Re-humanize your hiring with intentionality (and avoid common hiring mistakes in the process)
A cold December night
It was late December 2017. I was sitting in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side of NYC waiting until my next meeting. As I was waiting, I was thinking about what I wanted to accomplish at day100 in 2018 — more revenue, of course, but specifically I needed more qualified prospects to come through the “door” who would be interested in partnering with day100 and were at the right organizational maturity to do so. Perhaps, I should go about finding a co-founder, especially one that can be focused on driving new business, or perhaps I should hire someone full time to do sales & lead generation. Doing nothing wasn’t an option.
As I laid out the options I was considering, another possibility bubbled to the surface — don’t rush into hiring a full-time sales person or co-founder yet, but instead double down on what we’ve been able to do successfully and do it in a way that minimizes risk. For day100, what has been working well has been running an event series, called the People & Tech Series, and inviting amazing leaders to speak at it month over month, which has helped us begin a lot of fruitful conversations. What if I brought someone on specifically to take on those events and drive them to be even more successful — and do it in a risk-managed way, perhaps with an intern or part-time associate? It certainly made sense to me, and so I told myself that I would kick off that hiring process right after the New Year.
Hiring is something we’ve thought a lot about at day100. The software we make at day100 is in-fact a hiring intelligence platform, which sits on top of, and works together with, the process-focused category of applicant tracking systems. We’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to use assessments & analytics, which really just means statistics, to identify which people will have the highest likelihood of succeeding in a certain work environment, based on parameters that a hiring manager or team supply (which we believe is going to be a game-changer by the way). However, embarrassingly enough, as an organization we’ve never given a whole lot of structured thought to the end to end hiring process, and how what we’ve been doing ties together with all the other steps that it takes to hire someone.
This article is an attempt to tackle exactly that: how day100 thinks about the end to end hiring process — by taking you through the actual process we followed to hire someone to take on managing the People & Tech Series events at day100 (and explaining where we believe a hiring intelligence platform like day100 fits in). The key philosophy that guides this process is embodied in the most important principle that we believe matters in hiring: intentionality.
But first, let’s take a moment to zoom out: bad hiring is a huge topic of discussion in the realm of company leadership. Annually in the US, it represents something like $50 billion (possibly more) in mitigable losses, attributable to decreased productivity, turnover and missed sales opportunities. Within a single company, this number can be quite substantial as well. If you’re going to hire 1000 people in the next year, the market average is that 8–12% will not stay past a year, and that could very easily represent 100 people leaving and a double digit million dollar mitigable loss. This doesn’t even take into consideration underperformance as a result of bad hiring, which could easily double or triple the loss. Intentionality, I will argue, is the best defense against these losses, and unfortunately at so many companies, large and small, it is in short supply.
Intentionality in hiring consists of six parts:
- Understanding your tradeoffs: What about your ideal hire will make them work best with YOU, specifically, and in YOUR work environment
- Describing good performance: What goals & tasks will your new hire have to accomplish to be successful
- Cutting friction: Leave out the requirements, qualifications and cover letters, be open to people from different backgrounds; only ask for what you actually NEED from someone
- ACTUALLY getting to know people: Combine input from your candidate and other people they’ve worked with to get a 360 degree view; Structured assessments are especially helpful here
- Focusing interviews on goals & motivations: Spend your valuable time clarifying what the job really entails AND if that furthers your candidate’s goals and excites them; Don’t waste it on brain teasers or ad-hoc tests
- Deciding with numbers: Assign values to goals & motivations and get values from assessments; Understand the risks and decide with numbers like you would with any other business decision
Most hiring situations are severely lacking in the first two: Understanding tradeoffs; and Describing good performance. There’s actually a good reason for this: it’s very hard to have a structured conversation about what you really want someone to do for you and accurately describe what qualities will lead them to work well with you in that job. As a result, these steps are frequently skipped and then the remainder of the hiring process suffers a lack of intentionality. How can anyone make an informed hiring decision if the qualities that will drive that decision are undefined?
Let me now share with you how we approach intentionality at day100, and the process beyond, that can lead to hiring someone who will do a great job with you and will love doing it!
What’s in a job in 90 minutes
For the hire that I wanted to make, the process started by trying to get a firm grasp of the actual scope of the position and set of responsibilities that I wanted to delegate. I knew that I wanted whomever I hired to take on the event series, but as more thought went into it, part of the success we’ve had with the event series is that there have been such amazing speakers month over month that we were able to invite. This helped me identify that I actually wanted another set of responsibilities attributed to this role: those of identifying the speakers that we want to invite.
