Turbocharge Your Recruiting

I n most companies, recruiting is a chore. And like most chores, there are excuses why dishes are in the sink, the grass is uncut, or the laundry unwashed. With recruiting, the most common excuses I hear are, “the recruiters did not give me any good resumes” or “all the resumes I got were bad.”

If you hear this from your staff, or you find yourself mouthing this excuse to your boss, you are approaching recruiting as a victim, and very likely, you are doing a bad job. You may as well stop and enjoy this article as whomever is at the top of your current recruiting process is possibly not great, or worse, will not accept.

Why the harsh words? In blaming recruiting, you have mistakenly assumed that hiring is recruiting’s job. Wrong, it’s your job. And if you want to be a world class manager, hiring needs to be somewhere between #2 and #3 on your priority list, if not frequently #1.

A key attribute of a great leader is the ability to attract, motivate and retain great talent. Great people are the lifeblood of an organization, but if your team does not take recruiting seriously, you will be unable to refresh talent when your best people move to new challenges. You will lose people not just to the outside, but more often than not, to important projects inside your organization. Savvy leaders realize the mobility of the best people, and therefore are always nurturing a pipeline of potential replacements. Simply put, you should make recruiting and hiring a top priority in order to control your own destiny.

Now that you agree that recruiting is your job, it is important to realize that your recruiting team is only an enabler, and often not a very good one. Your recruiting team is likely overstretched, and facing high turnover of low paid contract employees. But if recruiting is core to your success as a leader, you need to devise strategies to make recruiting effective, regardless the circumstance.

Let me tell you how.

F irst, make recruiting & hiring deeply personal: The best candidates want to work for an organization that “wants them” and where the candidate believes the senior people care about her or his success. How do you convey to top candidates that they are a top priority for your organization? Ironically, the most common way of sourcing candidates sends the opposite message to candidates, as recruiters or junior sourcers are the first point of contact.

If you want the best people to take you seriously, have your most senior person make the first call. In most cases this means that the hiring manager does the initial phone screen. If you want to “wow” a candidate, have the hiring manager’s boss make the first call. That is memorable.

Follow that up by involving the entire team in the screening and vetting process. For example, I end every second round PM interview by having the candidate present on an abstract strategic topic, and I required the entire PM team to attend. This allows us to see how much the candidate “wants the job” and it also allows us to state, “the entire team cares deeply about the next hire.” Our participation, questions and merely showing up, backs up that statement.

You may say that this is too burdensome. True this is a lot of work but candidates remember their first contact and it will stand out if the “boss” is actively involved in the first screen. Not surprisingly, this personal approach is exactly what the top professional services firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs do every year as they replenish their pipeline with top new talent. Each year they require their senior staff to go and meet candidates at “meet the firm” social hours that kick off recruiting. The upfront effort pays off in spades as candidates vividly recall the interactions with senior staff while the senior staff identify the most promising candidates.

Still not convinced? Most successful startup CEOs spend a ton of time recruiting and selling the vision to prospective employees.

S econd, make recruiting a team sport: Recruiting can be a lonely dance for a hiring manager especially if you rely exclusively on your recruiting team to source resumes. Short handed, the current team feels trapped and unable to take personal stretch assignments. They soon leave. Meanwhile, the lone wolf hiring manager makes little progress on recruiting as urgent matters takes priority over this important “chore.”

The most ambitious staff may come and ask, ironically, “when will I get to manage a team?” This desire to manage is the #1 career development goal for mid-level professionals as they hope to advance their careers. Sadly, there are few people leadership opportunities when the team is shorthanded, devoid of new blood, and just reacting.

Can you use the recruiting chore as a way to teach your top performers about people management? Of course. The solution is to turn recruiting into a team sport. Explain to your most promising people managers that the first step toward people management is that you must hire your team. And by involving your best performers in the recruiting process, you are going to give them a tangible step toward attracting, motivating and making their future teams successful.

In the same breath, you will also remove the “bottleneck” dependency on your internal recruiting team. Your 2–3 top performers should be able to help you dramatically increase your candidate pool as they reach out to their various schools, past employers and other networks.

Make sourcing and building the pipeline a competition. Review publically at staff meetings, and celebrate the progress. Done well, this tactic should dramatically increase the pipeline, allowing you the time to make the introductory calls and screen all the candidates until you have a pool of 5 or 6 to consider for more formal interviews. Effectively, you are turning the typical recruiting model upside down.

There is an important caveat to this approach — it has often been said that “A” players hire “A” players while “B” players hire “C” players — in my experience this is mostly true. Recruiting is not the chore that you hand to your most tenured staff in deference to their seniority or ego. Rather, recruiting must be a responsibility you entrust to the people on the team you trust the most — those you would save in your lifeboat if the ship was sinking and to whom you would entrust your own personal financial success. It’s that serious.

T hird, screen for smart and hungry over experience: Experience is overrated. Most hiring managers and professional recruiters screen first for directly relevant experience, as this is the “safest” approach. If the candidate has done the job successfully 2 or 3 times, then they probably can do it pretty well in your environment. If you are selecting a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon, this is exactly the right approach because as the patient, you want a highly technical task done with an exacting level of precision. You want very little variability and very little innovation in your life or death case; save the trial and error for another patient.

But if your aim is to recruit managers and leaders who can innovate in response to a changing technology landscape, motivation is far more important than experience. If your candidate has done the specific job 2 or 3 times in the past and they are highly motivated, they don’t want that job. They want your job.

