The kung-fu of startup hiring (6 of 7): Diagnosing issues with your hiring process.

In the past few posts, we discussed how to prepare, plan, structure and execute your hiring strategy. So hopefully by now you’ve been able to start interviewing people and moving them through your hiring process.

However, finding the right people to join your team is a difficult and ongoing task, especially if you’re hiring for more than one role. As such, it becomes really important for you to be able to identify any potential problems with your hiring structure so that you are able address them and make your process more efficient.

Because a hiring process is such a long, complex and variable journey, it means that there are probably a million places where issues can arise, ranging from the incorrect setting of expectations at the planning level to pure and simply having the wrong people running the interviews or even having chosen the wrong channels to promote your opportunities.

How then are we going to be able to identify which areas need improvement? The good news is that if you structured your process appropriately, it should be much easier.

The reason why it is so important for us to be able to identify and correct issues is because each minute that is spent interviewing the wrong person, or interviewing in the wrong way will be a minute that could be better spent doing something else of value to the company. And trust me when I say that when recruiting, those minutes really add up. So any gains in efficiency mean a lot of saved time, which can be invested in finding better candidates, or in providing candidates with an amazing experience.

The first step in fixing any issues is of course to identify any problems that you might currently be experiencing. Like I mentioned, these can vary a lot, so I’ll go ahead and list a couple of common ones that you’re likely to find, as each issue warrants a different solution…

a) Are you getting too many candidates? Not enough?
b) Are the candidates not making it past the first phase of the process?
c) Is the overall quality of your candidates not good enough?
d) Are the candidates all getting rejected in the later stages of the process?
e) Are the candidates’ salary expectations completely misaligned with your budget for the role?
f) Did you receive negative feedback from a candidate that dropped out of the process?

a) Are you getting too many candidates? Not enough?

This is clearly a supply issue. Getting too many candidates isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, provided that the candidates are all good quality. The issue is that most of the time, they aren’t. Which means you have to invest a lot of time to sift through all the bad applications to find the few good ones, which means you become swamped reviewing everyone and giving them responses, which you’ll absolutely need to do if you want to provide the top-notch candidate experience that we discussed in past posts.

If this is the case, perhaps it’s time to rewrite your job description and make it more specific and demanding, or make your application process a bit more complex so that people will need to put some more thought and effort into applying instead of simply sending in a generic email and cover letter to “see if it sticks”.

In the event that you’re not getting enough candidates applying, that’s an entirely different issue. It can be because they’re not finding your job description appealing, or simply because they’re not finding it at all!

Most job listing websites will provide you metrics of how many people viewed a particular position, and if it’s on your own careers website, you should have access to the analytics. Looking at those numbers will be a telling factor of which action you should be taking: improving your job description or ensuring that you need to promote your offer in a better way and to more people.

b) Are the candidates not making it past the first phase of the process?

Are you getting many candidates through the door, but none of them are making it to the later stages? Again, this can be caused by a handful of different things.

It might be that the requirements are listed on your job description don’t actually match the requirements needed for the job, and thus a lot of people lacking key skills or characteristics are applying and then getting rejected.

It might be that whoever is running the first round interviews doesn’t have the correct expectations for that particular role. (i.e. He’s interviewing for a junior sales role, but expecting people to have a much higher experience level)

In either case, it is helpful to have a conversation with the person or people who are running the 1st round interviews and understand if there is an issue with the description or if they might have some training gaps that need addressing. Running interview mocks is a great way to detect this. Simply come in as if you were a candidate and have them run you through their normal interview process. Any flagrant issues should quickly become apparent.

c) Is the overall quality of your candidates not good enough?

This one is a though one, and is especially common when you’re hiring for senior profiles. This might indicate that you need to change your strategy if you want to find really amazing people.

There’s nothing wrong with changing your strategy, I know I’ve done it plenty of times. It’s continuing to do the same things and expecting that things will change that presents a huge problem. Just as you wouldn’t continue to mine for gold in a place where there clearly is none, so you shouldn’t continue to look for great candidates where clearly there are only mediocre ones.