This thought exercise helped me bring about the mission of the role: to organize and successfully execute day100’s monthly events, including identifying the speakers that would lead to high quality events and further business potential. Coming up with a job mission, right off the bat, is a key part of the scorecarding approach described by Geoff Smart in the book “Who: the A method for hiring”. After creating the job mission, the next steps outlined in Who are to describe the goals / responsibilities and then, lastly, to elaborate on the competencies you need the person you will hire to have. This approach from Who guides both the scorecarding that I do in hiring for my team, as well as inspires the “day100 scorecard” that you will see later on.
With a job mission in hand, next I thought about the specific goals and tasks that I would want this person to do to fulfill this mission. Over two 20 minute sessions (one of them on a subway commute) I created the below list using the Notes app of my iPhone. This became invaluable as I went through the stages of finding people and interviewing. It’s highly recommended that a manager take the time to write down the goals as part of creating their own scorecard, and in addition put down on paper all the things that they will want their new hire to do. This doesn’t need to necessarily take an extremely structured form, but the more you can break it down into bite-sized bullet points, the easier it will be to convey to recruiters and candidates — and remember, this is what feeds directly into the job description that you will post to advertise the job. Literally, this is “Describing good performance”.
The third and final part of scorecarding was to put on paper what behaviors, skills, and personality traits would lead someone to have the highest likelihood of succeeding in working with me and that I would value when they would take on this role. This is where day100 should first come into play as part of a hiring process because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of “I want it all” without technology like the day100 scorecard to give you a dose of self-awareness.
The role of day100 in this phase is to give a hiring manager an objective understanding of which behaviors, skills and traits would lead a potential new hire to work with them best. This is based on answers that the hiring manager provides about the work environment that the person they hire will enter, how the hiring manager would describe their new hire and what traits / behaviors the manager values the new hire having. All of the questions are presented in a format known as “forced choice”, where in order to choose one thing that you want, you have to by definition trade off another thing that is equally as good, but different.
Very importantly, there’s no place for someone to just say they want a “10 out of 10” person on every possible trait or skill. Not only is this not realistic, it also isn’t helpful when hiring, because if you can’t be intentional with the trade-offs that you’re willing to make, you will not be able to make a confident decision that is an acceptable risk at the end of the process.
I provided these answers to describe the work environment that I would expose my new hire to, as well as the qualities that were most important to me in my new hire:
In my case, I strongly focused on two things in my answers. First, I wanted to emphasize that this role was very structured and about getting things done. The responsibilities were fairly fixed, the tasks were fairly recurring. At the same time, I needed someone who could be able to get things done in an independent manner and be a strong self-manager. I simply didn’t have the time to watch over every minute of their work.
By responding to the questions, day100 provided a resulting “scorecard” that assigns values to various established soft skills (i.e. external facing activities) and culture traits (i.e. internal descriptive characteristics). Below is what my resulting scorecard looked like based on my answers: specifically, it highlights in green that my “must have” soft skill is Communication and my “must have” culture trait is deliberation.
Below those in yellow are several “nice to have” soft skills and culture traits, and then the “not so necessary” soft skills and culture traits in red. Rather than having me say, I want someone who is a leader and is deliberate and is adaptive and is creative and is a problem solver and is…bla bla bla everything else, I now have a more realistic picture of which soft skills and traits I should focus on identifying in people so that I end up with the person who has the highest likelihood of being successful.
What’s immediately clear from the below scorecard is that I am looking for an “executor who communicates well”, and that creativity, problem solving, and change / adaptiveness are not as necessary for someone to be successful and could even be detrimental (because it could potentially lead to quick boredom). Most importantly, doing this provided me with a very necessary dose of self-awareness as to what kind of people I should be looking for and what trade-offs would be okay for me to make.
Lastly, I had to come up with what to title the role. This is an important, and often undervalued part of the preparation process. When people are looking at jobs and companies, the title is an important signal. It could mean how colleagues in the company will look at the work the person will be doing, as well as how much room they will have to grow, and how they will be able to portray themselves to the outside world. It can also correlate to how much pay one can expect from a certain job and helps a person keep track of where they are in their career. The intentional hiring team here considers other jobs in the market that are similar to the one that they’ve described as well as their budget and organizational limits. In my case, the logistics of what I was looking for (~20 hours a week) and was able to pay prevailed — meaning that I titled the role as an internship, specifically Business Development & Events Intern.
