal employee directory.

It was named “Bar Raiser” given it was intended to signal to all existing employees that they should be looking to hire employees that raised the bar relative to the existing team. In other words, the average talent level should rise with each new hire. 

The Bar Raiser, who can’t be the Recruiter or Hiring Manager, plays a critical role in the hiring process at Amazon:

• A Bar Raiser participates in every “hiring loop” (see more on Hiring Loop below)

• The Bar Raiser has the power to veto any hire and override the Hiring Manager

• The Bar Raiser is not penalized if the role is left unfilled and therefore is not subject to the same urgency bias that Hiring Managers often are

While this program was launched 21 years ago, it has stood the test of time at Amazon and remains one of the most important and successful internal initiatives in the company’s history. 

There are now hundreds of Bar Raisers across the company, but some of the original cohort of 20 still work at the company to this day.

The Job Description

Amazon is a very memo-driven culture, so much so that Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint in his meetings. It’s perhaps unsurprising then that they place a particular emphasis on getting the job description (JD) right in their process.

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to make the right hire without creating a well-defined and clearly written job description, which interviewers use to evaluate the candidates.” 

~ Bill Carr and Colin Bryan, “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon”

At Amazon, it’s the role of the Hiring Manager to write the job description and Bar Raisers can be used in order to evaluate the quality and consistency of it. 

While every role must include Amazon’s Leadership Principles as standard, the majority of the JD will consist of role-specific requirements. 

When hiring for a new role, the members of the interview loop will often meet with the hiring manager and Bar Raiser in order to review the JD and ensure that it faithfully captures the requirements of the role. 

“We have participated in many hiring debriefs in which a poorly written job description created a conflict between the interviewers, who were looking for one set of skills, and the hiring manager, who was expecting something different.”

~ Bill Carr and Colin Bryan, “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon”

Resume Review

From this point, the Recruiter will go through the resumes that have been submitted (sometimes together with the Hiring Manager). They will shortlist the resumes that most closely match the requirements as set out in the JD. 

This is one of the key feedback loops in the process for the Recruiter and Hiring Manager. If the candidates that are being shortlisted don't meet the requirements of the Hiring Manager then it’s likely that JD is not clear enough. 

Phone Screen

Once enough candidates have been shortlisted from the pool of candidates, the Hiring Manager will conduct a 1-hour interview with each person. 

The Hiring Manager has several objectives for the Phone Screen:

• Outline the role to the candidate so they can answer any questions

• Build rapport by describing their own background and why they joined Amazon

• Question the candidate to understand past behaviours, paying special attention to questions related to Amazon’s Leadership Principles

• Provide at least 15 minutes to answer any questions the candidate might have

At this point, the Hiring Manager makes a decision on whether they are “inclined” to hire. If they are, they will be invited to an in-house interview loop. 

It’s worth noting that Amazon tracks the number of applications, how many are shortlisted, and at this point how many go from the Phone Screen to the In-House Interview Loop. They leverage this data to better understand the candidate experience, but most importantly to make improvements and to improve training. 

In-House Interview Loop

From here, the Hiring Manager will design what’s known as the “interview loop”. This is a long and time-consuming process that requires the time of many other Amazonians, so it’s not taken lightly.

They will decide how many people need to participate in the loop and what sorts of backgrounds should be represented (e.g. Sales, Engineering, Leadership). In most cases, the interview loop will contain no more than 5 to 7 interviewers. This group will always include the recruiter, the hiring manager, and a Bar Raiser.

Importantly, there are a few important qualifications that are required to participate in a loop:

• You must have completed training in Amazon’s interview process. While they run a half-day session on this much of the training is actually practical. Even in the early months of joining you are encouraged to shadow both screening calls as well as interview loops.

• The loop participants should be no more than one level below the candidate they are interviewing nor should participants interview their own boss. While there’s often pressure to include team members in the process of choosing a boss, this is highly discouraged at Amazon given all the potential drawbacks. 

Once the hiring manager has designed the loop the process now relies heavily on two important elements:

Behaviour Interviewing

Amazon learned very quickly in their hiring journey what many other companies have come to understand. Namely, the basic details of your past employment and qualifications are often very poor predictors of your future abilities. 

As a result, Amazon focuses much of the process on understanding how your past behaviours and ways of working map to the Amazon Leadership Principles. While they assess job-specific skills in a very standard way (e.g. Engineers would show how they would solve a technical challenge), they leverage behavioural interviewing to answer the more fundamental question of whether this candidate will thrive long-term at Amazon.

In each case, the interview loop members are assigned one or more of the leadership principles and will then ask questions based on them. There’s actually an internal tool at Amazon with a bank of questions (5-7 questions for each leadership principle) that loop participants pull from, so almost every interview at Amazon globally relies on the same basic set of foundational questions.

The goal here is for the interview loop to understand what specifically the candidate contributed and how they went about doing it. Critically, generalised answers are not accepted and each interview loop member is trained to dig deeper to understand the detail behind your answers. To do this effectively and at scale, the company relies on the “STAR” (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method:

• What was the situation?

• What were you tasked with?

• What actions did you take?

• What was the result?

As part of Amazon’s interview training, the interviewer will continue to ask follow-up questions until they feel they have a good understanding of their answer. 

The Bar Raiser

As described above, the Bar Raiser plays a critical and very involved role in the process. They are involved in every interview loop and ensure that each step of the process is being followed.

Interestingly, there’s no additional pay or bonus for being a Bar Raiser. In fact, the only recognition you get is a little icon next to your name in the company directory. However, it’s a coveted and highly prestigious role internally.

