It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy When You Hire

Your business needs new talent; friends and family can’t cut it anymore.
You realise you need to go out and find someone amazing to hire.
You don’t have the budget for it, so where do you start?

Illustration by FolaSade Adeshida

As you continue to grow your business, recruitment can be a handful to deal with. Yes, there is already a lot of great content out there describing what to do and what tools are available. However, you have quickly realised that what you truly need is a breakdown of the exact processes that have worked for businesses like yours so you can hit the ground running without experimenting.

In this post, that’s exactly what you will discover. I cover the different building blocks that I personally used in running the recruitment drive at a Pan-African entrepreneurial training program and currently use at Venture for Africa, a company I started.

The training program was set up to find and recruit 50+ super-talented folks each year, from a pool of over 3000 applicants, with a 2-man team and a budget of just a couple hundred dollars. This is why I’m fairly certain that there are a lot of valuable tips and tricks in here which will be great for small to mid-sized business owners like yourself.

Here is a list of the modules I am about to share which you can mix, match and adapt in creating your own recruitment process:

1. Job descriptions
2. Resume/application reviews
3. Skills assessment tests
4. Phone interviews + scoring/grading interviews
5. In-person interviews
6. Communication pipelines for applicants
7. Applicant feedback
8. Dashboards and reporting

Before we dive in, I have put together a recruitment toolkit that includes email templates, worksheets, and documentation that should make it easy for you to implement the modules I describe in this post.

You can subscribe to my mailing list here to get access to the complete kit or pick and choose the modules you find the most useful.

Venture for Africa | Bridging talent gaps for Africa's tech startups

Let's get right to it!

Job Descriptions

Who do you need? Why?

As a team about to hire someone new, asking yourself this question forces you to clearly outline the nature of the work your potential hire will work on.

I generally follow the philosophy of “hiring when it hurts” and Wailin Wong on the ReWork podcast put it best describing it as hiring when you feel overworked for a sustained period of time, or you feel like the quality of your work is sliding.

Therefore, once it starts to hurt, that should already give you the foundation of information you need to then build out your ideal job description (JD).

Now there are a lot of creative ways to package a job description. However, whatever you go with, make sure to answer the following questions as plainly as possible:

• About the job and the work to be done
• About the kind of person you believe would fit into the role
• About the benefits and pay
• How to apply

If you’re looking for inspiration on creating a JD for a specific kind of role, you can check out Workable (it is one of the world’s leading hiring platforms and provides an amazing amount of recruiting resources for free).

Reviewing Resumes/Applications

Once your job description is live, using an applicant tracking system(ATS) to receive and review applicant applications is your most efficient bet.

There are a lot of tools in the market (both free and paid) that help make this process easier to manage, particularly at scale. From my experience, whatever platform you feeling comfortable with, you need to make sure it at least offers the following key features:

• Applicant Tracking: managing all applications, sourced applicants and internal referrals in one place
• Applicant Communication: real-time applicant communication, email scheduling, email templates, triggers and automation
• Collaboration: assigning several levels, roles and responsibilities to different members of your hiring team
• Commenting: complete log of the applicant history and all actions that have been taken, note-taking, task creation and assignments

The next set of features are nice-to-haves, but still important to at least consider:

• Applicant scorecards & evaluations: custom feedback forms and scorecards to get feedback on all applicants at every stage of your recruitment process
• Recruiting Pipeline: customise and structure all steps of your recruiting process according to your specific needs
• Recruitment Marketing: Automatic posting of your job ads to relevant job boards/platforms
• Integration: integrate with the applications you already use, from scheduling apps to video-interviewing platforms to take-home testing systems

If your budget cannot account for a platform that covers all of the primary features on the first list, I have two awesome resources you can try out:

1. I have put together a hack that combines a number of free and cheap resources you can use to closely mimic the experience you would get from using an ATS.
   The hack will require that you have access to the following services:
   - Google Sheets
   - Google Forms
   - Mixmax
   - The Mailmerge google sheet add-on
   - Zapier
   - Airtable
2. I got in touch with the team behind Jobylon, a fantastic hiring software that I use quite often and they agreed to create and give access to a lite-version of their platform which should suit the early hiring needs for small to mid-sized businesses.

