Want to hire the best talent? Do this.
“It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.”
I’ve never been a fan of this saying. To me, it sounded like nepotism. It meant that superficial connections could trump hard work and tangible skills. It also meant a system rewarding extroverts — people who could foster a multitude of contacts with ease and comfort.
When my team started making hiring decisions, we decided to steer clear from that. We were not interested in who you know (unless it’s a sales role — then please know everyone). We were interested in knowing you. What hard skills have you honed? What soft skills will make you adapt and grow into your role? Will your personality be a good add to the team?
With these questions in mind, we set out to follow the typical hiring steps, under the adage if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. For many this will sound familiar: resume screen, phone screen, interview, interview, interview, reference check, decision.
Since then, we have discovered a better way to hire for us. But to get there, I’ll show you why the current hiring process is broken in the first place.
Resumes: where candidates get reduced to identical pieces of paper.
We started out with resume screening, and we were stumped at the first step. Faced with over one hundred resumes for a junior business analyst position, we realized that they looked the same. These candidates had graduated from the same top-tier universities in the tri-state area, and had similar extracurriculars and internships.
An exceptional candidate in this position is set apart by their soft skills and personality — and resumes give almost no glimpse of that. Very few of our initial questions were answered by that one piece of paper.
It’s challenging to move forward when the first prescreening is flawed. Each step down the funnel gets more expensive, as it involves more time from higher-level people in the organization.
Either way, we needed to hire, so we stumbled through the identical-looking resumes in a fashion not too different from “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” and sent a fraction of the candidates into the next step.
Interviews: the problem of rose-colored glasses.
The phone screens and interviews that followed were more informative. Over the phone, we were testing for conciseness, logic, and passion. Sitting in front of a candidate helped us gauge their verbal skills, their professionalism, and gave a glimpse into their personality. We were getting somewhere.
Yet we started noticing that, in that one interaction, we naturally gravitated towards a gregarious and enthusiastic personality. These candidates brought lightness and ease into the interview. That is fantastic if all you want to do is have a pleasant conversation. However, were these really the qualities we were trying to test for, the qualities that would make for a great hire 100 days down the road? Not really.
What we wanted was that honest, long-term view of the candidate’s growth and performance. There are lists upon lists of interview questions online that help an interviewer do that. And guess what: a well-prepared candidate has seen most of them and has rehearsed answers.
Once again, we were stumped. We felt like we were looking at the interviewees through rose-colored glasses. Were we getting the true candidate, or the well-rehearsed, perfect image that they wanted us to see?
One solution to this problem is to ask questions that are as specific as possible to the position at hand, such as how they would approach an issue that is typical to the role at the company. If you put them in a detailed, realistic situation that they didn’t have prior knowledge of, you will get a truer understanding of their logic and thinking process.
Reference checks: they’re more than reference checks.
Finally we came to the last step: reference-checking. This is the step that most companies treat as optional. After all, if the candidate has indicated these people as referrers, what can you expect to learn besides “Greg is a great guy”?
Turns out, it’s much more than that. We learned a couple of tricks to doing references right:
- Don’t ask a candidate for two referrers; ask for five. Any candidate can find two people that will say the best things about them, but as the number increases, the feedback from referrers will get closer to the unbiased truth.
- Don’t ask questions that have “right or wrong” plastered on them, such as if the candidate has good team-working skills. Ask open-ended questions such as: “What work environment is most suitable to the candidate?” or “Are they more logical or creative in their work process?”
- Don’t ask a bunch of random questions that you find online, then try to figure out what the referrer’s answers mean. Flip that around. First, concisely identify a shortlist of metrics that will make a candidate excel in this specific role and company, then ask referrers questions targeted at shedding light on those particular metrics.
What we found by asking such questions to referrers is that the answers were enlightening and refreshingly sincere. Sure, there was a slight bias in the referrer’s view of the candidate, but they were still less incentivized than the candidate to depict an overly positive image. Moreover, the view of multiple people unveiled trends and patterns which we had missed previously.
References were so insightful in our process that it was a mystery why this information is typically not collected earlier, and oftentimes not at all. Doesn’t it make sense, after all, that if you cannot get to know all your candidates personally and for a while, the next best source of information is people who already know them and have worked with them in the past?
A probable reason for the lacking use of references in hiring is that checking references is work. It requires the back-and-forth of scheduling calls with the referrers, the time to chat with referrers (calling up 3+ referrers per candidate for 15–30 minutes each can quickly add up), and then the process of analyzing and comparing the gathered information.
We thought there would be a smarter, scalable way to get insightful references for candidates. We wanted this information upfront, so that we could take it into account during the resume-check stage and improve the quality of candidates that we sent down our funnel.
We didn’t find a tool that did this. So we built our own.
We called it day100, because we aim to give employers the long-term view of the candidate: a glimpse into how the candidate will perform 100 days into the job. Since we launched it in January, we’ve helped several employers turn a sea of indistinguishable candidates into a shortlist of talent that is best-fit to tackle the tasks that the company needs.
TL;DR
The simple secret we found, and the very concept upon which we built the day100 platform, is rooted in the power of relationships: the power of knowing people.
Admittedly, this is at first sight ironic, since “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” was exactly what we wanted to avoid.
The difference is that the “who” has changed. It’s not about the quantity of superficial relationships; it’s not about your LinkedIn network. It’s about the small circle of professional contacts who know you best, and are your champions.
So, as an employer, next time you’re hiring someone, try to get to know your candidates through their trusted connections. And as a candidate, next time you’re applying to jobs, leverage your champions and let them help you tell your story.
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If you’re hiring, I’d love to talk. Reach me at anada@day100.me.
