A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 3: Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience
A Comprehensive Guide to Hiring -> Part 3: Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience
How you can leverage your hiring process to hire better, faster, all while building word of mouth for your business.
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.
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 3: Guide. Delivering a Superior Candidate Experience (← This Post)
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.
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