Written Feedback

Consistent with Amazon’s emphasis on a writing culture, there’s a significant expectation to capture and categorize everything that transpires (almost verbatim) in each interview. The initial notes form the basis of the written feedback you’ll submit after the interview is completed. 

As per the Bar Raiser process, if you don’t take detailed notes then this is one of the situations where they will step in and course correct. 

Many Amazonians will actually book 15 minutes after the interview to ensure they faithfully capture everything and nothing is forgotten. The feedback should be so clear in written form that the author need not be even present. There is no flexibility here and oral feedback is not considered a substitute. 

Each write-up includes their interviewer's recommendation, which only falls into one of four categories

• Strongly inclined to hire

• Inclined to hire

• Not inclined to hire

• Strongly not inclined to hire

There is no option for “undecided” and to avoid bias the interviewer is not able to see the interview notes from the other members of the loop before their own feedback has been submitted.

Debrief/Hiring Meeting

Once all the interviews have been completed and the feedback has been submitted, the hiring loop meets either in person or via video to go over everything.

The meeting is led by the Bar Raiser and the meeting starts with everyone reading through all of the submitted feedback. Critically, once everyone has reviewed and discussed the feedback you have the option as an interviewer to change your opinion on the candidate. 

The rationale here is you now possess new information (feedback from your colleagues) that you did not have access to before you made your decision. This can either strengthen your initial decision or cause you to change it completely and either option is considered valid. 

The conclusion of the meeting is when the hiring manager makes the final decision whether you move forward with the candidate or not. While the Bar Raiser has the ability to veto their decision it is extremely rare for this to happen.

At most companies, it will be the hiring manager or recruiter who leads the debrief meeting (if they have one at all). At Amazon, it’s the Bar Raiser who leads it. It can be quite uncomfortable for new Amazonians to go through this process where they don’t run the meeting (or they feel the need to sell their candidate to the rest of the loop). The purpose of having the Bar Raiser lead the meeting is to bring an objective approach to the process and to the evaluation of the candidate so only the very best make it through. 

Reference Check

Amazon has de-emphasized the importance of reference checks in the hiring process, which is increasingly common at other companies. They took this decision because according to their data, the reference check rarely affected the final hiring decision. 

However, when they do complete reference checks it’s a key part of this process and the candidate can’t be hired until it’s complete. 

At Amazon, it’s the hiring manager who completes the reference checks and this typically involves asking candidates for 3-5 references who ideally include former managers, colleagues, and reports. 

The two most frequent questions are:

• “If given the chance, would you hire this candidate again?”

• “Of the people you have managed or worked with, in what percentile would you place this candidate?”

The information gleaned from this conversation should add to the overall understanding of the candidate and should support the existing information you’ve already captured as part of the process.

Offer Through Onboarding 

Once the team has decided to make an offer it’s the hiring manager that makes the offer, not the recruiter. They will personally call you to walk you through the offer and why they’re excited for you to join the team. 

Amazon knows that they’re operating in a very competitive market and that candidates that are going to get to their final stages likely have many other opportunities they can pursue. For this reason, they encourage the entire interview loop team to stay engaged in the process until the candidate signs on.

The expectation is that at least someone from the team maintains weekly contact with the candidate - even if it’s just to check in - up until they formally accept the offer. 

Amazon also leverages their own product to entice candidates to sign, sometimes sending “book bombs” to candidates (a collection of books the team thinks they would like) or other products offered by Amazon to demonstrate an understanding of the candidate. 

The focus is to make the gesture sincere and personal and to show the candidates how much they’ve understood about them through the process before they’ve even started.

If the team encounters roadblocks at this final stage, they’re encouraged to dig deep to understand what’s preventing the candidate from signing or whether there are concerns that they’ve left unaddressed. They have the agency to enlist others at the company to help address those concerns or escalate to more senior leaders (VPs and even the CEO) to help pitch the candidate on the opportunity. 

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This is a four-part series on how to build a world-class approach to hiring. Most companies will say that talent is everything, but very few take the kind of comprehensive approach to hiring that consistently leads to great hiring decisions (especially at scale). 

If you agree that who you hire represents the most important decision you make as a business, then your process becomes a central component of the how. This playbook is intended to help to sharpen your process whether you’re hiring for the first time or you’re a seasoned pro at this stage.

In putting this together, I’ve sought out some of the sharpest minds in this space and I’m hoping the below will play some small part in helping you move the needle in the right direction!

I’ve broken out the hiring process into four broad buckets and will be tackling each one in depth:

• Part 1: Align. Build the right foundation (← This Post)

• Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet

• Part 3: Guide. Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience

• Part 4: Onboard. Setting up new hires for success

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing each article in this series.

For this first step, we’ll be looking at how to build the right foundation when making a hire.

Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: Kassy Kropka (Director, Global Talent Acquisition at Viral Nation), Jane Maguire (Head of Talent at Gadget), Martin Hauck (Founder, The People People Group), Kathryn Cant, Kim Benedict (Co-Founder & CEO, TalentMinded), William Laporte (Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik), Amanda Nagy (Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale)

Step 1: Align. Build the right foundation

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." 

~ Abraham Lincoln

For many companies, “recruiting” is almost always the starting point. However, I’ve chosen to start with internal alignment because one of the critical errors companies make is recruiting before they have a clear idea of what they’re looking for and what process they’ll follow once candidates are in the pipeline. 