You can subscribe to my mailing list to get access to Jobylon as well as a working sample of my hack around applicant tracking systems like it.

Administering Assessment Tests

Pre-employment assessment tests offer an objective, standardized way of gathering data on applicants during the hiring process. They have become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to filter and manage large applicant pools.

Bless the internet for making it easier to apply for jobs, but this also leads to some job-seekers spamming job posts by distributing their resumes across the web with little regard to if they actually meet stated requirements or if they are a right fit for the job in question. As a result, most hiring managers don’t have the proper bandwidth to thoroughly review every applicant’s application.

Assessment tests offer an additional way for you to conduct a comparative evaluation of different applicants within your pool and find the best fit for the role.

You can create your own GMAT-style tests using platforms like Classmarker, or have applicants complete a free personality quiz like 16personalities or plum.io and have them share their results with you.

A quick word of advice here. Before you go ahead to make applicants take certain tests, make sure you understand how to use/interpret the results. A quick way to do this is to take the quiz yourself, together with your current team members, and see what the results show; think of it as “calibrating your measuring tools”.

Phone Interviews

By reading the application and conducting an assessment test, you should have already determined whether the applicant is qualified “on paper” as well as key parts of their profile you might need to follow-up on.

As a business with limited resources, a phone interview offers a cost-effective but personal way to screen through a large applicant pool when compared to in-person interviews.

However, to get better results, such an interview needs to be well-structured, designed with the end in mind, and conducted by someone who actually knows how to interview effectively.

You cannot approach your phone interviews haphazardly and expect that it results in a quality hire.

To help you out, here is a general structure you can use for your phone interviews including tools that can help with semi-automating your scheduling process:

Phase One: Setting up the interview

“The Platform”:

In order to create the near-perfect experience, putting together a seamless scheduling experience helps remove any potential bottlenecks on both your side as the interviewer and the applicant being interviewed.

To do this, there are a number of scheduling platforms you can use, but my preferred free choice here is “Calendly”. (If you’ve got a few dollars to spare here, you can check out Mixmax)

Using platforms like this one reduces the amount of email trail generated from the back and forth conversations that usually happen while trying to find a time that works for a meeting.

Calendly and tools like it are straightforward to use. Here is how they typically work:

• Connect your calendar
• Select blocks of time when you are available to speak
• Include instructions for how the applicant can connect with you or request for the applicant’s contact details
• Send your calendar link in an email invitation to the applicant.

“The Email Invitation”:

Considering that some applicants might not be familiar with the automated scheduling platform you have chosen, it saves you time if your initial email with the booking prompt includes key information about how the platform works and what the applicant should be looking out for.

Subscribe to my mailing list to get access to email templates for phone interview invitations as well as an interview script you can adapt to suit your hiring process.

Phase Two: Preparing for the interview

“The Digital Rubric”:

A rubric is a scoring guide that aims to evaluate applicant performances based on the sum of a pre-selected, explicit and descriptive range of criteria that is designed to reflect the weighted importance of the traits you are seeking out during the interview. This helps ensure that your evaluating standards do not change over time and across interviews.

Although I am a strong advocate for free-form note-taking during a phone interview, I also believe that having a well thought out rubric that turns some of your qualitative judgements into quantitative metrics is good practice. This is especially key when trying to determine the relative performance of applicants after their interviews.

I have put together a simple google form with a rating scale for example qualities you can look out for in potential applicants during your phone interviews. These different data points can then be combined to produce a total score for each interview you complete. You can choose to use this data however you please when making decisions on your applicants.

