How to build a recruiting process and consistently hire top talents.
A hiring framework for your startup
From seed stage startups trying to get their first key hires, to venture stage companies looking to aggressively grow their workforce… What does an efficient recruiting process look like? And how can it help you hire and retain top talents?
My hope with this post is that you walk away with a good recruiting framework in mind. So that you can build — and continuously adjust — your very own recruiting process. Each step / section (sourcing, interviewing, closing, etc) would deserve a separate deep-dive. I’ll focus here on the overall process, to keep this post (reasonably) short.
Is your startup attractive?
It mostly boils down to your company mission, its core values, and the people it’s currently made of. On that note, I touch a bit on these subjects here:
A couple questions you need to ask yourself: How is my brand perceived on the market? Is the company mission clearly articulated? What’s the higher purpose every employee in the company is hoping to achieve? What about core values?
Last but not least, is all of this reflected in my recruiting process, and in my employees behavior? People tend to work for people, not for companies. And your company culture is pretty much defined by who you hire (and fire).
You know you’re doing a great job when candidates themselves start referring other people for the position.
Candidates perception of your company will evolve during the recruiting process. And guess what? They’ll talk about it with other potential candidates. They’ll talk about the kind of people that work there, what you’re trying to accomplish, and your way of growing the business.
The best recruiting webpage or sourcing effort could be ruined in a single interview. Strive to provide candidates a good experience, aligned with what you stand for. It will help you along the way. Probably more than you think.
Which roles do you need to hire for?
Just like everything when it comes to execution, focus your recruiting efforts on what your company actually needs.
Recruiting should be an integral part of your company strategy. Prioritize which roles you need to fulfill, at which stage, in order to reach which milestone.
To give you a couple examples:
- As a young startup CEO with budget constraints, you might want to assess if you need another engineer to clear your backlog? Or rather hire an SDR to increase your sales dealflow? Or if you should actually step down and scale through a VP Sales, that will then decide if (s)he needs an SDR?
- As your startup grows, your thinking might then revolve around hiring for an existing role that either changed or grew in scope, and that is no longer a fit for the person occupying it. The CTO might need to scale through a VP-Eng, focusing on tech rather than struggling with teams management?
Just like you have a Product and Engineering roadmap – because you can’t develop and ship everything overnight – plan for the reality that you can’t hire all the people you want overnight. Trying to do so will lead you to miss your goals, and/or hire the wrong people.
Recruiting takes a huge amount of time. Probably way more than you think.
Your best leverage here is to make sure that you use that time appropriately. And once you know precisely which roles you need to fill, write proper job description(s) on it.
Make crystal clear what the role responsibilities are, and what success looks like. Get buy in from relevant people on it, and start executing on filling the position. That means 1) designating who is responsible to fill this job, and 2) working down a structured pipeline, which this article is about.
The recruiting pipeline: a numbers game.
A good recruiting pipeline starts with strong metrics, keeping track of the right KPIs down the funnel.
We’ll go in details through each step, and what you should pay attention to. But the general idea is to continuously monitor how you’re doing at each of these steps, prioritizing efforts and focusing your attention accordingly. Very much like you’d work through your sales pipeline.
Modelize this funnel, using data everywhere you can to continuously improve the process and focus your attention on the right steps.
There’s no other magical bullet to build a great recruiting machine, and grow your company on the long run. To give you a couple examples:
- On sourcing side, you’ll want to compare how your different channels perform, just like you’d compare the CAC and transformation rate of each of your acquisition channels on Sales side.
- The screening step will help you both compare the candidates’ quality per channel, and give you insights on how your job description perform.
- Whereas during the on-site, you’ll likely realize you need to invest in training your employees at interviewing.
Ultimately, it’s your closing rate, average time to hire, and employee churn (regretted attrition) that will drag your attention, ending up as core KPIs for your company.
And just like there should be clear «ownership» on each role you’re trying to fill (e.g. hiring manager) you should define who is responsible for monitoring and improving this recruiting pipeline.
Step 1 : Sourcing
How and where to find candidates? More importantly, what works best for my company and the role I’m currently hiring for? Let’s go quickly through the most common channels:
Inbound
People directly applying from your website’s career page. Volume will grow as your startup gets more exposure. You can certainly increase it through paid acquisition (e.g. LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc) but make sure to measure how much it costs per candidate (including the amount of time you spend filtering each resume) and how they perform down the funnel.
Outbound
Great people are rarely actively looking for a job. And cold emails can actually be a great channel. Be smart in how you collect these emails (e.g. work at a competitor for 2+ years? particular interest in your vertical? etc) and make the email content look like what *YOU* would like to receive.
Invest in software that both automates the sending and measures engagement (e.g. MixMax, Outreach) so you can A/B test different title / copy.
As an example, I think one of the best email title we used at Hickory (credits goes to Jonathan Basker) was literally: “Hi! I want to hire you… Or at least try :)”. The opening rate was something like 5x what we usually observed.