In reality, the very best processes are actually front-loaded. In other words, it’s the work before the recruiting starts that makes the biggest impact:

“The pre-work is so critical to the process and it’s where I encourage our teams to spend a lot of time before recruitment even starts”. 

~ Kassy Kropka, Global Talent Acquisiton at Viral Nation

When you make a “bad hire”, it’s easy to start to lay the blame on the hire themselves. Yet, if you really dig deep and are honest, it’s likely that your process (or lack thereof) broke down well before you ever came across that individual’s resume. 

When you start with internal alignment, you help your team answer critical questions like “Who are we hiring?”, “Why are we hiring them?”, and “What impact will they have on the business?”. 

By doing this work, you dramatically increase your chances of making a successful hire and you set a cultural bar for your team and organization. 

The most common mistakes and pitfalls to avoid

When it comes to trying to do something well, it helps to start with what not to do first. 

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

~Charlie Munger, Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway

While there are a multitude of pitfalls to avoid when hiring and the below is by no means an exhaustive list, they are certainly some of the most common:

👊 No clarity of ownership

When it comes to hiring, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen. This is often by design, but it also means that it’s easy to introduce a grey area around who exactly owns what part. 

While the Hiring Manager should rely on the input of their team to make the right decision, the Hiring Manager should have the final say. You should not organize this process like a democracy, where everyone gets a vote. When you hire by committee you absolve yourself of the decision and you start to focus on candidates with the fewest weaknesses in their application rather than the ones with the standout strengths you need as a business.  

However, when it comes to the actual process (e.g. candidate communication), if you have the luxury this should be owned by the People team. 

“When you the People Team don’t own the process, it can become very disjointed very quickly. For instance, if you join one team you might have 18 interviews and if you join another you have 1.5 interviews. The People Team can help ensure the process is objective, that we’re constantly learning, and the candidate experience is top of mind.”

~ William Laporte, Director Employee Experience at Trackforce Valiant

The other benefit of having the People Team own the process is that they can provide an essential channel to help learn more about the candidate and answer questions that they may not be comfortable asking their potential future boss.

🐌 Moving too slowly

The old business adage “time kills all deals” applies here just as much as it does for Sales. The mistake is to assume that candidates in your pipeline don’t have other options because the very best ones will. The slower you move through the process the greater the chance they’ll be given an offer by a competing company and you’ll miss out on a great hire.

What’s more, if you’re hiring for the right reasons, it means there’s an urgent need in your business to fill. The sooner you fill it with the right person, the better off your customers (and business) will be.

🙅 Bias-driven decision making

The impact of bias (both hidden and overt) in the hiring process has become much better understood and acknowledged over the last ~10 years and has helped companies build better teams because of it.

If you have overt bias in the hiring process, you have much bigger issues. What’s more complex (and insidious) is the multitude of hidden biases that find their way into the hiring process by very well-meaning people. 

I won’t (and can’t) fully do this topic justice (for that there are some incredible resources and books by far more knowledgeable people than I), but I do want to name the most frequent areas of bias that you should be aware of:

• Unconscious bias: These are implicit biases that we may not even be aware of, such as favouring candidates who are similar to us in terms of background, culture, or interests.

• Confirmation bias: This occurs when recruiters or hiring managers seek out information that confirms their preconceived notions about a candidate, potentially ignoring contradictory information.

• Halo effect: This bias leads to the overall impression of a candidate being influenced by a single positive trait or experience, overshadowing other important qualifications or shortcomings.

• Groupthink: While not technically a “bias”, it often negatively impacts the hiring process by discouraging debate or diverse points of view when coming to a decision.

I’ll share a short story from my own experience around unconscious bias. At the time, my team were hiring for a critical and urgent role. While we had an enormous response to it the team was struggling to find someone with the right skills and capabilities. We got together as a group and reviewed the most promising resumes we’d shortlisted, but the team was not recommending we move through the process any further. 

One resume stood out that looked like they had all the relevant skills, capabilities, and experience. Why were they not moving forward I asked. Everyone replied it was because this person didn’t have relevant industry experience.

The interesting part was that we had not identified “industry experience” as a critical component for this role. Given everyone on the existing team came from the same industry, they were assuming (unconsciously) that because this person didn’t come from the same industry that they would not make a good hire. Despite all agreeing that industry experience wasn’t the most relevant piece to this role!

The story had a great ending. The team realized their error and proceeded to pull the candidate back into the process. The candidate performed extremely well in the process and they were hired. What’s more, they went on to become one of the highest-performing members of the team!

🚘 Mistaking the passenger for the driver

One of the key questions a Hiring Manager needs to answer very quickly when interviewing a candidate is to establish whether they are talking to the driver or the passenger when going through their list of accomplishments. This becomes more crucial the more senior the role.

A driver has owned an initiative, program, or project end-to-end and was accountable for its successful delivery. On the other hand, while the passenger was present and contributed they were not the critical owner and did not have the same level of responsibility as the driver. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with being a passenger in this context - they may well have been doing the exact job they were hired for - but the problem does arise when the passenger describes their role more as the driver. 

For example, if you’re looking to hire a Director of Marketing and one of the key skills required is experience managing an online budget of >$100k a month you will want to establish whether your interviewee actually managed this budget or was on a team with that budget. The two are very different things. 

You can of course still decide to hire “the passenger” because you think their contributions and experience demonstrate a level of trajectory that warrants it. Still, your role as the Hiring Manager is to make that decision consciously. 