As I wrap up the preparation stage, I look back at the time I had spent going through the steps of getting towards intentionality:
- Put into words a mission for the role: 15 minutes
- Describe goals & responsibilities: 40 minutes
- Create the day100 scorecard of soft skills and culture / personality traits: 15 minutes
- Come up with a title for the role (incl. research & other details): 20 minutes
The total time spent preparing was about 90 minutes. In this time, I was able to create a mission for the role, describe the goals and responsibilities / tasks and identify what were the most important qualities in the person who would work well in my work environment and with me. Check on “describing good performance” and check on “understanding my tradeoffs”.
Finding the people who cared
So that I could start finding people, I needed to condense everything that I had created into a job description so that I could advertise it and get applicants to apply. For some roles, the best approach is to put up an ad and wait for applications — such as for this role — and for other roles, you will be better off actively identifying people and building up a pipeline long before you start an actual hiring process, such as with senior level or high-in-demand roles. Either way, you need to know what to tell an interested person about the specific job you’re hiring for when the time does come to start a hiring process.
Below you can see the job description I created for the role that I titled “Business Development & Events Intern”. Note that I focused on specifically what they would be doing (in a summarized form) based on the goals and responsibilities, as well as the information from the day100 scorecard. For example, “independent” was one of my 3 key words to describe my ideal person and I highlighted that “Doing a good job in this internship means being able to independently manage your tasks and take this workload off the founder’s plate.” Something else that was very important to me was to be as transparent as I could about the role, what they would be working on, how they would be working on it and the logistics around the job. Writing this took about 15 minutes or so, as a result of having all the inputs ready to go.
A big inspiration of mine for writing effective job descriptions is Lou Adler and his philosophy on performance-based hiring (as opposed to requirements-based hiring). The heart of the philosophy is to focus on and select for people who have the highest likelihood of doing the actual job, as opposed to focusing on those that check off the right amount of “requirements boxes”. Being transparent with job responsibilities and conveying them in a way that doesn’t utilize business jargon is an important part of that focus on performance. Everything else is likely just hiring friction. If you’re seeing hiring friction, try to remove it!
Another thing that I explicitly did was not ask for a cover letter. Instead, I made it part of my process to respond to each person who applies with a simple email containing the two questions I would want to see answered in a cover letter anyway. Why should I introduce additional friction by having people guess about what I want to see in a cover letter? Here’s what that looked like (personal details of candidate and my phone number hidden):
With job description and next steps email in hand I went to three places to post about the job: AngelList, WayUp and NYU’s Student Job Board. You should be mindful of what effect using certain sources will have on your pipeline of applicants. It’s worthwhile to consider experimenting with an ever changing set of sources to optimize for a diverse set of people becoming aware of the jobs that you are hiring for. This is where it becomes helpful for a recruiter to know (or learn) the kind of role you need and what the market for that role looks like in your location. Every market is different and the ways that people become aware of which companies are hiring and for what jobs is different. It pays to have some expertise on your side here so that you can be intentional with your sources of applicants.
When all was said and done, I received about 40 applicants for my role over a period of 8 days. The relative breakdown of applicants skewed heaviest towards NYU’s Student Job Board, followed by AngelList. What’s important though isn’t the quantity of applicants, but the quality of interaction that you can now have with each. In line with the performance-based hiring philosophy, the best approach is one that seeks to engage fewer people and have deeper engagement with each to come to a good understanding of who will have the highest likelihood of success in working with you.
ACTUALLY getting to know people
As I started receiving applications, I immediately responded back to people with the follow up email I prepared above. Right away, this was having the desired effect — most people weren’t responding back, which hopefully meant that they either didn’t care much for sending over 2 sentences, or that they actually looked up day100, re-read the job description and decided that this was not the opportunity they wanted. Having people self select out of your hiring process is an extremely powerful tool!
Out of the 40 people that applied, 10 actually responded with something substantial within a timely manner (i.e. within 4 days of submitting their initial application). To each of these 10 people, I sent an invitation to do a telephone interview with myself. 7 ended up actually scheduling the phone call. To make things easy for the applicants, I gave them a Calendly link to schedule the time that works best for them.
