5 Step Hiring Process
Hiring is a risky
game. You can increase your odd, but
there is never a recipe of success.
Here’re the 5-step hiring process that will help you figure
out the right match.
Step 1: Know What You
Want
This is the single most important step in the process and
the one that gets skipped most often. As
Ben Horowitz says, “You must realize how ignorant you are and resist the
temptation to educate yourself simply by interviewing candidates.” Three things will happen if you do not make
the conscious effort to go through your thought process and identify exactly what
you want before the interview.
Mistake 1: Hiring based on look and feel – When you don’t know what
exactly you want before the interview, you will be very tempted to make
decisions led by your feelings, and this is dangerous. It is hard to admit, but when you combine a
hiring manager who doesn’t know what she wants and an interview team that hasn’t
thought much (or even care much) about your hire, what do you think the criteria
will be?
Mistake 2: Hiring for a generic position. There is no such thing as a great program
manager. There is only a great program
manager for your group and for this position for the next 12 to 24 months. You need to clearly define the position in
the first place. If you don’t know what
you want, you will unlikely to get it. Far
too often, we hire an employee based on an abstract notion of what we think or
feel the position should be like.
Mistake 3: Hiring for lack of weakness rather than for strengths. This is especially common when you run a
consensus-based hiring process. The
group will often find the candidate’s weaknesses, but they won’t place a high
enough value on the areas where you value the most to fit your need. As a result, you hire a person who is
mediocre with no sharp weaknesses and nowhere you can get her to be great asset
for the team. If you don’t have
world-class strengths where you need them, you won’t be a world-class leader.
The very best way to know who you want is that you have act
in the role, understand that what it takes to be successful in the role. If you don’t have the domain knowledge and
have never act in the role, it’s the best for you to act in that role for a
while and learn from it. Or you should
bring in domain experts. You should
interview them first and learn what they think made them great. Figure out which of those strengths most
directly match the needs of your team.
If possible, include the domain expert in the interview process. But always keep in mind that the domain
experts have little knowledge of what you need, therefore, you cannot defer the
decision to the domain expert.
The outputs of Step 1 are the following document:
1.
Written
document of hiring criteria – the strengths you want and the weaknesses that
you are willing to tolerate. You
must write all down as the most important references throughout the interview
process as the guiding principle.
Example:
§
Operation excellence
§
Ability to influence
§
Building Partnership
2.
Written
document of interview questions that test for the criteria (see appendix)
This effort is important even if you never ask the candidate any of the
pre-prepared questions. The process of
forcing yourself writing down the interview questions that test for what you
want is mainly for the benefit of you to gain the level of specificity that
will be extremely difficult to achieve otherwise. As Joan Didion says, “I don't know what I think until I write it down.”
Step 2: Assemble the Interview Team
In
assembling the team, you should keep two questions in mind:
Group 1: The expert group –
They will best help you figure out whether the candidate meets the
criteria? They can be internal or
external people, and they need to be experts.
Group 2: The working group – They will best help you figure out whether the
candidate can easily integrate to the new environment. They are the folks that the candidate will be
collaborating the most in his new capacity.
Both groups are important, and some people may in both groups. It’s the best to have the group two interview
finalist candidates only. Next, you
assign questions to interviewers based on their talent. Specifically, make sure the interviewer who
asks the questions deeply understand what a good answer will sound like.
Step 3: Conduct the
Interview
This step is hard.
Let’s be honest, accessing the actual performance appraisal of an
individual is already a difficult task.
It is nearly impossible for you to sit someone down and try to find out
in an hour or so how well he’s likely to perform in an entirely new
environment. Sometime our interview time
would be shortened to just 30 minutes, in which I doubt what real evaluation
can come out of it.
The rule of three will tremendously increase your odds of success:
1.
The
interview is yours to control, and if you don’t, you have only yourself to
blame. The applicants should do 80% of
the talking. And what he talks about
should be your concerns. You should have a great control by (1) being
an active listener and interrupt and stop him if he derails or go on and
on. Don’t be the Mr. Nice, time is the
only asset, in which you must get as much information and insight as possible. When he off the track, get him back quickly
by saying I would like to change the subject from A to B. Apologize if you need to.
2.
The
interview topics is all about what your subject matter of expertise. An interview produces the most insight if
you steer the discussion towards the subjects familiar to both you and the
candidate. The interview topics should
be familiar to you, so that you can evaluate its significance. If you both don’t have common ground, take a
scenario that you are familiar with and walk the candidate through it. Early in my management career, I needed to
hire someone to build the business intelligence framework for our
organization. I did not know much of
business intelligence, and she did not know much of my business. I walked her through a problem that I was
facing and asked her for solutions. She
spent the rest of the interview time asking me questions and then, step by
step, she provided me with her proposed solutions. She demonstrated her ability to understand a
complex situation and provided her thoughts.
I hired her, and she turned out to be a true value-add to the team.
3.
The
interview should be completely straightforward.
You must be completely transparent to all your future hires as this
is the very first interaction you have with them where you show your team culture
and personality trait.
Step 4: References
and Referrals
For the final candidates, it’s critically important that the
hiring manager conduct the reference checks herself. The references need to be checked against the
same hiring criteria. Backdoor reference
checks (checks from people who know the candidate but were not referred by the
candidate) can be extremely useful way to get an unbiased view.
On the other hand, I hugely discounted front door reference
in the past as I found few references will lie, but few tend to volunteer
specific critical remarks. But once I know
exactly what world-class strengths I am looking for; front door reference is
quite helpful in the regard.
Referral can increase
your success rate tremendously if the referee himself has high credibility and knows
both you and the candidate’s need.
But no guarantee again. I failed
multiple times. One time, I hired
someone was referred by one of my top performers to work for me. And another time I hired someone who was
referred by one of my most trust-worthy peers.
Well, both turned out to be a total disaster soon after they joined my
team.
Step 5: Make a lonely
decision
Many people are involved in the process, the ultimate decision
should be made solo. Only you, the
hiring manager has the comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale
of the criteria, all the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative
importance and credibility of the various stakeholders. Consensus decisions almost always sway the
process away from hiring for the strength and toward hiring for lack of
weakness. It’s a lonely job, but you must
do it.
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