👯 Not involving cross-functional teams

Lastly, another critical error that’s made early on in the hiring process is to not involve cross-functional teams that will be impacted by this new hire. You will rarely hire someone who only interacts with your own specific team and therefore you need to involve the other relevant teams as early in the process as possible. This will not only help you recruit a better candidate, but it will also make their onboarding and first 90 days far more impactful. 

For example, if you’re hiring a new Technical Recruiter it’s important that the Engineering team is involved both in scoping the role as well as the interview process.

A framework for how to think about success

Now that we’re grounded in some of the most common ways hiring processes get derailed, it’s important to think through what success looks like. 

A powerful framework that I’ve used at this stage is to make sure I’m filling the right role, with the right person, at the right time for the business. If you deliver on all three of those elements you’re setting this person up to have a very big impact.  

Given how important each one is, I’ve broken down each one separately:

🎯 The right role

The biggest determinant of success is whether you as a business have identified the right role in the first place. If you’ve misidentified the role you need, then no matter how qualified or fantastic the person you hire is they’ll be set up for failure. What’s more, the more senior the role the higher your confidence needs to be. 

To start, you should be hiring for pain or opportunity, but not for convenience. When things are busy and your targets for the year were just increased it’s actually quite easy to conflate them. 

When it comes to hiring for pain or opportunity, the telltale signs that you need to potentially prioritize hiring include (but are not limited to):

• Your team is regularly overworked 

• Your customers are experiencing delays

• The quality of deliverables is on a downward trajectory

• You’re losing talent

• The team is experiencing low morale 

• Entering a new market

• Launching a new service

• Building a new function in-house where you lack existing capabilities

It’s your responsibility as a leader to dig deeper at this stage and understand the core of the problem before you move forward too quickly. Keep in mind, that you’ll often have a more expansive view of the business than the individual teams making hiring recommendations. 

“Before deciding to hire, we look very carefully at how efficiently the existing team is working. We need to explore solutions to extend the capacity of our team, and this doesn’t always mean increasing headcount. Sometimes, the best solution is to leverage technology or external tools. For instance, we consider whether there are software solutions or automation tools available that can handle routine tasks, thereby freeing up our team members to focus on more complex, creative, or strategic work. This approach not only enhances productivity, but also contributes to employee satisfaction, because it allows team members to engage in more meaningful and rewarding aspects of their jobs.”

Jane Maquire, Head of Talent at Gadget

I was once in a situation where our Recruitment team was well over their bandwidth capacity, but the hiring targets continued to grow (particularly for technical hires). The initial recommendation was to bring on additional Technical Recruiters to solve what seemed like an obvious bandwidth issue. 

However, when I spoke with the Engineering team they were actually struggling to even onboard our existing flow of new hires. In other words, hiring more recruiters was actually going to make the problem worse! What started out as hiring for the recruitment team ended up switching to a hiring need on a completely different team. 

The key thing to avoid is hiring for convenience. This means hiring more people to take on the work of existing employees because they either don’t want to do that work anymore or want to do less of that work and work on other more “strategic” (i.e. nebulous) tasks. 

As a leader, it is your responsibility to scrutinize every headcount request to ensure you’re either solving real pain and/or pursuing critical opportunities for the business. 

While you’ll get a short-term win for your team when you get the new headcount approved, if it doesn’t drive the business forward it’s actually a long-term loss and can contribute to a host of cultural issues. This means saying no to headcount requests is as important as it is saying yes.

If you’re confident you’re hiring for the right reasons and you truly understand the need and how it will impact the business, you’ll need to get very specific and codify your thoughts in a way that enables you to further refine the role and get buy-in from the rest of the organization.

Here’s a simple checklist you can use to do this:

• Goal/Purpose: What is the goal or purpose of this role? For example, is it to drive top-line revenue over the next 12 months? Or is it to build a custom-centric support organization?

• Outcomes: What outcomes will they drive in their first 90 days? While you can state outcomes further out than this, the very best hires will immediately show their impact and therefore I would hold them (and yourself) to far more immediate metrics.

• Full-time/Contractor/Part-time: You should press here to make sure the role you need is full-time, instead of hiring for a more flexible role like a Freelance or Contractor. 

• Function: What function does this role play (e.g. Engineering, Sales, Product)? In many cases, this will be obvious, but you would not be the first organization to hire for one function only to realize that the more pressing need was in another part of the org. 

• Cross-functional: How will this role interact with other parts of the organization? For example, if you’re hiring a Business Analyst and the intention is for them to support other teams you need to make sure you loop in the relevant leaders from those teams into the process at this stage. 

• Seniority: There are two overriding concerns to think through here. The first (and most obvious) is that the more senior the hire the higher the compensation. The second is that the higher the seniority the higher the cross-functional impact this role will have and the potentially more disruptive it is to your existing management structure. 

• Location: How important is the location for this role? Is it remote, flexible, hybrid, or entirely in-office?

At this point, if you’re looking for a relatively senior or very skill-set-specific role, Kathryn Cant suggests running even a light search based on your criteria to see whether there’s a viable talent pool for what you’re looking for or whether you need to make any adjustments:

“This helps ensure there’s actually a market you can go after and if there’s not you can make the necessary changes together with the Recruitment team before you even go live”.

~ Kathryn Cant 

🧑The right person

Now that you have a strong understanding of the role, it’s much easier to identify the right person. When it comes to the right person, the key thing to remember is don’t be U2:

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for

~ U2, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

As they say, if you don’t know what you’re looking for you’ll never find it. 

In a more professional (and less musical) context, this means developing a clear profile of what skills, competencies, experiences, and cultural traits a successful person in this role is likely to have. If this is a role you frequently recruit for, it may be very obvious, but for less frequent roles you might be starting from scratch.