With those phone interviews on the calendar, I requested each of the 7 to do a self assessment through day100. This is the first part of assessing a candidate that day100 supports — having the person applying for the job go through a set of questions, similar to those that I went through when setting up the scorecard, and answering them to the best of their awareness of themselves. As day100’s assessment is around soft skills and culture / personality traits, that is what the questions centered on. Since I already had a scorecard stating the important things for me (remember: Communication & Deliberation), I could objectively assess how the candidates compared along those traits.
And that’s exactly what the below dashboard in day100 for one of the candidates that I interviewed shows: how the candidate compares to my scorecard, which was created during the preparation stage. When reading the below Candidate Scorecard, it’s valuable to know that in day100 a candidate can be assessed to have a higher or lower score than the ideal value from the job’s scorecard for any given soft skill or culture / personality trait, and thus they can be a Strong fit for a certain skill or trait, or possibly be below or exceeding the ideal.
Generally, having someone be a Strong fit is the best option of the three, although it’s worthwhile to think about whether exceeding the ideal for any given skill or trait is always a good thing. Sometimes exceeding the ideal can be that “cherry on top”, but in other cases it can be “too much of a good thing”, which can turn out to be the reason why someone may become bored or demotivated in a certain role. For example, if we have someone whose strongest soft skill is Leadership and the scorecard for your job has Leadership as a “nice to have” or “not so necessary” soft skill, then that is a situation where you will see an “Exceeds ideal” for Leadership that may be too much of a good thing. Think twice if this person would adapt well to the specific work environment.
The other thing that I will always look at when seeing the results of a candidate’s assessment is the actual answers they provided and how those compare to the actual answers I provided when creating my scorecard. Seeing the differences here helps me create useful follow up questions for interviews — asking the candidate why they answered in a certain way and what about themselves makes them describe themselves as preferring a Highly collaborative environment as opposed to Individual contribution, as seen in the example below.
With an assessment like this in hand through day100, I don’t even try to assume that I can assess someone accurately enough in an interview, and instead focused my interviews on something totally different than assessment. Personally, I feel that it would be naive of me to think that I could assess what someone is like and what behaviors they will demonstrate in the workplace over the long term, and everything else about them to any degree of accuracy, from just a conversation (or two).
Therefore, when it came time to do the phone interview with each person, I prepared the below questions to ask:
The core objective I had for the conversation with each person was that they understood as clearly as possible what they would be getting themselves into if they decided to take this job with me at day100, both from a responsibilities and team perspective (having prepared the list of goals and responsibilities during the preparation stage made going through this question a breeze). This way they could tell me if they felt confident in being able to do the job and if they felt excited about the work and team environment.
Beyond that, I wanted to also understand what they wanted to get out of the time that they worked with me. Asking people “what are the 2 or 3 bullet points you would want to be able to write on your resume to prove that you were successful” is one of my favorite questions to tease out what success means to them in a way that would make it onto their resume. After asking that question, something I said to each candidate went something like this: “We may not work together forever, so I want to make sure I’m preparing you for your next job in alignment with your goals.”
Each phone interview ultimately took it’s own twist, but the common thread was that it wasn’t about asking brain teasers, or trying to judge the person on the other side. It was about trying to understand them, what they cared about and what they wanted to do — and the questions above are geared to do just that. In the back of my head, I was thinking of whether working with me and day100 would meet their expectations & help them achieve their goals. My belief is that if I put someone into a situation that motivates them and helps them achieve their goals AND makes them feel that they are contributing to success, they will get the job done. And honestly, I had already initially assessed them so why would I need to do that again?
An aside: When it comes to jobs that are more technical in nature than this one, all of these points should still hold. Engineers are people too, and they have goals & ambitions. We should all be mindful of trying to focus on people’s goals and how we can help them reach their goals. Discussing the goals & responsibilities that you’re looking to have the person you hire accomplish in more technical terms is fine, but it can be just as important to bring up past experiences that the person had to understand why they are or aren’t excited about a certain set of responsibilities & goals.
On deciding
Now came the first point where I had to make sense of everything to date and make a decision: who do I invite to the next round of interviewing and who do I tell that working together may not be a great idea.
For each of the people that I actually had a phone interview with (6, as 1 cancelled their interview prior to their call due to finding another job), I had two documents to review: the interview write-up and the candidate report from day100, that was based on the comparison between the candidate’s self assessment and my scorecard. On each interview write up, I wrote down a percentage corresponding to how likely I felt I was able to meet the person’s expectations and help them achieve their stated goals based on our conversation. These ranged from 50% to about 95%.
