jade rubick

Wonderful hiring practices that for some reason aren't more common

2021-07-16hiringrecruitingdiversity-equity-and-inclusionscalingpay-equity

Tips for startup hiring and recruiting

I’m going to share some practices that I don’t see used very often. These practices help ensure you’ll find great candidates, offer a superior candidate experience, and be competitive against other companies that are looking.

I haven’t seen many of these topics listed anywhere else. To be comprehensive, I’m listing a lot of topics, with breakouts for anything you want to go deep on.

If you do even a few of the things in this post, it should dramatically improve your hiring outcomes, and help you stand out.

Why listen to me?

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the years, and at times it was basically my full time job. As a consultant, I’ve also seen how a lot of organizations approach hiring, so I’ve seen both some depth, and some industry breadth in how people approach hiring and recruiting. And I’m very good at copying from the people around me!

Create a hiring strategy

You should have a pithy description of why someone should work at your company (and your position) as opposed to elsewhere. You shouldn’t rely on hope as a strategy, but have a plan that identifies how you’ll appeal to the best applicants you can attract.

There are a lot of ways you can attract candidates: pay, technical area, perks, and work culture. I’ve written up a whole post on creating a hiring strategy — read it over and identify what your approach is.

Update your careers page to reflect why they should work there

Now you need to make sure you communicate this strategy to people who are evaluating your company.

The first way people evaluate your company is by your careers page, but most startups don’t spend much time on it. This is your “top of the funnel”, and even a modest investment in this area will make the difference.

Spend some time reviewing the careers part of your home page. How are you talking about the company? Is it compelling? Does it convey why someone should come work for you?

If you’re genuinely trying to make your company be a great place to work, this is a good place to highlight that. Think of it like a dating profile — you want the people who read it to get a good sense of whether they’ll be a good match or not, and you want to portray yourself accurately and in a positive light.

Write compelling (and unbiased) job descriptions

People vet a job based on the job description. If it’s well-written, they may be excited about the job, and give it precedence.

Most job postings also turn away a large percentage of good candidates unnecessarily. I wrote up some tips for writing unbiased and compelling job descriptions. This includes what to include in your job posting, and some easy to use tools to improve your job descriptions and reduce bias.

Make your application process painless (for everyone)

  • Make sure your application process allows people to specify the pronouns they use. Make it optional (as not everyone wants to be “outed”). Make sure your team uses those pronouns during the interview process.
  • Don’t require gender as part of the application process. It can be an awful experience for applicants. If you have to require it for some reason, explain what to expect, apologetically.
  • Apply for the job and see what the process looks like. Test it out! How long until you get a reply? What flow do you go through? Are there unnecessary steps? Most people don’t know what their own interview process is like!

Create an interview plan

A good interview plan allows you to have confidence you’ll vet and find the right candidate. A poor interview plan results in a terrible candidate experience. I have a whole post and example on how to create an interview plan.

One tip: pair people up in the interviews. People learn from seeing others interview, so this will make your interviews automatically improve themselves.

Be faster than anyone else

One of the biggest improvements you can make in your hiring process is the speed at which you hire. This is so important I’ve made this its own blog post. Three things you can do are:

  1. Implement an internal SLA for communication
  2. Present offers the day of the last interview, and
  3. Use a rolling approach (with some caveats) to hiring.

I go into a lot more detail in this post: How to speed up hiring.

Use a candidate packet

One practice that doesn’t seem to be very widespread is the use of candidate packets for interviews. A candidate packet is a package you send to applicants that explains the interview process, tells them about the company and the role they’re applying for, and helps them understand what to expect as a candidate.

You can think of it as an FAQ for candidates, but also as a way to sell the candidate on the company and position.

Give feedback to candidates

One way to stand out for candidates is to give them real, honest, but kindly worded feedback on how they did, even if they don’t get the job. Treating them like humans can pay off in the long term. I’ve had candidates refer their friends to me after they were turned down for a position, because they liked the hiring process so much. Think about what they’ll tell any friends about working at your company, if they feel like they missed out at working for a great place.

This is a good example of something that is both right for people, and can be in the self-interest of the company. You don’t have to take a lot of time with it — just send some kindly worded summary of the feedback to them.

For especially promising candidates, you can even refer them to other companies, or make little suggestions on how they might improve their interviewing.

Ask for feedback from candidates

Set up your application tracking system to ask candidates about their experience. And ask them yourself when you give feedback. Periodically go over the feedback and continually improve your interview process.

Keep in touch with promising candidates

One of the bigger problems with the way companies hire is that they treat it like a transaction. But humans are relationship-focused creatures. Keep in touch with candidates you wish you had been able to hire. If someone turns down your offer, set a calendar reminder and check in on them, and ask them how the new position is treating them. Be nice about it — hopefully they should be enjoying their new role and new position. But keeping in touch can bring people back in the door who had a good impression of your company and may have gone elsewhere for good reasons that could change.

Don’t rely on inbound candidates, use mining to find hidden candidates

One of the best ways I’ve found of bringing in candidates is using the social connections of the people already in the company. You have to be careful because this biases towards people that are similar to the people already in the company. But when you reach out and they already know someone there, it can be a lot easier to attract them, and they won’t feel like you’re a complete stranger. These two articles describe an excellent process for “mining your networks”:

There is even a product that helps automate the process of finding candidates from the network of people your employees already know. (I came up with the idea for this product before it existed, so I’m so happy someone came up with the same idea and made it happen)

For this to work, you have to be extremely careful with consent and how you use people’s network. When I’ve done it, I got consent for the phrasing of the message I would send people. And I took notes for each potential candidate on how to contact them.

Make a list of people who are impossible hires

Because companies approach hiring as a transaction, they neglect courting people who might be harder to convince. Sometimes these hires can be incredibly important.

Make a list of people who in a dream world would work at your company. Periodically review that list, and ask yourself, “is there a way I could make it a rational choice for them to work here?“. Reach out to the them and extend an invitation. And importantly, treat it like a real relationship — don’t just send them a form letter.

The important thing with this approach is you need to invest time, and you need to handle it respectfully and strategically.

Work well with your recruiters

If you use recruiters, invest some time in making sure they understand what you’re looking for. Talk through how the whole process will work, and make sure you’re on the same page about expectations. You can make them much more effective by walking them through how to know if someone is a good fit or not. A strong partnership with your recruiters can streamline everything, get you higher quality candidates, and, if they’re organized, they might even be able to help manage parts of the process for you.

Have a review meeting when making a decision on a candidate

Candidate review meetings tend to be just reading the feedback everyone collected. Improve those meetings by following my guide to running a candidate review meeting.

Bundle up similar roles

One of the bigger inefficiencies in a hiring process is to treat every role as a separate queue of candidates. You can achieve way better outcomes by bundling similar roles together: no ramp up time for new positions, prefilled queues of candidates for new positions, process efficiencies, and even better success hiring candidates from diverse backgrounds.

Learn more about bundled hiring and how it can improve your hiring outcomes.

All of these things reinforce each other

The more you view your hiring process as a continually improving thing, the more these things will reinforce each other and combine to give you an advantage when looking for candidates. It can feel really good to see this in action. I often have received thank you emails from candidates (that I turned down), talking about what a great experience they had.

Did I miss anything? Please share your favorite ideas with me, I’d love to hear them!

Thank you

I learned the impossible hires approach from Alex Kroman.

Image by Katie White from Pixabay

Jade Rubick

Subscribe
Engineering Leadership Weekly & Frontline Management

Contact
Point me at your organizational problems. I advise startups and help in a variety of ways.

Comments powered by Talkyard.