When this happens, there are a couple of things you can do: Go to your network and ask for advice about where others have been able to hire similar profiles; Talk to someone who really fits the profile that you’re looking to hire (even if you can’t hire them) and ask them where they think you might find more people with a similar profile to theirs; If you weren’t already, you might have to start farming and hand picking candidates directly rather than just using a passive approach; Etc.

Again, looking at your job description, salary level and expectations might help too. “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys” is often heard in our office. Talk to a couple of people or consult competing companies’ job offers and industry websites to understand if what you’re asking for and offering in return are reasonably in line with people’s expectations.

d) Are the candidates all getting rejected in the later stages of the process?

It’s never too much to repeat that time is important, and your senior people’s time is even more so important. And here is where a lot of important time gets wasted.

If your filtering isn’t working correctly and many candidates are being passed through the first rounds only to be rejected later for blatant issues, then that means that someone isn’t doing their job correctly.

Most of the time, when a candidate gets rejected at the last stages of the process, for easy to detect issues or things that should have been checked previously (salary expectation mismatch; large personality issues; culture inadequacies; lacking obvious technical skills; etc.) it means that the people who interviewed him previously made a mistake. Simple as that.

In many organisations you will find people that when on the fence about someone, or because they don’t want to be the “bad person”, pass the candidate on, knowing that they’ll probably be rejected later in the process.

You need to ensure that whoever is running your interviews is properly trained and empowered to make these decisions. A wiser man than me once said: “If it’s not a yes, it’s a no”, and I live by that recruiting motto until this day.

Now, it’s fine and understandable for people to have doubts, and in those cases it’s fine to call someone else in to have a quick conversation and give you a second opinion on a candidate. But everyone should know which characteristics are deal breakers for a candidate and which ones aren’t. A salesman needs to be able to sell, no matter how nice he is, and a programmer should know his way around code. No ifs or buts about it.

Passing a candidate along just because someone didn’t feel like rejecting him means that a senior person’s time was wasted in running a needless interview, along with the candidate’s time and effort as well.

That’s why having structured interviews, along with well defined expectations and a checklist of who should be checking for what at each stage really helps with reducing this kind of errors.

e) Are the candidates’ salary expectations completely misaligned with your budget for the role?

Again, this is where doing your research really helps. If you feel that everyone who is coming in has an expectation that is greatly different from your budgeted amount, it might mean that a readjustment is needed. Either in your expectations for the role, or on the compensation and perks that you’re currently offering.

If however you’ve already done your research and feel that both what you’re asking for and offering candidates is well adjusted to the market, it might make sense for you to include the salary component in your job description, as that might act as a filter and ensure that the people applying already have a clear idea of what to expect.

f) Did you receive negative feedback from a candidate that dropped out of the process?

Getting feedback should always be a great way for you to identify issues in your process that may otherwise not be apparent. I’ve personally dealt with hiring managers who had the completely wrong attitude in interviews, acting like they were doing the candidate a favour by interviewing them, which obviously put a lot of people off and misrepresented what we wanted our company to be about.

We must always keep in mind that whoever is dealing with candidates is effectively representing your company, its culture and the people that work there. This is why it’s super important to ensure that you’re getting feedback from candidates, as it is a great way to get an idea of how people are perceiving your process from the other side.

There’s also the case of bias which might creep into the process, sometimes even unconsciously. Whether it’s favouring people from the same gender, same race, same university, same background, same country, etc., there are many ways that bias can affect your processes and stop you from hiring in a fair and equal manner, and make you lose out on great candidates in the process.

Because of this, ensuring that you have structured interview questions really helps, because it gives you unbiased, similar criteria with which to review different candidates. It’s not perfect, but it goes a long way to reduce the impact that biases can have on your process.

All in all, creating a great hiring process should never be seen as something that you can just do once and be done with. It should be a constant process of improvement fueled by feedback and an analytical approach.

We’re almost to the end of the series, and hopefully each post has been getting you closer and closer to hiring your next great team mate! :-)