This is the second part of my series on hiring for startups. Last week we covered the first step in the hiring process – how to identify and source the best talent for your organisation. If you have not read that yet, I suggest you check it out first for a clearer context.
Being clear about what you want in the role is the first step in the hiring process – it ensures that you have the clarity you need to hire fast while being confident that you are looking at the right people. However, singling that down to the one right person is a factor of how robust and structured the second step in your process is – evaluation (or the interview process).
The evaluation process will determine the quality of your talent going forward. Any attempt to bypass this by having a strong training program at a later stage would be akin to hiring school kids as bodyguards and then trying to strengthen them up on a strong dose of proteins. It won’t work.
Evaluation
Many companies talk about having the right talent but fail to follow up with the processes that would enable them to achieve it – it’s the most common corporate version of talking a good game. A commitment to talent means that hiring is one of the highest payoff activities you do as a team, while the reality is that in most organisations interviewing is seen as a chore, and they would struggle to objectively define their best interviewers when asked.
The success of your evaluation process is a feature of:
- Priority given to talent acquisition
- Effectiveness of hiring process
- Quality of output generated from the hiring process
As I had touched on briefly in my previous post, there is no shortcut to achieving great talent density. If the leadership team is not obsessive about building the highest density of talent in the organisation, it is hard for that to percolate down to the entire organisation. Making hiring a priority for the organisation only works if it is a priority right at the top. In most organisations, the higher you go, the more detached people get from the hiring process. Ideally, the reverse should be true.
Interviewing should be a privilege, not a chore – only your best people and your best interviewers should be allowed to be the face of your company for external talent. The role of an interviewer should be cherished within the organisation. And like any other role, the performance should be tracked and managed.
There are many ways to do it. Many organisations have bar raisers (Amazon has one, and I was privileged to be one at Uber) who are amongst top performers globally and have an elevated status in the interview process, often interviewing people much senior to even themselves. Google has a trusted interviewer program. Whichever way you do it, the idea is to have your best people conduct interviews and provide them with continuous feedback to get even better at it. The best people don’t often need a lot of incentive to take this seriously. Being recognised for what they do and bringing in better people to work with is motivation enough.
The next thing you want to ensure is to remove hiring responsibility from hiring decisions. You want functional leaders, especially in early-stage companies (where you may not have a fully developed talent acquisition team in place), to drive the hiring process. However, when you rapidly expand your team, you don’t want functional managers to make the final hiring decisions unilaterally.
When you hire highly talented people, you are hiring them to be a part of the organisation for the long run. This is often lost when functional managers are under the gun to add rapidly to the team, leading to standards slipping. Instead, have a healthy mix of peer-based, functional as well as leadership team members in your hiring process (bar raisers are a great way to go, too) and take a collective decision basis the output from the process.
The process itself needs to be well-defined too. As Google research has indicated, the decision accuracy for hiring levels off quickly at 85% after four rounds of interviews. After that, the cost of doing any more interviews outweigh any benefits derived from them.
The challenge that most companies face is to get enough output and buy-in from everyone so that hiring decisions can be made. There are two significant impediments to this.
First, it is important to ensure that you do four different interviews, rather than the same interview four times. Second, every interviewer should know the output expected from them in any particular interview. A format for collating feedback can also help make expectations clear and bring more sanctity to the process. The scoreboard you have created can be the starting point for any format.
In most organisations, there is no link between interviews, no sharing of data and limited pooling of outputs. With limited objective parameters, a lot of the decision making is based on gut. This makes common interview processes as accurate as throwing lots of darts in a dark room, hoping some of them will hit the board.
A robust well-defined interviewing process backed by a clearly defined objective scorecard (as discussed in the last post) makes it easier to reach accurate decisions on hiring. There should be an interview “packet” with all relevant information and output from every interview for each candidate – this will make it less likely for decisions to be gut-based.
While there are as many points of view on how an interview should be run as there are companies hiring, here is a five-stage interview process (influenced by Who) that works for almost all roles (with changes in emphasis depending on what you are looking for):
- Screening test – cognitive/work sample test for entry to mid-level roles (individual contributors)
- Screening Call
- In-depth Interview
- Focused Interview
- Reference checks/screening
Screening Test
For individual contributor roles with hard skill requirements (coding, data science), it may make sense to start the process by checking the skills/cognitive ability of the candidates. Sometimes, this works just as well for other roles and skills – communication, writing, presentation, etc. This serves three large purposes. One, you set a minimum benchmark of skills that you are hiring for. Two, you find which candidates are serious about the role. And three, if you structure it well, you are better able to explain the requirements of the role than a JD ever would.
As Google has found through several experiments, the best predictors of performance are work sample tests, tests of general cognitive ability and structured interviews. We should ideally cover the first two in our screening tests – they cover for the skill set required for the role.
Screening Call
The screening interview is a short call designed to clear out the low hanging fruit from your roster. The idea is to keep this interview short and sweet – at this time, you don’t want to spend too much time on each candidate. Only schedule for half an hour; you can always extend or reconvene if you need more time for any candidate. The time for a more in-depth interview is later.
You should also keep your questions simple and to the point. Fancy questions (how many balls fit in an aeroplane seem to be an old favourite) waste too much time without giving you any more details than what you would have gotten from the screening test. Instead, a standard set of questions honed over a period of time helps you judge all candidates on the same scale. Here are some quick ones that work well:
- What are your career goals? Ideally, a candidate will share career goals that match your company’s needs
- What are you good at professionally? Look for strengths that match your requirements
- What are you not good at or not keen on doing at this stage of your career?
