A set of principles for hiring talent

The job for Talent teams, and indeed for every single person concerned with the success of an organisation, is to get hiring and development right. Talent flow is absolutely as critical as cash flow to the health of a business. Find, attract and hire the right people, give them a voice and access to resources, development opportunities and a safe place to bring their whole professional selves to work.

Getting the hiring aspect right means truly understanding what the business needs with each hire, and setting up systems and approaches to meet that need. Here are the steps

Quantify the need first.

Too many businesses' first step when hiring is to pull out the old job advert and relaunch it. This is always the wrong move. Roles evolve as much as people and organisations do. Before you post an ad, take stock of where the team is now and how the specifics of the need might have changed.

Bring a group together to discuss the need and the impact from the new hire. Start with the question “What problem does this hire solve?” The discussion might start with "added engineering support to help lessen workload" but there are always other holistic factors to consider about the dynamics of the team and the benefit of new collaborators.

Using exercises like the 5 Why's can be very useful in exploring the underlying need for a hire. What problem does this hire solve? "We someone who can coordinate projects across the company" Why? Because there is no Central way for project teams to deliver in this business" Why does that matter? "Because we aren't able to guarantee service levels will be the same across the business" Why can't existing PM's coordinate themselves? This kind of thinking sometimes clears up roles entirely. Businesses with money are often happy to create another position to solve a problem which actually might just required better resource allocation. In other situations roles can change under questioning once the time is taken to identify the root cause.

This discovery exercise with team members about resources can be distilled into the essence of what the job needs to achieve. Write job descriptions around the idea of success factors, not simply a list of requirements. Success factors are what makes the role have an impact on the organisation. What does winning look like in this role?

Look for ways to enhance, rather than merely preserve culture.

Just as technical and impact needs change with each hire, so can the culture requirement adapt. Before you publish the job description, think about way to enhance the organisation’s culture with this hire.

Strictly preserving culture within an organisation can diminish innovation and result in a lack of diversity. What alternative thinking styles, collaboration skills, or ideation would help the team? Does the team have a natural collaborator or idea instigator? Is the team effective at championing itself externally? Would a person with a skill for unlocking knotty problems in the minutiae help? Someone who enjoyed presenting?

Work with the vales of the organisation and the lived behaviours of the team and recognise that the latter can always use further progression.

“We have always done it this way” is a sure pathway to decreased productivity, challenge and enjoyment. Good leadership helps an organisation meet changing needs by adapting behaviours and methodologies whilst staying true to a values set. What matters at a fundamental level to the organisation, and what can be refined, redeveloped or reimagined?

Once you have an understanding of the values a hire needs to inhabit you can then look for people who will help you solve future problems on a way that will be authentic to the business.

Search widely and continually for talent.

Hiring talent reactively and at pace is a sure fire way to get things wrong. Rushing into a hire blindly because an important person is leaving, putting out an advert on your website and a post on LinkedIn and hiring the best applicant in that small sample is positively not the way to build a world class team.

Planning for hiring over the long term is hard and usually takes a dedicated team to do well, but it needn't be impossible and if your team has a mindset of "always speaking with the best people we know", proactively considering weaknesses in your organisation, advertising widely when you are looking, and developing substantive relationships with agencies or search firms, your chance of moving from "least worst" hiring to world class hiring increases exponentially.

Develop realistic interviews and train managers to interview with purpose.

By realistic I mean ensuring that the setting and questions of the interview match very closely with real world problems in this specific role. Your interviewers should be able to conduct an interview solely focused on the particular skills, behaviours and values that meet the need for this specific hire, rather than bringing a standard approach to all interviews.

Training for interviews is highly valuable. In no other space in business are such highly commercial decisions taken by people with so little training. Training means teaching your managers to recognise their own bias, to listen with intent, to make candidates feel at ease without losing an objective eye, and to move away from tired, unsuitable one-size-fits-all questioning they may have been using.

Interview to understand, not to judge.

As part of the training, develop your hirers skills in making candidates feel interesting and heard by getting them to approach interviews as though they were the candidate's biographer. In order to do that job well the interviewer has to draw out stories with follow-up questions and "tell me more" phrases as well as genuinely listening to the candidate's answers.

A secondary effect of this listening is that the candidate is more likely to open up more than in a traditional interview, and a tertiary benefit is the candidate will associate this positive experience (we all love to be heard) with your company and role.

Teach interviewers about thin slice bias and how to deal with it.