One of the best places to start is by looking at your peers and colleagues across the company. What do the very best contributors have in common at the company? Where is the company over-indexing and where is it under-indexing? 

From there, you should put together a list of the critical “must-haves” this person needs in order to succeed in this role. 

When it comes to skills and competencies, this can include things like:

• Job-specific skills and qualifications: Is this important? Are there certain qualifications that are necessary in order to fulfil this role?

• Experience level: While the number of years of experience is often a poor predictor of performance, there may be some minimum here you’d need to be confident this person can succeed.

• Hard skills: How proficient are they in the relevant tech stack and how important is that to their success? 

• Management/Leadership experience: Will they be running a team and if so how important is it for them to have prior experience?

The cultural piece is just as important, if not more important. This new hire may have all the skills and experience to do well, but they will need to thrive in your unique culture.

“To build a diverse team, you need to look at culture-adds not culture-fits”

~ Kim Benedict, Co-Founder & CEO of TalentMinded

In most cases, you’ll already have a very clearly defined set of company values to work from but company values are not always fully encompassing of what it means to work at your company and they are not all created equally. Be honest with yourself (and the candidate) about what those most important elements are and don’t compromise. Rarely does a hire with the right competencies work out long-term when there’s a clear misalignment in values.  

Your hiring profile together with a clearly scoped role provides you with the two most critical inputs you need to empower you (or your recruitment team) with the clarity to succeed. You just need to make sure you get the timing right.

🕗 The right time

There is just such a thing as hiring for a role too early or too late. It’s not about getting the timing perfect, but there’s a world where you identify the right role and the right person but you fail because the timing is wrong. 

Years ago, I met with a high-growth company that was looking to recruit a Chief Operating Officer (COO) to their ranks. As for all of the reasons above, I was suspicious whether there was even a need for the role let alone if I was the right person for it. The more I talked to them, the more I came to believe that they did in fact need to fill that role but it was the wrong timing. 

In this case, the company was not at a size (or growth rate) where it made sense to bring someone with that skill set at that moment. There were already several senior leaders around the table who were aptly filling in and while it was a problem they needed to address, it was not so urgent that they should be prioritizing it then and there.

While all of the above foundational work may seem like a lot of steps to go through, you would be amazed how quickly a great team can run through a focused exercise like this and come out with great deliverables. 

What’s more, you need to consider what you gain. When done well, you walk away from this with the highest statistical chance of making a great hire AND all of the tactical elements you need to run a great recruitment process:

• An aligned team

• All the inputs for a stellar job description

• The right material for great interview questions

• Clear outcomes to help put together an ambitious 90-day plan

Align on compensation early

This is a monster of a topic and my intention is not to cover it comprehensively here (that will be for another post!). However, there are two specific and critical components to consider before you proceed from here: Compensation Range and Budget Sign-off.

Compensation Range: What compensation range should you offer?

You should have a very clear idea of what you can offer a potential candidate for a multitude of reasons, not least given some of the early conversations will be about screening for compensation expectations. 

In most cases, your HR team will have access to compensation data that will help you build up a specific picture of what you can reasonably expect to offer. This will often be in the form of a salary range that includes a minimum, a midpoint, and a maximum. 

Note: If you or your HR team don’t have access to compensation data I would strongly recommend you prioritize this before going much further.

The best way I’ve come across about how to think through compensation ranges in a relatively rigorous and objective way is through what’s called a compa ratio. This ratio looks at where your potential offer will sit relative to this range. 

The compa ratio is simply the Actual Salary (e.g. $50,000) you’re offering divided by the Salary Midpoint (e.g. $55,000) in your salary range. It gives you a quick view of how much higher (or lower) your offer is relative to the midpoint and can also be used to evaluate internal pay equity.

In this case, the compa ratio would be $50,000 / $55,000 = 0.90 (where 1 = midpoint).

When it comes to deciding where on the scale the offer should land, this should be primarily driven by the level of experience and impact you expect the candidate to bring to the role. This decision should be made by the Hiring Manager in very close consultation with the Recruiter.

Budget Sign-off: What compensation range can you offer?

As for budget sign-off, it’s critical to ensure that the role you’ve identified actually ties back to your budget. In many cases, you may not have an official budget so the most fail-safe process is to connect with your Finance Lead (or Executive Lead) and ensure you have the approval to offer a salary range. 

It’s important to have the range approved because you don’t want to have to go back and forth if there’s a negotiation, but this will also avoid budget creep. For example, if you only get a specific salary approved and you offer even slightly more (say, $5k) it won’t have a big impact on your specific team budget but if your peers all do the same thing the compounding effect can be significant. 

In a previous role, I joined a fast-growing company and saw first-hand how big an issue this can become in a very short amount of time. The company had ~50 open roles across the business, but while we were not even close to filling all of those roles we were very close to exceeding the budget already. 

Why? Because on average hiring managers were offering almost $10k more per role than we had budgeted, which meant that after only 10 hires we were already spending more than $100k over our budget. We had to redo the budget and scale back our hiring plans.

Write a stellar job description

Now that you are aligned on the scope of the role, you have all the essential elements to write a clear and specific job description (JD) that codifies what you’re looking for.

It’s important to note at this stage the difference between a job description and a job posting (JP). While the job description is an internal and more formal document used for alignment purposes, the job posting is an external document that is effectively a piece of marketing.

