Part 3: Drafting a Rock-Solid Score Card
Nope. Period.
In our experience, startups that are the most successful with their recruitments tend to apply a “developer / product” discipline on their hiring process.
Introducing the Score Card.
A Score Card is for recruiters what a feature specification is for developers. A necessary investment to maximize medium-term return on allocated resources.
It contributes to making the recruitment unbiased and dispassionate. It brings 3 main benefits:
- reducing potential misunderstanding with potential candidates about the role and the level of expectations;
- delegating interview to team members once we are all clear about what we look for;
- easing the feedback & debrief process with the team members (Steering Committee, VCs …) involved in the recruitment process.
Of course the Score Card can slightly evolved as you meet the first candidates.
At Kerala we suggest to follow these 2 steps to make a Score Card:
1/ Choose the criteria.
2/ Write down the questions to assess them and set what would be the answers of a candidate that would meet or exceed expectations.
1/ Choose the criteria.
Ask yourself: 18 months from now, what would it be like for the candidate to be successful within your organization?
And choose 4–5 criteria that will best illustrate what a success for the role looks like. You are supposed to say for each of these criteria:
“18 months from now, I’d be 100% happy with this person if…”
Putting this into perspective, I’ve taken an example of possible criteria for a Head of Sales. The criteria could be:
- Sales skills. “18 months from now, I’d be 100% happy with this person if our MRR has grown from €9K to €80K.”
- Management skills. “18 months from now, I’d be 100% happy with this person if she/he hired 2 Sales Development Representatives and 5 Account Executives who are happy at work (no turnover) and performing well (each AE bringing at least €1K of new MRR per month).”
- Process / Tools. “18 months from now, I’d be 100% happy with this person if a CRM is implemented and fully used by the whole Sales team, the sales knowledge (pitch, handling of objections …) is well structured and updated in a cloud-based tool so newly recruited Salespeople fully ramp up in 2 months.”
- Doer / Hands-on approach. “18 months from now, I’d be 100% happy with this person if she/he has been able to carry her/his own Sales quotas for the 12 first months. Her/his time spent on Sales will decrease from 100% to 10%.”
- Cultural fit. “18 month from now, I’d be 100% happy with this person if she/he matches our values: X, X, X and X.”
2/ Write down the questions to assess them and set what would be the answers of a candidate that would meet or exceed expectations
For each criterion, write down a few questions that will be asked to the candidate to evaluate his/her profile and think of what would be the answer of the ideal candidate.
By doing so, you will:
- scale your recruitment process as you now have a plug-and-play guide several employees can use to interview candidates
- bring consistency in the assessment of all the candidates for a given job
