Recruitment should be led by numbers.

Recruiting will be much easier if you use a clear process backed by numbers and scoring.

We all agree to say recruitment is key in every company. You need to find someone who matches your job description but also your company values, the famous “cultural fit”. In many cases, people think a good personal fit or “feeling” during an interview means this person is the right hire.

A personal fit with a candidate is not enough to recruit. Each skill required for a candidate has to be assessed, even those related to your company culture.

An effective recruitment is made by an effective process

There is no magic in recruitment. To make sure you find the right person, you have to create the right process to assess him/her. The goal here is to evaluate whether the person is matching with the business need you want to fulfil.

First, define your business and recruitment need. Thomas Nivol (ex recruitment director at Algolia) has written a great article about how to define it.

Once you agree on that, make a list of all the skills required to be successful for this position. Be careful, be consistent! Don’t make a list of characteristics that don’t exist (example: a developer who is shipping features quickly and creating a strong scaling architecture at the same time). The candidate has to match with your values too, don’t forget them in the list!

Here is where we start! Organise your interview to assess the skills you are probing. Find questions, cases, exercises that will help you assess those skills. Be sure the strong requirements are evaluated early in the process (for example: english level) to save time.

Scoring the candidate will help you make fewer mistakes.

Implementing a scoring system will help you assess your candidate’s skills uniformly. For each skill and value you want to evaluate, ask a specific question and give a score to each answer using a scale that goes from 1 to 4. This will help you to take a side and avoid the “I don’t know”.

Lever, the ATS we are using, proposed: 1: strong no hire, 2: no hire, 3: hire, 4: strong hire.

Also, it will help you focus on skills that matter. Using scores will help to quantify the candidate’s capability and keep away from “personal” thinking, or feeling.

At the end of an interview or a recruitment process, it will be easy to know if a candidate should go to the next step or has to be recruited. It would become a question of candidate’s score! Create a rule you will follow! For example: the candidate’s average score has to be around 3.5 and 4. Or: when someone has a 1 or 2, we are not pursuing with him/her.

Using your personal feeling to select candidates can get you in trouble.

Trusting your personal feeling could be a mistake! It may guide you to wrong criteria (example: your perception of “sympathy”) that won’t necessarily help you scale your business.

Also, a great process without personal feeling will keep you away from discriminatory criteria. Indeed, you’ll concentrate only on the skills rather than personal characteristics. Furthermore, this could help you to diversify the team!

This obviously doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be nice and smiley. A great attitude during a recruitment process could make a difference.