The Secret to Hiring Success
I’m going to teach you a secret to hiring that I’ve iterated on, tested, and deeply measured for over a decade where my definitive conclusion is that it’s the single most effective way to dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to fill a new vacancy. It’s a universally applicable approach that doesn’t require any special conditions or even any expertise. I’ve been fortunate enough to try all the bleeding edge solutions, work with countless agencies and headhunters, and even got to test closed beta AI tools that claim to completely eradicate the need for recruiters. Nothing comes close to the level of impact that this approach has. Ok, enough of the clickbait. What is it?
Considered preparation.
Let’s assume you want to hire a software engineer and you need to hire that person ASAP. Your CTO or Engineering Lead has already drafted a list of requirements so you publicise your vacancy as soon as possible in order to get the pipeline of candidates flowing immediately. You’re not sure what salary to pay yet so to cast the net wide, you advertise the salary as “competitive”.
You stick the job ad on your careers page and on your company LinkedIn and now you get back to doing real work while you wait for incredibly talented engineers to fall over themselves in a mad scramble to work for your unique and wonderful company. You wait and wait, but the candidates just aren't coming in as quickly as you had hoped. You start to worry that you might not be able to fill the position in time, and the stress begins to mount. A week has passed, you have a whopping four applicants. One requires a visa that you can’t provide, one has completely irrelevant experience, one is way too experienced (read: expensive), and the fourth candidate is underwhelming but out of desperation you decide to ask them to interview for the role only for the candidate to ghost you because you waited too long to respond to their application and they’ve already accepted an offer elsewhere.
This is typically the inflection point where companies consider using external recruitment agencies that have a magic pipeline of immediately available candidates so large that you will be spoilt for choice. After all, that’s why agencies are so expensive right? RIGHT? More on that in my next post…
Before you post a new vacancy, the value and impact of the role you create needs to be challenged from all angles.
Why do we need to hire this role?
Who or what breaks if we don’t hire this role?
Who will they spend most of their time working with?
Who will be most impacted by the work that they do?
Who is responsible for hiring, onboarding, and managing this person?
What does a typical day look like for this person?
What does success in this role look like after six months, a year, three years, etc.?
What’s the absolute minimum level of experience we need for this role to be successful?
What’s the ideal level of experience we need for this role to be successful?
What salary are similar roles being advertised at?
What budget do we have for this role?
If you use this list as a starting point, you will have the perfect foundation for an impactful job spec, a shortlist of necessary and relevant people who should be involved in interviewing candidates, and an outline of the key focus areas needed for those interviews.
Share your clearly defined job spec with everyone in the company immediately. Ask them to dig through their networks and provide them with an easy way to share candidates they believe could be a great match. If you don’t have a fancy applicant tracking system with an in-built referral function, create a simple spreadsheet and provide access to everyone in the company. Incentivise them with more than just your thanks. Give them a compelling reason to spend some time helping to build a list of people!
At Permutive, I led a small team consisting of some of the strongest recruiters and co-ordinators I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. One of the most important measures of success in our team was ‘time to hire’. Our time to hire metric was the total number of days from the point where a job vacancy went live on our careers page to the point where the vacancy had been filled. Our goal was to ensure that every vacancy we created had a time to hire of under 30 days. When I first joined the company the average was over 60 days. We shifted our emphasis to preparation for a new vacancy over any other part of the process and reduced the average time to hire to close to 20 days at our peak.
All of this effort can be done in less than a day. That one day of effort will potentially save you a lot of money but more importantly, it can save you weeks of your valuable time.
The second most effective way to dramatically improve hiring and retention in your company is to hire me for anything from 6 weeks to 6 months to develop a People & Talent strategy, build a foundation to support your growth, establish your employer brand, and help you acquire critical talent along the way.