For example, one of the people told me that the bullet points that they wanted to see on their resume after doing this job with day100 would be:
- Is expert at using Mailchimp, Google Adwords, and SEO
- Knows to manage a small team effectively
Online advertising is not something we’ve done much at day100, so I didn’t feel I could do much to impact the first goal (nor did I envision the job requiring it) and there wasn’t really any management opportunity in this job, as it was an executor role.
Another person stated that their bullet points would be:
- Established fruitful & important relationships
- Executed events great
- Learned about the technical aspects of business dev
While somewhat vague (talking about SMART goals is another whole topic), these goals fit a lot closer with what I thought could be reasonably gotten from doing this job. This led me to mark this as a 90% in terms of likelihood to meet their goals doing this job. The same story followed for the rest of the people I had a phone interview with.
When it came to the day100 candidate reports, there was one less step involved. I didn’t have to assign any values, as they were already calculated. I just had to look at them!
From the position level dashboard, I was able to see all the people (names anonymized to protect their privacy) from whom I requested an assessment and their high level results sorted by highest to lowest. However, I did not only rely on these high level numbers — just as I described above, I took the time to look at which of the underlying soft skills and culture traits were a Strong fit, versus which were either below or exceeding the ideal and how their answers lined up with mine. Generally, a higher overall match score is the result of more soft skills or culture traits being in the Strong fit range, but it never hurts to double check. Remember: I was looking especially for Communication as one of the top soft skills and Deliberation as one of the top culture traits.
For the top three people (candidates A, B and C), they all fulfilled that requirement and displayed strengths in both Communication and Deliberation according to their self assessment. The latter 4 (candidates D, E, F and G) were below ideal on either one of the other.
Taking this into account together with the interview write ups, I chose 4 of 7 to invite to a next round interview (candidates A, B, C and F). While candidates A, B and C all had a high rate of match as per the day100 assessment and I rated them all 85% or above in terms of being able to achieve their goals on the job, I also chose to include candidate F. In the case of candidate F, Deliberation wasn’t highlighted as one of their top traits and was actually highlighted as below ideal. But, I did note a 95% chance of meeting their goals as part of the interview write up, so I decided to give them a shot. For what it’s worth, I would suggest that you look for at least 85% overall match when using the day100 assessment — and only make exceptions when you have a good reason to do so, as I did.
To each of those 4 people, I wrote an email inviting them to do an in-person interview with me. The email to each person was customized quite heavily so showing an example may be giving too much personal information away, but the core was the same for each:
- Thank them for speaking with me on the phone and doing the assessment
- Reiterate what were the things that they would be able to work on at day100 that would meet their goals
- State that I feel confident about moving forward with them because I believe they have the requisite skills and traits that would lead them to be successful with me
- Address any potential concerns such as around pay or hours
- Highlight the good that we can accomplish together
After those were sent out, all 4 had accepted the in-person interviews and we scheduled them on the calendar.
To each of these people I then sent the second of day100’s assessment requests: the references request.
The goal of this second request is twofold: first, to build an even better understanding of each person’s soft skills and culture traits strengths & weaknesses. Second, to compare how a collection of other people see each person versus how they see themselves to get at the “self-awareness” gap. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about finding a self awareness gap, but it’s a valuable data point to contribute both to evaluating whether hiring someone is an acceptable risk and how could you then manage them to address that gap.
The process that followed was quite simple. Each of the candidates clicked the link in the email they received and were led back into their own day100 dashboard page. From here, they were able to provide the name, email address and other info about at least 2 people with whom they have worked prior or currently worked with. Doing so would trigger an automated email to that person asking them to do a similar type of assessment — focusing on soft skills and traits in the workplace, except in this case the assessment is about someone else, the candidate, rather than about the person who received it.
Suddenly, I had an extra perspective that I didn’t have prior. Now I could see how an aggregate group of other people had observed each candidate to be in the workplace and where they differed in their observations. A lot of interesting insights spilled out of the data — both quantitative and qualitative — take a look at one sample that I reviewed (note the color scheme: purple is the candidate’s self assessment answers and orange are the aggregate references answers)!
The interviews
When it came down to it, a further 2 out of the 4 I invited to an in-person interview wrote to me asking to cancel their interview as they took other opportunities. It’s a reminder that no matter what, it’s a competitive market out there when you’re hiring. Nevertheless, I still felt good that I had 2 interested people ready to meet.
