A set of principles for hiring talent

The job for Talent teams, and indeed for every single person concerned with an organisation's success, is to get hiring and development right. Talent flow is absolutely as critical as cash flow to a business's health. Find, attract, and hire the right people, giving 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 hiring step 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 impact of 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 team's dynamics and the benefit of new collaborators.

Exercises like the 5 Whys can be beneficial in exploring the underlying need for a hire. What problem does this hire solve? "We need 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?" and so on. This kind of thinking sometimes clears up roles entirely. Businesses with money are often happy to create another position to solve a problem that might simply require 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 success factors, not simply a list of requirements. Success factors are what make the role impact 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 ways 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 organisation's values and the team's lived behaviours 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 while staying true to a set of values. What matters at a fundamental level to the organisation, and what can be refined, redeveloped, or reimagined?

Once you understand the values a hire needs to embody, you can look for people who will help you solve future problems in a way that is authentic to the business.

Search widely and continually for talent

Hiring talent reactively and at pace is a surefire 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 complex and usually takes a dedicated team to do well. Still, 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, listen with intent, make candidates feel at ease without losing an objective eye, and 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 and genuinely listen to the candidate's answers.

A secondary effect of this listening is that the candidate is more likely to open up than in a traditional interview, and a tertiary benefit is that 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" happens when we make instant subconscious judgments about people as soon as we meet them. The process takes less than a second and colours our perceptions of our interactions with a person without our 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. Much more likely that our previous experiences are colouring our judgment, 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

Share questions ahead of the interview. Give candidates real-life problems to solve in interviews. Ask them to look at your code, project plans, design briefs, or 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 the actual role and daily 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, customers, department leads, or politics, but also express the big joys of the work. Miss the former, and the candidate will feel missold (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 hired this candidate previously is not proof that 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 Oxbridge 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 how 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 members. Produce content that helps transform your 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, invite future hires to meetings and discussions ahead of their start date so they can observe how decisions are 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, but it is also highly beneficial for decreasing the time it takes for a new hire to contribute fully. Which brings us to…

Onboard effectively

There is a 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 very early on, 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 reactively, selecting without care, and more or less crossing our fingers that our new hire will work.

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