Iterating on your hiring process can lead to an efficient interview experience and a more focused candidate pool for the hiring team to choose from.
Background
Early stage start-ups initially focus on product development and customer acquisition. As they begin to scale, constructing the right mix of team members becomes the all-important next step.
I learned this firsthand when I transitioned into a management role at Guidebook. While I had participated in the hiring process at other companies, this was the first time I was ultimately accountable for the team we were building.
As I reflect on those early days and the processes we used to qualify, screen, interview, and hire, I’m dumbfounded that we were able to attract and land such quality teammates. Hiring was driven by intuition and feel rather than anything that resembled a repeatable and consistent process.
We emerged from this growth phase with a number of hard-learned lessons. Those experiences are shaping our hiring process and I felt it worthwhile to share them.
Our Previous (lack of) Process
When we started, we lacked a formal hiring process. More accurately, each team had its own processes which led to some common pitfalls:
- Varying Interview Experience: Each team had its own take on the hiring process. Candidates had varying experiences when interviewing with us and our teams had trouble measuring candidates to find the best fit. This led to a few bad hires (note: not bad people, just bad fit), but more than anything, made it challenging for those on hiring teams to discern signal from noise.
- Misalignment on Role Competencies: While hiring teams knew the role they hiring for, they weren’t aligned on exactly what would make someone successful in that role. Not being explicit about this internally led to confusion about what to prioritize and probe for during the interview process.
- Redundant Interview Coverage: We didn’t spend enough time upfront aligning on interview coverage. While we tried to have each interviewer explore different aspects of a candidates background and potential fit, we didn’t seem to have a game plan around teasing out the exact characteristics we were targeting. Candidates would get the same questions repeatedly and we would have big gaps in our evaluation.
At best, confusion around these points led to wasted time. At worst, they led to poor hires which caused meaningful damage to the team in terms of lost productivity, and more importantly, culture and engagement challenges.
Iterating
At some point we realized we couldn’t continue scaling this way, so our People Team reflected on these shortcomings and developed an improved and repeatable process that each team now leverages when hiring. There are three major changes:
1. Improved Planning
After we open a req, but well before we start the screening process, there is a much more involved planning phase that takes place. The aim is to:
- Define The Interview Team: The People Team sits with the hiring manager to explicitly define the interview team. This team typically includes immediate team members, but might leverage cross-team members for a more rounded approach.
- Prioritize Role Competencies: Once the interview team is configured they walk through an exercise to align them on competencies crucial to the role. This is a critical part of the process as it explicitly defines and prioritizes the characteristics and values that the team believes are crucial to fostering success in the role.
2. Consistent & Repeatable Process Across Teams
Our People Team has developed a streamlined, consistent and repeatable process for our hiring teams – which in turn, leads to a streamlined and consistent interview experience for our candidates.
At a high level the goal is to organize, align, and train the interview team; determine goals for the onsite; and divvy up competencies across the team such that we have full coverage for each candidate.
1. Introduction of Behavioral Based Interviewing
To quote Mugatu, behavioral based questions are so hot right now. They’re a relatively new type of interview technique and developing the muscle to facilitate these types of interviews is crucial to building out a well-balanced team.
Behavioral questions follow the pattern of understanding how a candidate addressed an issue in a real-life scenario that closely matches what they might face in the role they’re interviewing for. The goal is to look for:
- Action taken
- Lessons learned
- Results achieved
For instance, when probing for a competency like “Peer Relationships”, a question might look like: “People at Guidebook come from various backgrounds with different work styles, yet we all contribute towards a common goal. Tell me about a time when you successfully hit a deliverable even when your personal style didn’t match those working with you.”
Our New Process
Here are the steps we’re using:
- Internal Alignment (lead by recruiting coordinator)
- Establish the interview team
- Define + prioritize competencies important to success in the role
- Divvy up competencies amongst the interview team; the aim is to decrease redundancy and get 100% coverage on the characteristics that have been identified
- Establish timeline and team expectations for the interview process
- CV + HR Phone Screen (performed by the recruiting coordinator)
- Communicate expectations we have of the role
- Generate excitement for the company
- Preliminary screen for phone presence, experience verification, and to assess self-drive within the candidate
- Hiring Manager Phone Screen
- Introduction to the hiring manager
- Generate excitement for the role
- Probe for relevant technical experience related to the role
- Gauge rapport with the candidate
- The goal is to come out of this screen with a yes or no with regards to moving on to the coding challenge
- Coding Challenge
- An asynchronous homework assignment that the candidate should spend no more than 30 minutes solving
- The content of this challenge can vary from team to team and role to role, but the goal is to ensure that the candidate has a handle on the technical fundamentals key to the role and so the interview team can get a sense of the candidates coding style
- Onsite Interview With The Interview Team
- Each interviewer will have the competencies they are covering concretely defined
- Each interviewer should also have a set of behavioral based questions prepared that will exercise each candidate’s traits, mindsets, and ways of thinking
- Review
- After each interview, each team member adds their interview notes along with a “hire”/”pass” decision
- The hiring manager and recruiting coordinator review this feedback and leverage that with their own interview experience to come to a decision
- Final Interview (optional)
- A final interview with the a Director+ level advisor as one last sanity check before a final decision is made
- Offer
Our improved process has been incredibly successful. We’ve been able to hire stronger candidates and have better team alignment when they join. In turn, this allows us to support our new hires more effectively as they flow through the onboarding process. While you may want to tweak this to fit your needs, I’ll stress that careful planning, a defined and consistent process, and behavioral questions will allow you to make better hires, faster.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are you struggling with as you build your team?
