Hiring is not a Soft Skill

… and if you treat it like one you’re going to have a bad time.

The process of getting a job sucks. Writing resumés, cover letters, phone interviews, decoding recruiter speak, hours upon hours of whiteboard work, and if you want to get the job don’t forget about the days/weeks of interview question prep-work. The Internet already has a ton of articles and anecdotes about perceived flaws in the process, missed opportunities, or impractical and pointless exams.

For every one of those stories there is a hundred nightmare anecdotes from the perspective of people powering those hiring loops. I’d prefer to go without getting into the embarrassing gore, but try to imagine how it feels to act as a filter on a never ending rollercoaster of hope and disappointment. People who want a candidate to fail during an interview are rare. Watching it is painful for the rest of us. Interviewers are thoughtless and casual far more often than they are malicious.

Most people don’t think about hiring as a critical job function unless they are a manager, HR professional, or a recruiter. But whatever the reason, many people think of hiring as a soft skill. What does that imply?

Soft Skills: (plural noun)
Desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude.

— Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition

Can you remember the first time someone asked or told you to interview a candidate for a peer position? Chances are that your manager approached you and fumbled something at you like, “Hey, you know how an interview works right? I mean, I interviewed you so you should. I need you to interview some people.” Can you remember how you came up with the questions that you asked the first time you interviewed someone? If you haven’t interviewed anyone before, most people will start by asking questions from their own interview. They might not know why they their interviewer asked those questions or what they were looking for. Even if they knew those things, they had little to no experience evaluating responses.

Once a person has conducted a few interviews they begin to feel “experienced.” They become more confident in the skills they develop and evaluate in a vacuum. Maybe they are great but, maybe not.

If you treat writing job descriptions, reading resumés, evaluating portfolios, designing interview loops, designing interview questions, evaluating candidate responses, conducting interviews, participating in and leading debriefs, and conducting compensation negotiations like soft skills then you are going to have a bad time. Your interviewers are going to be inconsistent, and unpredictable. They’re going to introduce bias in the worst cases. They’ll be as effective as a dice roll in the best cases.

You’re going to hire about as well as random would because the hiring process you’re using is random at best. You’re going to create poor candidate experiences that are as likely to turn good candidates away as let poor candidates slip through. If you hire poor candidates and miss good ones then your culture is going to rot. You will foster contempt between teams and team members. Your teams will produce more debt and operations will degrade employee experiences. You’ll experience crippling churn and all of the associated brain-drain and tooling rot. Maybe one day your company will produce a bunch of ads that excite one out of five people. But the remainder wonder why they would want to work there.

You can improve each component in the hiring process with study, critical thought, experimentation, and practice. Don’t just wing it. Act with purpose.