As an example, I typically use weighted averages — a combination of weighted results from this and other stages within the hiring processes, which can then be used to compute running averages and possibly rank applicants.

You can subscribe to my mailing list to get access to a working sample of a google form and the adjoining google sheet I use to score applicants and dynamically compute running averages with visual cues.

Phase Three: During the interview

“The Questions and How they’re asked”:

This is the secret sauce of the mix.

The most common issue I have encountered with most interviews is the lack of interviewing skills shown by the interviewer. Yes, you might have a list of questions you have to ask the applicant, but it helps no one at all if the interview begins to feel like an interrogation.

If you choose to conduct interviews this way, you face the greater risk of getting generic responses and you lose the opportunity to actually get to know the applicant beyond what is already visible on their resume.

After conducting 500+ phone interviews over a period of 6 months, my rule of thumb is simple:

“Make your interview a conversation”

Think of the interview as a conversation, and that you as the interviewer get the opportunity to set the tone of that conversation.

The approach here is to be as personal as is required, which in turn gets the applicant to relax and open up much more. From this point forward, You should treat the interview as a discovery process just like you would when trying to get to know a new person.

I believe this approach gets you quicker to the real truth than asking situational questions that tend to produce STAR responses.

Above all, your interview should concentrate on these 3 broad goals:

• Validating the applicant‘s understanding of the job opportunity, your organisation and its vision, and how it fits into their journey as a professional looking to build a career.
• Learning more about the applicant‘s listed skills particularly those that are critical towards succeeding in the role they’ve applied for.
• Understanding the applicant’s drive, energy and self-awareness. Hard-skills you can teach, soft-skills — not so much.

In the sample form that you get access to when you subscribe to my mailing list, I have included some commentary beneath each question on the rubric as a guide.

Phase Four: Closing out the interview

Once you are comfortable with the amount of detail you have learnt about the applicant from the interview, now is the perfect time to provide as much information as possible about what the rest of the interview process might look like for the applicant.

This usually helps prevent the applicant from using(wasting) their questions on basic details after the interview. Plus, getting this out of the way before you give the applicant the floor to ask questions, helps you assess more important things like:

• If the applicant was paying enough attention during the interview
• If the applicant has done any research about the organisation
• How insightful the applicant is overall

Like I said earlier, hard-skills you can teach, soft-skills — not so much.

In-person Interviews

After drilling down your applicant pool to a manageable number using the steps above, a well-structured and well-conducted physical interview is a good way to wrap up your recruitment process.

There are two styles I recommend that you test out to find which suits your team best:

1. A straight one-on-one interview where you dig deeper into your finalist’s background and skills.
2. Taking a final batch of applicants through a group-interview before speaking to them one-on-one.

From experience, both the group-interviews and the one-on-one interviews can be done in one day. (For more context, my team conducts group interviews for 40+ applicants and then one-on-one’s for about 60% of that number in one day. Although these end up being very intense engagements, the results have proven great so far.)

The Group Interview

A team of 3–4 interviewers should be enough for this process (odd numbers usually help with breaking ties during voting).

One strong recommendation is that your interviews should closely mimic what a typical day might look like on your team or what typical tasks your team gets to work on. This gives you a bit of perspective on what it might be like to work with your potential hire.

An alternative for the group interview is to get finalists to work with your team on a live project before you hire them. However, going this route means you’re ready to pay a small stipend for whatever work they do within that period. As you can imagine, this can get expensive.

If a group interview sounds like something you’d like to try out, you can subscribe to my mailing list here to get access to a play-by-play of one of the many group interviews I’ve run in the past.

The resource includes:

• An agenda for the day
• Instructions for setting up a sample of group activities
• An interviewer’s guide

Communication pipeline for applicants

While an applicant is going through your hiring process, it is important to keep communication strong and consistent. One way to do this is to lay out the different checkpoints within your process and identify key places where a touchpoint with the applicant is necessary. With this information, you can then create email templates that can be sent to applicants once they reach such checkpoints.