- Who were your last 3-5 bosses, and how would they rate you on a scale of 1-10 for your performance when (not if) we talk to them?
You want to compare the candidate against the scorecard you have made for the role and see if they fit most of the requirements and seems capable of achieving most of the goals set therein. The key is to make sure you are hiring for strengths rather than a lack of weaknesses. By being rigorous in the screening interview, you make sure you spend the most amount of time in subsequent rounds with candidates who are likely to be A-players.
Remember, at each stage, you are also taking notes on the impressions and the further questions to ask if you move forward with the candidate.
In-depth Interview
The screening interviews help you separate the wheat from the chaff – they are not intended to find the best fit for the role. That happens with the in-depth interview.
Here you are trying to find data and patterns of behaviour that help you understand a candidate better. It is a chronological walkthrough of the candidate’s career starting furthest back. You ask five simple questions for each job he has done in the last 10-15 years.
- What were you hired to do? Trying to find his scorecard
- What accomplishments are you most proud of?
- What were some low points during the job?
- Who were the people you worked with?
- Why did you leave that job?
The questions are so simple that the discussion that follows seems more like a conversation than an interview. There are no trick questions – just a very in-depth understanding of the candidates’ careers. The trick is to ensure that you push the candidates to give you detailed answers. Often, people can be reluctant to share low points or share weaknesses that are actually strengths (I worked too hard or pushed others too hard), but you need to push them till they give you at least some pointers in each role. Over the period of the discussion, you will find it easier to align their strengths and weaknesses to the role and scorecard you are hiring for.
For senior candidates, such a detailed conversation can often take more than a couple of hours, but the amount of data you generate will help you make a more accurate hiring decision. You are looking for passion – and people can ramble on for things they are passionate about, which is why a good interview may also last longer.
Given that this is the most critical interview in the process, I suggest that the hiring/reporting manager should take this themselves.
A few tricks can make the in-depth interview even more effective. This is one conversation where you should feel free to interrupt to dive deeper into some aspects of the role relevant to what you are looking for. You are also trying to understand the candidate’s trajectory over a period of time – is it moving up or down, were they pushed out of their jobs or were they pulled into the new ones. Were they the hammer or the nail?
You should also not restrict yourself to the candidate’s past but also assess if they have the learning mindset to continue to grow in the future. The landscape for startups changes so fast that if a person has a lot of experience but no learning ability, they will get left behind quickly. The low points question in the interview should help you solve for this – over a period of time, did they learn from their mistakes and low points?
Focused Interview
The focused interview, which follows the in-depth interview, allows you to dig down on specifics about which you want to find out more. This is not meant to be another in-depth interview – they should ideally not last for more than 45 minutes to an hour. Instead, it is a very pointed discussion focused on open points from previous interviews or any outcomes and competencies still unanswered from the scorecard.
This is also an opportunity for peers (there can be more than one interviewer for all the interviews) to spend some time with the candidate and for you to get another point of view on the candidate.
However, refrain from making the interview process a democratic one. Each person brings additional data to the process, but you still hire using the scorecard and not gut (though gut can sometimes tell you who NOT to hire).
The focused interviews (especially when done by peers, bar raisers and even would-be reports) can also serve to double-check on the cultural fit – to ensure that the candidates fit not only the competencies and outcomes of the job but would also be able to embrace the larger values of the company.
Reference checks/screening
There is often a temptation to skip the reference process entirely, especially when you meet a strong candidate. I would strongly recommend against it. I have personally seen multiple leadership hiring mistakes that could have been avoided by following a strong referencing process. And while numerous agencies can now help you run background checks and references for new hires, I would also strongly recommend that the hiring managers do these calls themselves.
There are three things you need for successful reference interviews:
- Pick the right references. Review your notes from the interviews and pick the people you would like to speak with. Don’t just use the references the candidate gives you.
- Ask the candidate to contact the references and to set up the calls.
- Pick a set of 3-7 people – a mix of bosses, peers and subordinates to get a 360-degree view.
A set of 5 simple questions that follows the same pattern as other interviews is usually enough to generate the data that you need:
- In what context did you work with the person
- What were the person’s biggest strength
- What were the person’s biggest areas of improvement back then
- How would you rate their overall performance in that job on a 1-10 scale? What about their performance causes you to give that rating?
- The person mentioned that he/she struggled with _____________ in that job. Can you tell me more about that?
In most cases, you will find that past performance is a pretty good indicator of future performance. However, the one thing you would have to look out for is that people don’t usually like to give negative references. You have to learn to read between the lines. The absence of enthusiasm is a terrible sign. Remember, a 6 is really a 2. In the end, you are really looking for people who consistently get ratings of 8, 9, and 10 across your reference calls.
Wrapping up the hiring decision
The team has met the candidate and has generated enough data about him. You have run your reference checks as well. By now you have a pretty good idea of how well each candidate’s skill (what they can do) and will (what they want to do) profile match your scorecard. You are looking for a candidate who has a 90%+ fit for both the skill and the will on the competencies and outcomes you have captured in your scorecard. Hopefully, one or more of your candidates matched this criterion. If not, you need to restart the process.
But this is NOT the end of your hiring process. Let me ask you a riddle: five frogs are sitting on a log, and one of them decides to jump into the water. How many frogs are on the log now? The answer is five. Deciding to do something is not the same as doing it, as many hiring managers have found out. Now is the final step: getting the person to join your team, minimising the chance of drop-offs and onboarding them successfully.
Hope you liked the article. Look out for the final part of the series over the next couple of weeks.
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