🤓 How to hire great people

Thoughts by Ronen Shetelboim, #2・ FEB 23, 2022

“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world”. Steve Jobs. 🙌

When you ask successful executives what is their secret to success? They’ll often say the people they’ve worked with or the people they’ve hired. 

When you ask successful people why they chose to join a specific company,  they’ll often say.. the people. 

Hiring great people is the most important thing for companies.

In fact.. a company can’t succeed without hiring the right people.

Yet, hiring is hard. 😩

And frankly..

There are not a lot of good guides out there. 📚 😒

So.. I put together a guide on how to hire great people ✍️

A guide I wish I had when I started hiring. 

But, before we get into the details, let’s unpack why hiring is so hard.

Here are 5 reasons why hiring great people is hard

1. Companies often lack formal hiring process and don’t spend time on training their managers.

2. It’s a time consuming effort.

3. You often don’t see immediate results.

4. It’s risky, there is a lot at stake. Hiring the wrong people can lead to culture issues, missed targets, losing money, time etc..

5. There are many different internal and external dependencies: 

   • Internal dependencies: lack of budget, brand awareness, lack of resources  

   • External dependencies: low unemployment rate, state of the economy, pandemic, inflation and etc..

So.. what can you do?

Actually, a lot..

The below guide will help you hire great people.

So, without further ado, let’s get into it.

Part 1: Preparation

1. Planning is everything. Map your future team. Benjamin Franklin said: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”. This is one of the most important steps. Before you start hiring you should map your current and future team (org chart) in detail. How does your team look today, how is it going to look like 12 months from now? What are the key roles, who are the ideal candidates -  go deep in the planning. Working through this process in detail will provide you clarity and save you time in the future. 

2. Design an exciting job description. Design a well-detailed, clear job description. Do your research, look at similar job descriptions from other companies on LinkedIn. Be specific, stand out, get your candidates excited. Every detail is important. Think about the words that you are choosing, describe your ideal candidate as precisely as you can. Hiring is a high effort, high impact process, it takes time. You don’t want to waste time. The more clear your job description is going to be, the better applicants you are going to get. 

3. Form your hiring team (hiring panel). Choose your hiring team carefully. The hiring team will have a huge impact on the candidate experience and the quality of the information you gather about the candidate. Your hiring team should be diverse in terms of roles, seniority and experience.  You should think about who’s going to work with this person, who can explain the culture well, who asks good questions, who tells the company’s story well. After you form the hiring team, get them excited, do a kickoff meeting with the team to explain your plan and expectation, send a summary email so everyone is on the same page. Explain roles and responsibilities of each person on the hiring team. (this is important, because you don’t want people to keep asking the same questions, you want each person in your hiring team to assess the candidate on different attributes). Spend time with your recruiter. The selection of your hiring team and the communication internally are the keys to ensure great candidate experience, and help you later in the process to make better, more informed decisions. 

4. Design an amazing candidate experience. You should map the experience from the first phone call with a recruiter, through the interview, offer and onboarding, how many steps, how long each step is going to be, including what topics are going to be covered by each person in your hiring team. Planning is everything! Put yourself in the candidate's shoes, think about what ideal experience you’d like to have and design something similar or even better. Please note! You should pay attention to changes in the market, the economy and your competitors and adjust your candidate experience and interview process accordingly. 

5. Let the world know and ask for referrals. Ask your network for referrals, publish the role on the company’s career website and social media channels, internal slack, external slack communities, consider writing a blog or posting a video to get the word out. (here is an example of a blog post I wrote when I was hiring a digital marketing manager).

Part 2: The interview process

1. Biases. Be aware of biases. Make sure to educate yourself and your hiring team. There are a lot of resources out there around hiring biases, here is one I like: 13 common hiring biases to watch out for. Biases can very much be the reason why you hire the wrong person or miss out on a great candidate.

2. Interview Scorecard.  An interview scorecard can provide you with quantitative data on interviewers and candidates, so you can make better decisions, validate assumptions and eliminate biases. There are plenty of examples online of interview scorecards. In a nutshell,  you shouldn’t interview candidates without an interview scorecard. Here is a good article from HBR that highlights how an interview scorecard can help you make better decisions. 

3. Bar Raisers. Look for bar raisers. Few years back a recruiter at a big VC firm asked me “who are the top 1% people in your network”. When I asked her to clarify, she explained, “it’s the 1% of people who can be successful at any role, who can do more than you need”. Look for those 1%, look for the bar raisers. You should ask yourself and your hiring team 1 simple binary question, “is this candidate going to raise the bar?”.  You can read more about Bar Raisers in chapter 2 of the book Working Backwards (Insights from Amazon) by Bill Carr and Colin Brayer. 

