3. How to improve your hiring process?
‘How to evaluate with purpose’ is the third chapter of Learn, the fifth book of The Hiring Playbooks, 5 ebooks that will turn all your hires into wins. Created by the Homerun team.
This chapter will help you avoid human bias, improve hiring success rates, save time and stress by creating structure, ask questions that predict success and make data-backed decisions.
Using a structured system for determining, implementing, and
assessing improvements to your hiring process will help you take swift,
constructive action on your hiring data that will significantly improve
your hiring process.
How do I improve my hiring process?
1. Gather a team
One of the most difficult things about making change is getting buy-in.
Fortunately this is simple to address. People tend to support what they
help create, so all you have to do is include more people in the decision
making process. This will make it is easy for you to support each other,
brainstorm together, and bring a greater variety of ideas to the table.
Don’t forget to assign some roles too: teams should have a leader who
helps facilitate teamwork, a secretary to take notes, and an owner (the
person most affected by changes made to the hiring process) who has
the final say.
2. Review
Once your team is assembled, go over your hiring process evaluation
together, make notes, and discuss both the general and the specific
problems you see.
3. Chart your current hiring process
As this is a such an abstract, broad subject, the best way to get your
collective heads around it is with visuals: put everything on the wall
somewhere so that the entire team can access it so that it’s easy to
reference at any time.
Start by mapping the process. Sticky notes on a whiteboard work
really well for this, as you’ll probably make several adjustments along
the way. Then identify the activities that make up the process you’ve
mapped by writing out the various steps and noting who is responsible
for each of them.
4. Pinpoint your pain points
Mark the problems that you discovered during the hiring process
evaluation directly onto the chart of your hiring process. Use different
coloured sticky notes so that it’s easy to distinguish between different
areas and topics. As you do this, you’ll quickly begin to see which areas
of your process need the most work.
5. Establish goals and expectations
Discuss the pain points you’ve laid out and decide on a few problems
to focus on first. Next, work out your expectations for improvement.
Break these down into long-term and short-term goals and set the key
performance indicators that you’ll use to measure success.
While thinking big is always good, don’t lose sight of lower priority
pain points as you’ll want to address them in the future too. Trello is an
excellent place to keep a record of future fixes that you want to make.
6. Diverge
Explore possible solutions as a team. The overarching goal is to come
up with as many different ideas as possible and explore all the different
solutions available.
It’s vital that everybody feels completely comfortable putting forward
ideas. Reassure the team that there are no or wrong answers, and go in
with a mindset that builds on suggestions by saying “Yes, and …” and
avoids flat out “no’s”. Anything goes here, so encourage everyone to
continually ask, “How could we…”
7. Converge
After exploring as many directions as possible, it’s time to come
together and make some decisions. List all of the ideas your team
has come up with and narrow them down until you have a handful of
actionable next steps that you can all agree on.
When making your decisions, keep scale in mind, because by combining
both simple and complex steps, you can realistically take action on
multiple solutions at once.
Once you’ve decided on next steps, create a living document (we like
to use a Trello board) that you can share them with your team to keep
everyone up to date on the progress you make.
8. Create and implement
Get busy! It’s time to make those changes. Turn your plans into
concrete actions and make the changes that you’ve agreed to make.
9. Test, evaluate, improve
Once you’ve put your solutions into action, give them time to sink in and
generate impact before evaluating them. This may mean waiting until
your next scheduled hiring process evaluation, or even the one after
that — but that’s okay. It’s worth waiting for!
What do I do next?
You now have a thoughtful, structured, and measurable hiring process,
and that’s something to be proud of — at least until the next time you
decide to evaluate it all over again.
We’d like to thank you for reading this chapter. If you’d like some
further reading on the world of hiring, we would like to point you in the
direction of the Homerun Library. This is where we’ve collected some of
our favourite articles on growth, hiring, culture, trends and tools from
the likes of Fastco, New York Times, Forbes, QZ and Medium. If you’d
like a steady stream of up to date tips, then why not sign up to the Art
of Work newsletter? We send it out biweekly with the latest trends,
interviews and must-reads on The Art of Work + a selection of great job
openings in the creative industry.
Until then, keep up the good work!
All Images by Studio Spass.
