Hire Slow!
Said more accurately, hire with intentionality!
I believe one of the best decisions we ever made at my previous company was to hire slow…to be highly selective and picky about who we allowed on the bus.
And by slow, I don’t mean dragging the process out unnecessarily over several weeks. We probably averaged about 7 hours with each successful candidate and usually did that over 2 or 3 visits to our offices, but there were times we compressed most of this into a single day, particularly for out-of-towners.
Of course, do the basics…peer interviews, team interviews, interviews with people at multiple levels in the organization, and even interviews with people on different teams than the one the candidate would be joining.
But in addition to those steps, we were big fans of “homework.”
Towards the end of the interview process, we’d assign them homework to do as one of the final steps. For example, if you’re hiring an engineer and the team’s culture values collaboration and constructive debate, have the candidate prepare a presentation on a technical topic then present it to a group of existing team members. Those in the room would poke holes in the ideas from the candidate and ask probing questions. How does the candidate react to feedback? How do they process information under stress? How quick does their brain work? How deep do they truly understand the topic?
“If it isn’t a clear YES, then it’s a clear NO.”
Essentialism by Greg McKeown
Another technique that I strongly recommend: the CEO should interview every final candidate. It looks like this…
The hiring manager comes to their final choice…ONE!…not their top 2 or 3. You want them coming to a decision not pawning that off on you.
Then the CEO interviews them with unilateral veto power. When I did this at my previous company, I probably vetoed roughly 10 - 20% of the candidates. For those I vetoed, I would come back to the hiring manager with very specific feedback. If you say, “I don’t know…I just didn’t like them” then you’ll lose credibility with the team.
It’s far better to be understaffed
than hiring the wrong person quickly!
On the other hand, by the end of the interview, if I knew I was going to approve the candidate it gave me the opportunity to try to close the deal and allowed me to share more about the purpose, values, and culture of the company.
This is yet another way for you to differentiate yourself from other companies where they may be interviewing.
By the way, I wasn’t doing this because I felt I was necessarily the best interviewer or assessor of talent, but based on my role, I didn’t feel the urgency to fill the empty seat like often happens with the hiring manager.
Also, since I interviewed everyone we hired, I had some unique views into the patterns that were working and those that weren’t.
I stopped doing this when our team grew to about 110 people, Reid Hoffman suggests 150, the former CEO of Workday did it up to 500. There’s no right number, but it probably should be triple digit.
“The first 150 hires are your cultural co-founders. It’s up to you, the founder, to get every one right.”
Reid Hoffman
Not the CEO? If you have hiring managers as direct reports, you can implement something similar on your team or in your division.
One of the side benefits of this deliberate, time-consuming approach that we came to realize was that those who made it through the selective process felt like they had accomplished something just by getting an offer.
If everyone already on the team had gone through a similar process, then they were confident they were about to join a company full of talented team members that were strong cultural fits.
They were joining a winning, high-performing team!
Admittedly, this is not the easy approach, and it requires discipline, particularly in the face of deadlines and other priorities.
However, if you follow the same cookie-cutter, “efficient” hiring approach everyone else does, why should you expect to have a better than average team?