Find, Hire, Keep – Part 2: Designing a Hiring Process that Works for You
When most people think about talent, they think about acquisition – how do you find and hire the right people? Bringing the right people on board is important, but it’s not the only factor to consider when building and nurturing a team.
This is the second installment in a three-part series in which talent management experts Kelie Morgan (Permanent Equity) and Ashley Day (FFL Partners) share experience and insights on how smaller companies can improve their hiring process, employee retention, and what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for operators trying to build great teams.
Kelie is the Director of Talent Acquisition at Permanent Equity, where she leads talent acquisition, building relationships, researching compensation structures and roles, and evaluating candidates for roles at portfolio companies and the firm. She also heads The Orbit, Permanent Equity’s talent acquisition network.
Ashley is an Operating Partner at FFL Partners in San Francisco. She works closely with FFL’s portfolio companies, advising them on all aspects of talent management, recruiting, compensation, succession planning, retention, team building, and performance management.
Designing a Hiring Process That Works for You
Most smaller businesses don’t necessarily have a dedicated HR Department, let alone a Recruitment/Talent Acquisition Department. But you don’t need to have a crew of experts or expensive technology in place to level up your interviewing and hiring processes or your employee retention rates. So how do you put together a hiring process to set your company and your employees up for success?
Kelie: One of the things that I've found that's successful is really being clear on KPIs during the hiring process. As you're bringing people on, you're letting them know, “This is what we expect to see from you. This is what we're looking for. This is what a good job means or looks like.”
And then once you have that clearly defined, it's really easy to see who fits in and who's falling below those standards. If you don't have things that you're measuring, then you're measuring nothing.
Ashley: Talent intelligence, data analytics, all of those things sound really intimidating, like really big concepts that people can't tackle. But at the core of it, data is just information.
One of the things I like to ask our leaders is, “Have you tried to apply for a job at your company? Do you know what that experience feels like? Do you know where it breaks down? Where is it challenging? What does the experience of the candidate feel like in terms of who gets back to them when? How long does it take someone to move through a hiring process? From the point that they engage to the point where you make an offer, how long is that taking?”
It is still a hot talent market, so people still have options – and I don't know that you can bank on that changing anytime soon. A hiring process in the four week range is…a sweet spot.
Kelie: And it can be a little painful to try to press that pace. One of the things that I've found helpful is thinking carefully about who’s going to be doing the interviewing at each stage. And then once you've identified those people, giving them a heads up: “I’m going to need eight hours of your time to hold these interviews on these dates.”
Outlining the process, giving people clear expectations as to when the biggest load of work is going to be required from them. Making sure that there's nothing that’s going to hold that process up.
One time we were hiring for a controller, which is a hard position to hire for. The week of the final round interviews, our CEO was at a conference and out all that week… We had four finalist candidates. By the time he had come back from his conference, two had accepted other positions.
Once you’ve figured out your hiring process, including touchpoints and timeline, you want to make sure that your interviews are identifying candidates that are the right fit for the situation. That means going beyond running through resumes to identifying what really matters to you and your company for a particular role. One tool to help you structure and personalize your interviews – to get deeper, faster – is personality assessments (as long as you’re using them thoughtfully). The key is to understand the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, the hard skills, the soft skills, etc. for a role, and then to develop processes by which feedback is being shared throughout the hiring team.
Kelie: I've seen a lot of success introducing different assessments. In the last hire we did, we had people take the DiSC assessment. It wasn't to screen at any point in the hiring process, but to understand how they work best and inform some of our questions in that final round of interviews. As we think through the team they would be working with [assessments like this] help us understand how they would work with the team and what questions to really dig into in that final round interview.
And then it helps with the onboarding process as well. It lets you get laser-focused on relevant questions and understand what drives and motivates the people you’re interviewing.
Ashley: I always caution people to be pretty careful in how they're using these measures… [They can provide] directional data that is helpful in determining questions for further inquiry.
So I would look at someone's personality questionnaire and I would say, “Okay, I'm getting some theories about who they might be under stress or how they might react and behave at work. And so I'm going to use that information to ask some very specific questions to learn more about the person.”
So, what are the hard skills? What are the soft skills? And what is the fit to situation?
If you can think through [these questions] before you start interviewing (what are the things that we're looking for in each of those three categories as it relates to this role?), you can then start doing things like creating interview guides with questions you can ask to get at whatever specific soft skills are important for this role.
Then, how are you communicating that feedback from your conversation to the next person in the interview queue? Even if you can get a little bit of process around what was discussed, what were the strengths that you saw, what were the weaknesses, and what wasn’t covered or what areas should we spend more time with this candidate on, you’re… giving some kind of coherent cadence from each interviewer.