A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 1: Building the Right Foundation
A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 1: Building the Right Foundation
Lessons from Viral Nation, Tailscale, Trackforce Valiant + TrackTik, Vena, Gadget, TalentMinded, The People People Group, and more
I write a bi-weekly column on leadership, management, and the future of work. In each case, I’ll tackle the questions on the minds of first-time managers, experienced managers, and even executives. I’ll leverage my own experience as a tech leader as well as my network to answer these questions in the most comprehensive, actionable, and accessible way.
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)
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”.
🧑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
🚀 Scaling a company is hard. I help high-growth companies build their people, teams, and systems to achieve extraordinary results. 🚀