The JD should be written by the Hiring Manager (with close consultation with the Recruiter, if you’ve got one on your team) and should include both the expectations of the company (i.e. values) and the specific elements of the role you’re looking to fill. 

I often see Hiring Managers “outsource” the JD writing to Recruitment teams and I do not recommend it. The Hiring Manager owns the decision to hire and they are in the best position to articulate what’s required in the role.

When it comes to the JP, this is where it often makes sense to leverage your People Team or Marketing team to ensure what you put together is done in a way that appeals to the right audience.

“When it comes to job postings, companies often just re-use the job description. The posting is a chance to speak directly to the candidate and in a human way that’s enticing. At some companies, the job posting is even written (or at least reviewed) by the marketing team.”

~ Amanda Nagy, Global Total Rewards and Benefits Manager at Tailscale

Lastly, the JD (and JP) is often a place where bias surfaces and can work against you and the people you’re looking to hire. Your goal is to build as large and diverse a pool of candidates to review, but it’s easier than you realize to fall into the trap of writing something that really only appeals to one group over another even when it’s not your intention.

Fortunately, there are some great tools out there that will help you identify blind spots. If you’d prefer not to use a tool (or don’t have the budget) leverage a few people with different backgrounds on your team to give it a review before posting. You’ll be amazed at what others see that you don’t see.

Now you’re ready to start recruiting!

👉 Part 2: Recruit. How to Become a Talent Magnet

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The company All-hands meeting is by far the most expensive meeting at your company. It’s also one of the most valuable times in the calendar to align, engage, and inspire your team around what you’re building and where you’re going. 

Yet, it seems like most struggle to find a formula that works for them. From some of the teams I’ve spoken to recently, it’s actually having a negative impact on the team. The material is rushed, the presenters unprepared, and the format difficult to follow. 

This got me thinking: what makes a great All-hands and what can we learn from the companies getting it right? 

The below is an effort to codify and summarize my own experiences as well as document insights from a range of companies (big and small) that were referred to me by their own attendees.

I hope this goes some small way towards helping you make the most of this time.

Before we dive in, I wanted to give a special thanks to the following who graciously offered their time, insights, and recommendations: Joel Marans (VP of Internal Communications and Employer Brand at Top Hat), Jane Maguire (Head of Talent at Gadget), Paul Charlton (VP Digital at CPA Ontario), Mary Papagiannis (Senior Talent Manager at Vena), Tasha Simpson (Employee Experience Lead at Humi), Liz Culotti (Executive Assistant at Loblaw Digital), and Jason Goldlist (Founder and CEO at Venue).

0. On Why.

The purpose of an All-hands is above all else about high fidelity communication. If your team doesn’t know what you’re trying to do, why you’re doing it, or how they can contribute it will make it next to impossible to achieve your company’s mission. 

The goal of an All-hands should be to do three things exceptionally well:

• Inspire: Why does this matter in the grander scheme of things?

• Align: What are we trying to achieve together and how can the team help?

• Engage: Why should I be excited and what does it mean for me?

1. On Size. It matters.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a company's size has a massive influence on what’s necessary or even achievable with an All-hands. Not only do larger companies have more resources to invest in making great All-hands - in some cases dedicated teams - but they also have significantly more information to communicate and complexity to untangle.

While size will impact a number of the important variables below, it’s important to note that much of the guidance below is applicable whether you’re running a small or large organization.

For that reason, the below guidance is not written for a certain-sized company. My hope is that there’s relevant and actionable information here whether you’re 15 or more than 500 people.

2. On Resourcing. Ensure you budget enough time to prepare.

The way to think about the amount of time to invest is to make it relative to the number of people that will be attending. The more people attending, the more meeting hours you’re expending and therefore the higher the bar needs to be to make sure you’re leveraging everyone’s time wisely. 

For instance, if you’re a 15-person company it makes sense to spend only a small amount of time on pulling content together because internal alignment and communication are already easier and the total number of meeting hours spent is on the lower end (e.g. ~15 hours for 15 people to attend a 1-hour meeting). 

However, if you’re a 500-person company the total number of meeting hours jumps to 500 hours and the complexity to both coordinate and cover that much content requires a lot more effort. 

Lastly, when budgeting time there are two separate buckets of time to consider:

• Host/Owner: The best run All-hands have a single, central owner (see more below) who is responsible for coordinating internally to make sure all the right content is ready to go. They will often play a “host” role too by welcoming everyone and smoothing transitions between presenters. While the time varied quite a bit from those I spoke with, the average time they spend getting the deck ready is between 30 and 60 minutes.

• Individual Presenters: In every example reviewed, there were multiple presenters at each All-hands. The average number of presenters varied between 3 to 8 with each taking between 30 and 60 minutes to prepare their own material.

3. On Ownership. Assign a single owner.

This can be difficult in a small company where resources are tight, but the benefit of a clear owner (even if it’s the CEO) means the quality and consistency of each All-hands is dramatically higher.

From the group I spoke to, the most frequent owners are the following:

• CEO

• Internal Comms

• Chief of Staff

• Senior HR Leader

• CEO Executive Assistant

• Rotating Executive Team Members

In most cases, one of the above owners will own the All-hands each and every time, but in some cases, there are “takeovers” where a new team or team member steps in to run it. This is used to highlight particular teams and the work they’re doing and to keep it fresh.

For organizations with >150 employers, the most common theme is to have rotating executive team members present each time. 

4. On Structure. Anchor on key content, but leave flexibility to keep it fresh.

This is an area that is particularly sensitive to the size of the organization. 