Preparing for each in-person interview was a matter of going through the write-ups and assessment reports again, pulling out key topics to further discuss and generally getting myself aware of what was left to address with each person. The core of what I wanted to get at in each interview was the answer to one key question: what can day100, and I, do to make this role exciting, motivating and fulfilling for you? What I didn’t want the interview to become was a test. They had already taken an assessment, and some people that they’ve worked with had rounded out that assessment with their own observations. If they made it this far, I was confident that they had a high likelihood of being successful with me — it was in the numbers!
The format for the in-person interview was much simpler than the phone interview. First, we went through the day100 platform together and talked in depth about why things were designed in a certain way, and how that would affect a hiring process, much like I’m doing here in this post. It was important to me that they know what the company does in detail if they decide to work with me. Then we talked about the assessments that they took and what the results showed and I asked them questions as to why they picked certain answers over others. I also shared what I believed was my working style, and the realities of working day to day to give them the chance to reflect on whether working with me was actually something they wanted as well. Lastly, we touched upon the logistics again — hours per week, how the work fits into their schedule, pay and more. Everything was out on the table.
One thing that I felt was that there was a kind of relief to the interviews that I’ve rarely felt before. Interviews used to always be these very tense moments of judgement, both from the perspective of the interviewer and interviewee. I didn’t feel that in this case. It felt like a discovery — just getting to know how to best help another person succeed so they can help me in return by doing a great job.
Speaking of which, another question that obviously always needs answering by this point is “could this candidate actually do this job?” Shouldn’t I then test my candidate for doing the actual on the job tasks? When possible, you should! But then, I would also recommend that this happen as part of a structured assessment or take-home assignment in parallel to the interviews and the day100 assessment for soft skills and culture traits. I strongly recommend using the interviews to focus on a person’s goals & motivations and using assessments for what they’re good at: assessing & testing.
Making an offer
The final call as to whom to give the offer to came down to the numbers. After the in-person interviews, I felt pretty good that I could support both of the people in helping them achieve their goals and get value from the time working with me: I rated both at 95% for that. But it was very important for me to bring someone onboard that had a very strong sense of independence (because I would frequently not be around to oversee their work) and was deliberate and thorough in their assignments. One person was shown to be stronger in those traits than the other and that ultimately swayed the decision for me — the assessment report from day100 gave me the confidence to move forward because I knew it was tracking to the qualities I needed most: Deliberation & Communication. For you, those most important qualities may be different, but no matter what they are, you should be confident that if you’re tracking towards them, you’re moving in the right direction.
But of course, when you present an offer, you generally have to negotiate it too. For what it’s worth, at this point I felt pretty confident that this was a person who I would fight for and when they asked for a higher pay than I offered, I ended up both raising the base salary and adding an additional bonus that correlated with the success of the day100 events that they would manage.
4 weeks later / Thinking beyond
Looking back, this was probably the most intentional I have been in hiring. Not only because I used an assessment like day100 (which I’ve of course been using before), but also because I took the time to really make sense of what I needed from someone who would take this role and laid out a carefully thought out process. This allowed me to also lead an extremely transparent interview cycle that prioritized what really mattered for the person across the table from me.
At the end of the in-person interview with the person I ended up hiring, they said to me “I really appreciate how open you are with me about everything going on at the company and that you’re insisting so hard that we talk about what I actually want to get out of the role”. I hope YOU strive for the same end result. For what it’s worth, I’m very happy with the performance of the person I hired so far (candidate A from the above list of anonymized candidates for those keeping score at home) and they are indeed living true to their strengths in Communication and Deliberation.
Looking beyond just the hiring process, something that I will continue to do, and I hope you do as well, is to make use of this intentionality as you onboard and manage too! I’ve seen some folks make “handbook for working with me, your manager” decks to help their new employees know what to expect and not to expect. I highly recommend doing something like this and also filling that deck with all the info you created during the hiring process. Hiring, onboarding and managing do not have to be separate processes in any way and the more you connect them, the better.
Hopefully this story had an impact on you. Just as I prioritized being transparent during the interview, I want to be transparent now as well, sharing all the materials and assets I used so that you could benefit from seeing them and the actual process I followed. To summarize it all up, here is a checklist that brings together all the steps:
Do you have any questions? Want to chat about this? Is there any way I can help you with how you’re thinking about hiring or about how you can add intentionality into your hiring? Feel free to reach out! You can email me at ilya@day100.me, tweet me @IlyaUsorov or find me on LinkedIn.