Typically, communication touchpoints should come at the end of each stage and should always answer the following questions:

• What’s happening
• What’s next
• When will it happen

With respect to timing, industry standards recommend that you keep your entire process within 45–60 days from your first contact with the applicant to when a final decision is made.

Subscribe to my mailing list to get complete access to a pack I’ve created with email templates you can use for different stages within your hiring process. From phone interview invitations to group interview notifications, to applicant decisions (positive and negative).

The pack also includes more information on how to easily send out bulk, personalised emails to applicants in your hiring funnel.

Applicant Feedback

No one puts time and energy into an application with the hopes of getting rejected. For opportunity seekers, this means getting rejected can quickly become a confidence-eroding experience.

This is why the least you can do as a potential employer is to provide feedback to applicants who don’t successfully make it through your hiring process.

I’ll be real with you, providing detailed or personalised applicant feedback isn’t the most exciting thing to put your time and bandwidth towards when hiring. However, if you’ve followed the tips and tricks shared so far, you should already have a bit more information about each applicant and how they’ve performed within your process.

This information you have gathered will help you put together feedback that is slightly-personalised and might help unsuccessful applicants understand why they were not the right fit for the role.

Each year, my team and I have to provide feedback to over 500 applicants who take part in our application process. The easiest thing to do here would be to provide the same feedback to every applicant who does not make it through. However, I created a hack around this, that I have called an “Applicant Feedback Algorithm”.

Although this algorithm still involves sending templated responses, it groups applicants into certain buckets based on the skill-gaps identified and then provides feedback in relation to the bucket they have been placed in.

To get this hack set up for your own process, you will first need to:

• look into the applicants that have made it through
• identify the key traits that set them apart (or you can use your selection criteria as a foundation).
• create feedback responses for a sample applicant who fails to demonstrate any of those key traits.

For example, if good communication skills are something you look out for, think about how you would describe how that skill applies to the work that you do and create feedback based on that.

After you have done this for each criterion, you should:

1. Review your notes on each unsuccessful applicant and identify which of these criteria they dropped the ball on.
2. Tag the applicant’s profile using keywords (e.g in this case, it could be “communication”) and then send them your feedback template based on that criteria.

As you can imagine, this is slightly more scalable for large applicant pools, especially when you have a bulk-messaging service set up.

Subscribe to my mailing list here to get full access to all the resources I use in setting up an Applicant Feedback Algorithm.

With this, you will be able to effortlessly send semi-personalised feedback to your applicants in one go.

Dashboards and reporting

Once you get through the steps above, your recruitment process should result in a significant amount of data that you can play around with to produce useful insights for your future hiring efforts. Some Insights that I like to track include:

• the demographic distribution of an applicant pool
• where applicants are coming from
• the skills that are most represented
• the most common educational background etc.

The next logical step is then to find the best way to visualize all this information. This is where Google Data Studio comes in; a free tool from Google that lets users make custom reports with data from Google’s marketing services, external sources and self-generated sources like spreadsheets and CSV files.

Hint: Tools like these function best when most of your data is formatted in a spreadsheet. This is why my aforementioned hacks tend to produce tables of information.

To learn about the features included in GDS and how to use them for your reporting, you can take a look at the introduction video here.

Conclusion

I do not recommend that you try to consume all you have seen here in one sitting as it combines a lot of the thoughts I have shared in the past as stand-alone articles. I chose this format so you can have one single place to come to and use as a guide in setting up a proper recruitment process for your team.

Depending on how comfortable you are with the concepts and hacks I have shared, you might be able to take the information and quickly implement them.

However, if you appreciate a bit of a more hands-on approach, subscribe to my mailing list here to get access to detailed instructions, templates, samples and more to get you from point A (posting a Job Description) to point Z (sending out offer letters) as quickly and simply as possible.

It really doesn’t have to be crazy when you hire!

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