Conversely, if the candidate is comfortable accepting the job they have done in the past, you have to ask “why?” At the risk of raising a number of HR violations, let me just state that there are legitimate reasons why one’s motivation and hunger may wane — it will happen to each of us as we go through the phases of our career with relationships, family, and aging parents. It’s a fair question to ponder and necessary for you to assess where a candidate stands on the “hungry” scale.

If your goal is to turbocharge your hiring, and shake up your organization, motivation matters. And motivation is not a euphemism for “young.” A senior person who is still actively learning and hungry for a new win can make a huge impact in a new industry. Meg Whitman worked at Hasbro before taking a new direction at the the helm of eBay; Sheryl Sandberg was a senior government official before joining Google.

When you screen for “smart & hungry” you are really asking two fundamental questions:

• Does the candidate have a track record of success where they thrived in abstract situations? Did they cajole more experienced peers to achieve something “new”?
• Will this role make a difference in this person’s trajectory? What development goal or achievement will this role enable the person to realize in 18–24 months that they can’t get otherwise?

The first question is bread and butter of recruiting. “A” students do whatever it takes to get the “A” grades, while “B” students are more content getting an “A” once in awhile — if not too hard — otherwise a “B” is plenty good. In my book, past success and impact is far more important that direct experience.

The second question is at the heart of making good calls on people. A candidate who failed in two recent startups will need a win in a more stable corporate environment. Candidates from a “sunsetting industry” may need their next role in the emerging or adjacent sector to be a victory. In both cases, these candidates will suffer through confusion, poor onboarding, and even a bad manager. They will “figure it out” because they need the win at an emotional level.

Evaluating motivation is highly subjective but taken in the proper context, it leads you to identify and invest in the highest potential candidates who are routinely overlooked by normal recruiting practices. This is why the best opportunities come from the people who know you, the topic of my next blog.

My best hires over 11 years at Yahoo were people who came from outside the online advertising industry. Given the competitive landscape, it was hard for me to recruit candidates from Google, Facebook or Microsoft. If I did meet a candidate from an incumbent, I wondered if they were still highly motivated, and still had the desire to be a top performer. Did they need me?

Conversely, if I recruited candidates from smaller competitors, I wondered why they had not made it into the big, fast growing leaders where careers were being made, before joining the startup. The best candidates who had both “leader” and startup experience preferred talking to their old colleagues for new jobs. Sadly, a recruiting pickle.

Selecting candidates from outside the industry, proved particularly fruitful. In making recruiting a team sport, we screened candidates from well regarded, out of favor (at that time) technology-minded companies like Avaya, IBM, Siebel, eBay, and Charles Schwab. We wanted to find candidates from these companies who had shown a high degree of personal accomplishment and had excelled in complex, abstract environments. And we looked for candidates desperate to change, for their own personal reasons. In short, smart and hungry.

Here too is a caveat — a great candidate may be smart and hungry for the role today, but two years from now they won’t be hungry for the same thing. They will have notched the success and be ready for something new. Your role as leader, if you want to retain the best people, is to know that when you hire “smart and hungry” that you have only 18 months to invent or create a new bigger challenge, or risk losing that employee.

F ourth, sell, sell, sell: You get nothing if the candidate says “No.” Each of the prior 3 principles is meaningless if you don’t close the candidate. And here too, most hiring managers allow themselves to be victimized as they await feedback from senior peers or internal approvals. Top choices languish for 3–4 weeks before they get an offer delivered by a recruiter who won’t actually work with the candidate. Often the end of a long process is more bureaucratic than personal, and that weighs on many candidates.

A long delay is death, and even if you make the offer, the candidate will be worried that any organization that takes weeks to decide must not be very interested. Good candidates won’t wait for your process.

How can you compensate for broken processes and delay? A ton of good will is created if the hiring manager simply made that first call at the start of the process. This pays off in spades when you try to close your candidate.

You also have to manage the internal process. I can’t tell you how many times I showed up at an approver’s desk, saying that a top candidate for our team was stuck. Showing up in person makes a difference.

Next there is outreach while you wait. There is no reason why both you and your staff can’t check in with your top 2 candidates regularly while awaiting approvals. You can let the candidate know that the feedback was positive and that the team thought highly of their skills even as you evaluate other candidates. Saying this is not a promise of employment, but it will let the candidate know that there is a committed group of professionals waiting to embrace a new colleague once they join.

Finally, when you extend the offer, you should make a big show. Offers are like college acceptances; most of us didn’t get that many, so it is cause for celebration. In addition to the hiring manager’s “sell” call, you should have the interviewing team call the candidate and let them know you want them.

And how much does it cost to send a gift basket with company t-shirts, hats, and other swag? This simple gesture makes the act of joining your company feel real. The answer is often less than $150, which is a fraction of the cost spent getting to the offer stage. Close with a celebration that makes the offer feel real and meaningful.

T o summarize, there is no perfect script on how to do hiring because you are ultimately trying to appeal to people and we are all unique. My experience is that the cookie cutter approach does not work well when you are targeting unique. Instead, you must augment the time saving recruiting tools by first realizing that effective recruiting and hiring is key to your success as a leader. If you accept this premise, then recruiting must be personal. You get more impact and it becomes more fun if you make recruiting a team sport. You focus on interesting people who are smart and hungry, bucking the conventional reliance on directly relevant experience first. If you follow these principles, your team will be more diverse, more motivated and more fun. Finally, when you find someone for whom your role means everything, you must sell. You must sell the candidate and you must sell your internal organization so that the process doesn’t fail you. That is how you turbocharge recruiting by making it personal. Simple, not easy.