By and large, the larger the company the more “structured” the content is kept. That is to say, they have the same consistent topics they cover each week. More than anything, this is for practical reasons because at scale (say >300) you can’t pull together content and talking points quite the same way as when you’re 15 people.

There are a number of other advantages to keeping a clear and consistent structure. For one, it makes it easier to show progress on key themes and topics because you’re anchoring the content each week. It also means it’s easier for your audience to follow because they already know what to expect.

In cases where companies were keeping a relatively consistent structure, there is a LOT in common with how the very best are structuring their content. In almost every case, they hit the following topics: 

• People Updates: New Hires, Promotions, Anniversaries etc.

• Highlighting Values: Special spotlight on employees who are embodying their company values with specific examples

• Customer Feedback: Showcasing the good/bad/ugly of what customers are saying about the product or service.

• Mission, Strategy, and Progress: Typically the CEO or senior leadership provides a review of the company’s strategy and progress against key KPIs (often including financials)

• Roadmap Deep-Dive: A walk-through of what’s been shipped, what’s being worked on, and what’s coming next.

• AMAs: An open forum for employees to ask senior leadership questions about the business

However, where possible there is a strong bias to keep the structure as flexible as possible to keep things fresh and people engaged:

“I think that one of the main points to prevent disengagement is variety.”

~ Jane Maquire, Head of Talent at Gadget

In many cases, this means staying very close to what’s going on in the business and building the All-hands around what’s most top of mind at that moment. This could be a particular feature that’s about to launch and the theme of the All-hands becomes more of a live demo. Alternatively, it could be a big RFP win that the team just delivered and the Sales group wants to do a deep dive into what went well and highlight everyone who helped make it happen. 

While this more agile approach is harder to pull off at scale, Mary Papagiannis (Senior Talent Manager @ Vena) shared how Vena (~700 employees) leverages size to their advantage. For every All-hands they rotate who’s presenting - one week it might be Sales, the next week product: 

“So there's never the same group presenting ... they truly switch it up and that means the content and delivery is always different.”

~ Mary Papagiannis, Senior Talent Manager at Vena

5. On Tooling. Invest in the right tech stack. 

I remember the first All-hands I attended where I was genuinely floored was back in 2015 when I joined Tilt (subsequently acquired by Airbnb) as their Country Manager for Canada. 

While I’d attended some great All-hands in the past, Tilt invested the kind of attention and detail to it that made them really stand out. 

While we were still a small team at the time (<50 people), the company’s founders - James Beshara and Khaled Hussein - made significant investments in the “production” quality of the presentations that made them feel more like a piece of entertainment than a stale corporate update.

They pieced together the very best in audio, visual, and streaming services to make sure the quality bar was as high whether you were in-person or remote. What made this even more unique, is that this was done well before the flood of cloud services that launched just before (no Zoom!) or immediately following the pandemic. 

The care, attention, and investments they made signalled that the information to come was going to be valuable and the feedback was consistently strong from the team.

Today, it’s even easier to make this happen and it’s more important than ever. Over 80% of the companies I spoke to run their All-hands either completely remotely or hybrid and none require everyone to be in person. 

Given this, there was a wide array of tools to tackle some of the unique challenges of hosting high-quality All-hands at scale. While there was a degree of consistency around the tech stack (Google Meet, Zoom) that will not surprise anyone, there were a number of organizations leveraging more innovative platforms to make the most of their All-hands that are well worth a mention:

• Venue - Venue is an all-in-one communications platform to create, host, organize, and share important team events like all hands, webinars, and AMAs.

• Gather - Gather is a video chat platform designed to make virtual interactions more human.

6. On Cadence. Plan to run them at least monthly, if not more frequently. 

Regarding cadence, the first thing to point out is that almost everyone agreed on the importance of a set schedule for the All-hands. While they differed on how often they should run, more than 95% spoke to the criticality of a fixed schedule that doesn’t change.

On the question of how often they should run, there is a dead-even split between companies hosting them weekly or bi-weekly (37%) and those hosting them on a monthly basis (37%). While less common, I’m surprised to see almost 25% of people respond that they host them quarterly given how much can change at a company over that period of time.

Interestingly, while I didn’t break out the data by company size there is not much of a correlation between the size of the company and the frequency. In other words, large companies were just as likely to meet frequently (i.e. weekly) as small companies, despite the larger cost. In my experience, the cadence is heavily dictated by the culture and values of the organization. Some companies prize transparency over many other things and therefore even at very large numbers, they still invest in these critical rituals to keep teams aligned.

7. On Timing. Choose a day of the week that makes sense. 

An oft-overlooked detail in All-hands planning is choosing the right day of the week. When choosing the day of the week, be sure you choose a day that matches the rhythm of your team and business. This encourages greater participation and ensures you can still meet the expectations of your customers.

When I was at Checkout 51, we had a massive sales organization that served our business and that of our larger parent company. They had very few “in-office days”, which meant for most of the week they were travelling to visit clients or take meetings with prospects. In order to ensure we included them the senior leadership team did a great job of scheduling the All-hands on a day when the majority of them would be in office. This made a huge difference and meant they were very well attended.

This may well explain why - to my surprise - there is a very even distribution when it comes to the most popular day of the week to host. While I would have expected there to be one or two days that were the most popular, that isn’t borne out in the data. 

What’s more, the most popular day of the week is Wednesday rather than a Friday, which in my own personal experience has been the most popular time to host. 

Lastly, a key consideration when choosing the date is whether you want to create a moment beyond just the All-hands presentation itself. For instance, do you want everyone to attend and then come back to their desks or do you want to use it as an opportunity to foster culture?