This is especially valuable in diversity and inclusion efforts. "Thin slice bias" is what happens when we make split second judgments subconsciously about people as soon as we meet them. The process takes considerably less than a second and colours our perceptions of our interactions with a passion without us even noticing. This is hardwired, ancient brain, threat assessment mechanistic stuff. This is the love at first sight stuff, or the gut instinct we believe is what makes us a good judge of people. It doesn't, and largely it isn't. Much more likely our previous experiences are colouring or judgement and this problem is particularly noticeable when we're meeting with candidates who diverge from our own experience through class, age, race, gender or neuro factors.

We cannot avoid thin slicing, but we can train ourselves to lessen the bias by recognising and acknowledging it. We can even give it a score to contextualise it. What we can’t do is pretend it doesn’t exist.

Let the interviewee see behind the curtain early in the process.

Give them real-life problems to solve in interviews, ask them to look at your code, your project plans, your design briefs or your customer insights. Get a hiring team to put together a simulated discussion of a recent piece of work and re-enact the meeting with the candidate present to see how they'd contribute.

The closer you can simulate their real role and interactions the better you can ascertain their fit. Fake questions and “pretend pressure” elicits fake and pretend responses.

Be honest in your interviews.

Speak up about problems with collaboration, with customers, with department leads or with politics, but also express the big joys of the work. Miss the former and the candidate will feel miss-sold (and will then struggle to fully engage), miss the latter and the candidate won't see the potential.

Be rigorous.

Likeability is not, on its own, the quality you are looking for. Google or Apple having offered this candidate a job is not proof this candidate is great. A successful background might just prove this candidate had all the advantages in life, and a lack of a degree doesn't demonstrate that this candidate isn't intellectual.

Social proof is not the proof you need.

Hiring shouldn't feel easy. If you find yourself looking at a resume before an interview and feeling relieved that "we've found a good one here", you are voluntarily turning off all your critical reasoning facilities in favour of your inbuilt biases. It doesn't matter that your boss loves to see the company hire Oxbrdige graduates or Rhodes scholars, what matters is the candidate's ability to maximise the thrive / deliver index in this business at this point in time.

What matters is your ability to spot that ability.

Give good rejections.

The nature of hiring means you will always have to deliver more rejections than offers. Too many organisations neglect the value found in rejecting people well.

Applicants are many things in addition to potential employees. They can be customers, brand advocates, network extenders, commercial links and even future employees. If we’re concentrating on building processes that treat candidates like investors, we should extend that thinking to the way we handle those we do not need to hire today.

Design processes that give insight, feedback, and advice to candidates who are not the right fit today. Work on a philosophy of future collaboration and then build out templates and systems to add value to all the candidates (selected or not) that have given their time to your organisation.

Look after your offers.

Once you’ve selected your hire, don’t immediately “get back to work” and move away from the hiring process. Too few companies use the time between offer and start effectively.

Stay in touch with your future team member. Produce content that helps alter the relationship with them from outsider to tribe member. This can be as simple as a video from the new team members describing why they made the offer, and what they are looking forward to working on together.

If possible, bring people into meetings and discussions ahead of their start date so they can observe how decisions get made. Add them to social events so they can understand the human beings they will work with. Ask for their insights into specific issues or problems, and generally reassure them of their decision to join the team.

Not only does this build loyalty, it is also highly beneficial for decreasing the time it takes for a new hire to fully contribute. Which brings us to…

Onboard effectively.

There is considerable commercial advantage to be had from building an onboarding program that allows new starters to contribute quickly. If your competitors are waiting for 3 months for a new hire to be fully up to speed and you can build a process that accomplishes this in six weeks you can outcompete your market.

Don’t just assume onboarding works. Build it deliberately. Set up networks of contacts, help new starters understand the ways work gets done, encourage them to to participate widely across the business (even sitting and listening in meetings outside of their domain), give them ways to understand their colleagues more fully, agree deliverables for 30,90, and 180 days and meet regularly meet to discuss progress, blockers and ideas. Introduce them to a buddy, but also introduce them to key performers across the business. Give them a voice to offer opinions from every early one, but encourage them to listen before they suggest. You are both seeking ways to improve and build on how things get done.

Conclusion.

None of these processes happen without effort, but none of them are especially hard to do.

Hiring new staff is complex and time consuming. We often turn away from the challenge, putting in place half measures of interviews, doing things in a reactive way, selecting without care and more or less crossing our fingers our new hire will work.

There is a better way to do things. The method above both reduces hiring risk and improves the performance of the business over all. It takes far more effort, but the ROI on the effort can be extraordinary.