Value and metric driven recruiting
A brisk walk from SOMA and you are in the confines of Redpoint SF. The swanky confines play host to Maia Josebachvilli at Greenhouse to talk about recruiting. This was the 4th in a series of bi-weekly talks here, previous speakers have included Brian Macaitis, Kenny Van Zant and Pete Koomen.
Maia started at Greenhouse and is the VP of people + strategy. Her talk focused on a metric driven approach to recruiting for your startup. Her advice was profound and had several non obvious insights. For starters, Maia has an atypical background for recruiting, she used to be a derivatives trader in a prior life, sold her bootstrapped startup (Urban Escapes) to Livingsocial before her current incarnation.
“The evolution of recruiting will look similar to marketing. Marketing has become very quantitative, recruiting will follow suit”
Maia spoke extensively about breaking down each stage in the candidate’s journey to categories in the funnel, analogous to a sales funnel. It is the funnel based optimization that leads into the metrics that are fundamental to hiring for any organization.
“If you have a gamut of metrics, it is a distraction, so the key is to identify ~5 of your core metrics that you should track”
Tom does justice to the 5 key metrics portrayed during the talk in his post here. In summary — metrics exist so you can do something about them. Ergo, vanity metrics are useless. There are 2 kinds of metrics — strategic and tactical. Strategic metrics typically are made of several or are tracked by Tactical metrics — these are high level metrics that will answer the question — “How are we doing?”. Tactical metrics are what you track on a day to day basis.
“The very best people are not looking for jobs”
Activating people who are not actively handing out resumes is a good way to get higher fidelity candidates. There are a number of companies out there that try to solve this problem but it isn’t really clear if there is a way to do this reliably at scale. But even when you find a highly qualified candidate who is a proven performer, the culture fit is of critical importance -
“Organizations make a horrible mistake by keeping people who are poor culture fits”
Culture is often a fuzzy concept and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Culture is one of those terms which don’t have to be defined quantitatively as long as people have a shared understanding of what it is. Culture begets values. Your culture is composed of values. And every organization should make it a pointed effort to define their values.
“Do you know the difference between Behavioral and Situational interviews”
Behavioral interviews are what someone has done in a prior situation. So you would need to lead with “Tell me a time when…”
Situational interviews lead with “What would you do when…”
Tactically, when confused, ask for more examples. If someone is being insincere, it becomes harder and harder to make stuff up.
One of the most insightful questions came out of the fear of spreading homogeneity in an organization. Greenhouse avoids this by having 2 specific questions about the interviewee. One of the questions explicitly asks about culture fits — “Would X be a good culture fit”, the other is — “Would YOU like to work with X”. While exercising your own discretion in the interview loop, this allows for a dispassionate appraisal of the interviewee.
All in all, an amazing session which portrayed recruitment and scaling in terms I had certainly not thought of before.
