Making recruitment better
Our recruitment process aims to whittle down the candidate pool to a small group of people who are:
Highly skilled;
Interested in the role; and
A good culture fit for the company.
Our process minimises unconscious bias in decision-making, with steps that are measurable, comparable and provide rich and detailed information about each candidate. This helps both you and the candidate make a well-informed decision about whether they are right for the role.
There are three stages to this process:
Design: Work out what you need the new person to do, and why.
Attraction: Get great people to apply, who are genuinely interested in working for you.
Selection: Filter and sort candidates to find the best fit.
Agreement: Get your preferred candidate to agree to come and work for you.
Each of these stages consist of a number of smaller steps, each designed to help you select the best person for the job, and for those who aren't a good fit to self-select out of the process.
Stage 1: Design
First, you need to design the role so that you know what type of person you're looking for, and why you need them. We can break this down into a few steps:
Decide if you actually need to hire someone. This means checking that the tasks you need them to do can't be automated, or completed my someone already on your team.
Assemble your hiring team. This will usually include the hiring manager (with skills in the same domain; ideally the person the new role will report to); someone whose role is to test the culture fit of this person; and someone who is responsible for managing the administrative process.
Make a list of skills. Remember: you’re not hiring someone simply to execute tasks - you need them to have specific skills. Break out each task you need done into the skills that someone needs to achieve them. This makes it easier to tell from a candidate’s responses whether they're likely to be able to do the job.
Stage 2: Attraction
Once you've designed the role, you need to find the best people for the job. This means people who have the skills to do the job, but also a genuine interest in working for your company, and the right personality to fit with your culture. Achieving this comes down to two critical steps:
Write a good job ad. Accurately describe the role, the company culture and the person you are seeking. This helps candidates make better choices about whether to apply. A good job description includes:
The skills you are seeking in the new hire (not a number of years of experience).
The personality of your company culture.
The personality traits of your new hire.
A salary range.
After you've written the job ad, the next step is:
Put it where the candidates can find it. We’re going to be using the recruitment software Greenhouse, which means you all you need to do is organise everything you need to upload, then push it live and advertise the role.
Stage 3: Selection
This is the time-consuming part. We aim for a balance of high-value and high-efficiency methods, to make sure that when we are sinking time into interviewing candidates (a high-value method), we already have enough data to be sure that they're likely to be a good fit (because we've also used high-efficiency methods). In order to achieve this balance, we need to keep a few things in mind:
Know what you’re looking for before you begin. We are all prone to bias and poor decision making, but defining what you are looking for before you review candidates can help you to resist bias, and look for skills instead.
Focus on skills, not experience. Skills are a better predictor of job performance than experience is. Not all experiences are created equal - some are rich and valuable, others are relatively pointless.
Use a range of good selection methods. Using more methods will increase the likelihood of predicting job performance accurately.
Don’t use low-value selection methods. Every method you use costs you. Increase efficiency by eliminating selection methods that don’t help you predict job performance. The biggest culprit here is the unstructured interview - get rid of it.
Focus high-efficiency methods early in the process. Early in the process you will have many candidates, which means many repetitions on any methods you use. By using your most efficient methods early, you can reduce your candidate pool quickly and easily to a manageable size. High-efficiency methods include:
Writing a good job ad (see above).
Reviewing resumes by looking for skills (not experience), in order to efficiently create a shortlist.
Using psychometric testing to efficiently reduce your shortlist before your initial interviews.
Use a phone or video interview early in the process to allow candidates to get to know you, find out more about the role & company and to help them stick with you through the rest of the process.
Use high-value methods that are also valuable for candidates. Most high-value methods ask for a lot of time from your candidates. When you use selection methods that give both you and the candidates lots of useful information, you increase the chances of a successful agreement in the end. Some examples of high-value methods include:
Work simulations or work samples. These are are some of the highest value methods because they have a strong prediction capability . If designed to accurately represent the role, and to include interactions with other team members, work simulations also give candidates invaluable information about what the job will really be like.
A structured long form interview to check and verify what you have discovered through the rest of the process, and to increase the chances that your preferred candidate will happily accept the role when offered.
Check many times in different ways. Every part of the recruitment process is flawed, even the best ones. Reduce your risk of an error by making sure that you check your findings along the way. You can do this by:
Using interviews to ask candidates questions about the other parts of the process, in order to double check your findings.
Using a structured reference check to see if your perceptions of the candidate match the experiences of someone who’s known them longer and worked with them before.
Stage 4: Agreement
If the rest of your process is done well, this part should be easy. By conducting a thorough, fair and information- rich selection process, both you and the candidate should be close to an agreement already. Here are a few principles to follow:
Start how you mean to continue. Your recruitment process and salary negotiation are the earliest experiences the candidate will have with your company. How you behave now will inform how they will expect you to behave in the future. Make sure your negotiation practices are aligned with how you will conduct yourself in a salary review in the future (and with how you want them to think about your future interactions).
Get to a final salary figure. If you’ve published a salary range on your advertisement, and used your interview process to check the candidate’s expectations, then you should already know what they want, and whether you’re happy to meet their expectations. Wherever possible, you should offer the candidate a salary that meets or exceeds their expectations.
Move quickly: Once you’ve made an offer, and got an agreement with your new hire, move quickly to get them the paperwork and seal the deal. You’ve hopefully built up a large amount of goodwill through your process so far, so don’t be inconsiderate and waste that goodwill on paperwork delays.