4. Ask for details, go deep . You should always ask for details, always go deeper. Since anyone can say they are the best at what they do, you have to dig deeper. People that actually did the work, will have plenty of examples. This is why Elon Musk always asks candidates “Tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them”. Musk’s method hinges on the idea that someone making a false claim will lack the ability to back it up convincingly, so he wants to hear them talk about how they worked through a thorny issue, step by step. 

5. Behavioral Interview. Try to mimic a real work situation. Have the candidate present a plan, solve a problem, or something along those lines. Pay attention to quality of work, questions asked, attention to detail, consistency in their answers, how well they receive feedback etc.. 

6. Values Interview & ‘no asshols rule’.  You should never skip the values interview. This interview will help you determine if the candidate is a good fit from a culture and values stand of point or not. Hiring the wrong candidate can be damaging. ‘The No Asshols Rule’ book by Robert I. Sutton explains how hiring assholes can worsen morale, productivity and can be very damaging for your company. To keep it simple, at the end of the day, you should hire people that you are excited to work with. The values interview should be conducted by the most senior person in your hiring team or one of your execs. The key here is to have someone that experienced your company culture, values and working style for at least 1 year. This interview is not about the actual work, it’s about the values and culture of the company. Make sure you design questions to address each company value to determine if the candidate is a good fit. If you are interested to learn more about Values and Culture. You should read Tribal Leadership, The Culture Code and follow Simon Sinek. 

Part 3: Post interviews

1. Reference check. Reference check is the process in which the candidate himself provides you with references. Don’t ever skip the reference check! Use this step to touch on any feedback or concerns from your hiring team. Pay attention to the responsiveness of the references, the quality of the references and of course, prep all your questions / topics in advance.

2. Backchanneling. This is the process in which you should do your own research and find people that worked with the candidate through your network and connections. These people are not on the candidate’s original reference list. Reach out to those people and see If they can share their 2 cents on their experience working with your candidate. If possible, you shouldn’t skip this step. 

3. Written Feedback. It’s expected from everyone in your hiring team to leave written detailed feedback with examples. Make sure there are no undecided options. Every person in your hiring team needs to decide if they are thumbs up to hire the specific candidate or thumbs down (not to hire). This step is important, since written feedback forces people to really put their thoughts together. Please note! You should make sure that people on your hiring panel don’t connect and share their feedback with each other before they submit their written feedback, this step is important, because you don’t want people to be influenced by their conversations with each other.

4. Debrief Hiring Meeting. Ideally, it should take place asap, no more than few days after the interviews are completed. Everyone should read all the written feedback and then the hiring manager asks if people want to change their mind. Please note! As the hiring manager you are not looking for a consensus. Best-selling author and speaker, Patrick Lencioni said “Consensus fails to satisfy anyone’s desires, but it does so equally. It’s through seeking consensus that we get mediocrity”. From the debrief you are looking to get unbiased data points to help you make good decisions. 

5. Onboarding. Congratulations, you hired a great candidate. But, wait! You are not done. You can still lose a good candidate because of a sloppy onboarding process. Keep in mind, onboarding is still part of hiring and it’s the hiring manager's responsibility to make sure the onboarding process is done right. You have to ensure great and consistent candidate experience from the first moment the candidate interacts with your company, through the hiring process, signing the offer, onboarding and beyond. The onboarding plan should be organized and detailed, not an afterthought. Onboarding plans should at the very least include: A list of key people the candidate should start building relationships with, objectives (30/60/90 days), and links to all relevant resources for the new hire (shared docs, slack channels, training videos etc..) 

How to get better at hiring great people?

Keep educating yourself. Learn from your mistakes, learn from your successes and learn from others. Find people in your company or network that built great teams. Spend time with them, understand their process, study their frameworks.

Below are a 5 resources that helped me get better at hiring:

1. Working backwards - Chapter 2 talks about Amazon’s hiring process and bar raisers.

2. The Making of a Manager - Chapter 7 talks about different steps in the hiring process from the hiring manager perspective.

3. Culture Map which I referenced before, is all about understanding people and culture differences. 

4. The Culture Code & Tribal Leadership is all about understanding and building great cultures. 

Enjoy the process, and good luck in finding your next great hire! 

P.s. please let me know if this guide helped you hire great people and/or if I missed anything.