Then it’s all about balancing the amount of time you spend collecting email addresses, with the reply rate you get out of it. Set an objective (e.g. nb of profiles identified per day) a time-slot (e.g. every morning from 8:30 to 9:00) and stick to it.
Referrals
Typically a very strong channel, especially when the referral comes from an employee in a similar position. It’s a common practice to incentivize your employees. In addition to opening their network and scale your sourcing efforts, their words will likely weight more than yours.
Head hunters / Sourcers
They’ll pretty much use a mix of all these channels. Fees are pretty high (typically 20% ~ 30% of the annual salary) so make sure to measure how this channel performs against the other ones.
Compare the performance of each of these channels, then optimize for consistency. Every candidate should go through the exact same process once they’re sourced, regardless of which channel they’re coming from.
Step 2 : Screening
The goal with screening is to save time to everyone, assessing in ~30 minutes if it worth bringing the candidate on-site, for this particular position. It will also help you prepare the interview panel, providing meaningful directions on what each interviewee should focus on.
From the technical phone screen — sharing your screen around a coding exercise — to the casual coffee down the block, treat this meeting as an actual interview. You’re the one responsible for setting structure to the interview. And I encourage you to time it. For example:
- 5 min icebreaking,
- 5 min to confirm role alignment,
- 25 ~ 30 min of actual exercise,
- 5 min to wrap it up.
Bringing someone on-site has a significant cost to the company. The screening step helps you “de-risk” this time investment. Make sure you walk out of this meeting with all the information you need to take a decision.
And as it’s also a first touch point with the candidate, be very clear on what the next steps are, and when (s)he will get an update. Compress delays as much as you can, the experience will only be better.
Step 3 : The “on-site”
The most expensive step of the process. Typically 4 to 6 interviews, back-to-back, 45 minutes each.
Aim to have the candidate meeting everyone in one single day. It really is best for everyone, and will end up saving a lot of useless and stressful back and forth. It’s okay to interrupt the process mid-course if you realize it won’t work (what happened during screening?)
Prepare the interview panel beforehand, selecting who will be interviewing, and sharing relevant details with them: at what time each of them will meet the candidate, the reason you decided to bring her/him on-site, and what you expect them to cover during the interview, so you get a full picture.
Each interview should be structured the same way. Give each interviewer the same amount of time, and ask them to write their feedback as quickly as possible. This feedback should only be shared with you (or the hiring manager) to avoid any bias. There will be plenty of time to debate during the huddle.
Invest time and resources in interview training for your employees.
Provide them examples of good/bad questions, explain them how to conduct the interview, breaking the ice, adapting the questions to the candidate performance, etc. At Twitter, we had every new employees starting by “shadowing” the ones with more experience. The idea was to make them attend a couple interviews, so they can observe in practice how to conduct them.
It’s all about building consistency and making sure the candidate has a great experience, regardless of his/her performance. It’s so important on this market, and will help you tremendously along the way.
Step 4 : Huddling and Closing
Once everyone has provided feedback, setup a “huddle” meeting with the interview panel. That’s the right moment for everyone to share their feedback, and ultimately take a decision. Keep the meeting short and focused: Hire or No-Hire?
Each feedback should come with a grade, including a clear definition of what is required, and what is eliminatory. For example you can use a [1–10] scale, where any single feedback below 5 would be eliminatory. Whatever the “rules” are, make sure they’re meaningful and consistently applied.
This huddle is the last opportunity for everyone to voice their opinion, and the moment you take a decision.
If you decide to pass, make the reason crystal clear and communicate it quickly with the candidate, so they can also move on. Think also to adjust anything in the process that could have avoided this situation.
If you decide to proceed with an offer, you might also want to slot the candidate if you already have clear job ladders in place (e.g. junior, senior, staff, etc). Then immediately focus on closing (e.g. conducting background check in parallel). Timing is key.
At this point, you should have a good sense of what this person is looking for. If you don’t, figure it out. Money? Impact? Fame? Getting challenged? Learning from someone in particular at the company? I will help you both getting started on a healthy basis.
Step 5: Onboarding
This is it. Your candidate accepted the offer and turned into an employee. Congrats! But the first couple weeks are incredibly important, so make sure you also deliver a stellar on-boarding experience.
You’d be surprised what the first couple weeks sometimes feel like to new employees. To start with, is everyone in the company aware that a new employee is coming, who that is, and when (s)he is getting started?
Does the employee have a desk? A computer? All accounts (email, internal software, etc) created and functional? Access to clear documentation? Invitations to all relevant team or company meetings? What about the organization, the role of each team, and the company core values?
Depending on the size of your company, you might want to consider a mentoring program, or team switches, having your new hire spending a couple days with other relevant teams. Have at least each team presenting themselves briefly. It helps so much making everyone feel they’re part of the same company. Especially if you’re growing quickly.
Last but not least, it’s always interesting to ask for feedback. How was the recruiting process? What could be improved? And obviously, quickly involve that fresh new hire on… your recruiting process :)