Jane remembers the early All-hands at Shopify fondly, which were hosted on Friday from 4 pm to 5 pm and designed around employee engagement and collaboration well beyond just the presented material:

“They organized a huge buffet for everyone each week. It was a full, full-on event. It helped everyone wind down into the weekend and people would stay for hours and hours just talking. I’m trying to create the same vibe here at Gadget.dev”

~ Jane Maquire, Head of Talent at Gadget

While it’s far more difficult to pull off these in-person events now with many people still working remotely, I spoke with many leaders who were recreating this kind of experience remotely by providing gift cards for lunches/dinners/snacks as part of the All-hands experience to encourage participation and engagement.

8. On Interactivity. Make it participant friendly. 

A frequent mistake I’ve seen made is to treat an All-hands like a one-way flow of information. It’s of course tempting because you feel like you’ve got so much information you want to communicate in a very short amount of time. 

However, the goal is not to get through all the information in a set amount of time. The goal is to inspire, align, and engage your team. For that, you’ll need to make it a two-way flow of information. 

There are a number of ways to do this really well. For example, when I was at Clearco one of the best-reviewed parts of the All-hands was when we would bring in a special guest to come and speak to the team about a particular topic we were focused on as a business. We would open up the talk to questions and our Zoom chat box would become flooded with questions, the vast majority of which got answered by our guests. Andrew D’Souza and Michele Romanow did an incredible job of finding the right people at the right time to bring in and that made all the difference.

Another, much simpler way to encourage interactivity and more engagement is to enable your team to submit questions ahead of time or to run an AMA-style section of your All-hands towards the end of the presentation. This will give your team a platform to talk to you and communicate an openness and level of transparency that’s important for any leadership team.

It can be challenging to balance both the presentation as well as the interactivity component in the allotted time. In this case, the most practical way of addressing this that I’ve come across is from the team at Humi. For their All-hands (aka “Humi Halls”) they actually separate out the AMA section from the main presentation so that people can focus on the content and they can answer everyone’s questions.

They even go a step further and have two different AMA sections that follow a week after the All-hands: one focuses on business and product questions and the other on people and culture-related questions.

“This means we don’t have to rush the presentation and people have time to think through the questions they want to ask, instead of having to do on the spot.”

~ Tasha Simpson, Employee Experience Lead at Humi

It’s worth noting that an interactive component is not for the faint of heart and you will almost certainly get very difficult questions from the team. However, I believe it’s worth it given you gain a clear understanding of what’s on your team’s mind and you’ll have an opportunity to answer it in a way you’d like as opposed to it being discussed without you. 

9. On Remote Teams. Run multiple All-hands. 

While you’ll take pains to ensure you pick a time that works for everyone, there are going to be situations where there’s just not a time that works for everyone (e.g. too many time zones to support).

In this case, I would suggest running a second All-hands at a more convenient time and with the same content.

While this can seem overly onerous, you’ve got to consider the alternative. You’ve made an investment to grow your team internationally and for it to be a success they will need to feel connected to what’s going on in the business, which is particularly hard when you’re permanently remote and geographically distant. 

If you choose to host a meeting at a time they can’t attend, you’re sending a clear signal (deliberately or not) that it’s less important to update them than it is to update others. The reality is that international employees are already missing a lot of context by not being at “HQ” and therefore you need to make even more of an effort to ensure that they have the information they need to thrive in a remote setting.

10. On Culture. Make it your own.

The very best All-hands follow many of the best practices outlined here, but where many set themselves apart is by bringing their own “special sauce”. It’s not necessarily something big (although some are!), but rather something that’s fun and unique and most importantly reinforces the company’s culture.

One of my favourites is from the team at Top Hat, where Joel Marans (VP of Internal Communications and Employer Brand) is responsible for running their weekly All-hands. He shared that each week they have a “Top Hatter” curate a playlist of their favourite music that’s then shared with the company and posted on their website:

“We’ve been doing it since the early pandemic days. It's been a fun and great way to learn about our people”

~ Joel Marans, VP Internal Communications and Employer Brand at Top Hat

Perhaps the most unique and extravagant one I’ve come across is from the team at Motley Fool (an investment guidance company). As part of their monthly All-hands, the company conducts a draw where one employee is selected to embark on a "Fool’s Errand". The more tenure at the company, the more entries you receive!

If chosen, the selected individual must take a mandatory two-week break, completely disconnecting from the office. You receive a stipend and are encouraged to travel anywhere globally and pursue any activity of your choice, under the condition that you complete one personal finance task during your time off. 

Interestingly, beyond just the fun and engagement factor the primary objective remains to ensure seamless operation within each team even when a member is absent. Colleagues left behind are tasked with evaluating any hitches encountered during the selected Fool's (What Motley Fool employees are called) absence, striving to enhance the overall workflow.

11. On Feedback. Get it. 

Lastly, it’s critical to get some form of feedback on whether your All-hands is delivering on your expectations and those of your team. The very best companies use an NPS-like score so they can not only capture feedback on individual meetings but can see trends over time and make adjustments if necessary.

Ultimately, the goal of an All-hands is to inspire, align, and engage and if it’s not doing those things well it’s likely a very, very expensive meeting. 

The good news is when done well, it’s likely by far the most impactful meeting.

One-on-One Coaching

Alongside writing, I coach a small number of leaders each year. Availability is limited, but if I don’t have room - or if I’m not the right fit - I’ll gladly recommend trusted coaches and point you in the right direction.

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