I. Finding the Right Fit
One of the startups I worked at was particular about the types of people they brought on into customer-facing roles. Despite being a SaaS vendor, they were focused on bringing in people with management consultant backgrounds to be part of their new business sales teams.
On one hand, I appreciate that the company was able to look beyond pattern matching to find the best people for jobs. I'm generally of the belief that the worst companies only look for people who have done the exact same thing before elsewhere, without consideration for why the person may be looking at all.
Over indexing on industry expertise or honing in too heavily on people from specific peer companies can be a mistake. Anyone good at their job with curiosity can pick up nuances of an industry pretty quickly. It can be easy to get excited because someone uses the same words you use, but it isn't a good proxy for ability to do things with those same words.
In this case though, the company loved management consultants. The client-facing teams were full of them. You know the brands: McKinsey, Deloitte, Boston Consulting Group, Bain and Co., etc. Even the teams that weren't client-facing usually had experience in this space.
Working for a brand like this signaled some level of competence: these companies tend to recruit heavily out of top universities and are good at picking out talented graduates to cultivate them over time. Much like how we would assume people who graduate from Harvard are smart, we would also assume people who work in management consulting at a top firm are also highly capable. It is a simple, easy proxy that reduces risk.
My question was always: what about this background makes the person a good fit for the role?
No one could provide an answer.
That's not to say management consultants weren't a good fit for the role: the team was having success and building momentum, but no one could break down what the key skills and attributes were that made them successful. Beyond recognizing the quality of the brand on their resume, the team couldn't tell me what actually made these people good fits for the role.
If I introduced leadership to candidates from other backgrounds, there was often a sense of skepticism of their talent or ability to function in the environment. Having a background in these firms became our proxy for quality -- if they're good enough for X consultancy, they are good enough for us.
Is this a bad thing?
Not always, but it is limiting.
What I mean by this is that although the team was able to identify what worked at a high level, they couldn't distill this down into more discrete competencies or attributes.
Being a management consultant was the closest proxy they could find to the skills needed to do the job.
As someone who didn't have this background, and had hired people who were successful in peer companies without this background into similar roles, I was skeptical of this need.
During my tenure with this company, I interviewed numerous management consultants. For one, many were not interested in what sounded like a SaaS sales job, and two, we couldn't pay them well enough to make this interesting to them. Most of the consultants we met within our price range had done little in the way of new business sales, but had done more post-sales, client engagement type work. While they'd be great for helping clients transform their business after bringing us on, they weren't going to "carry a bag" and break into new customers for us.
This cohort was also a high demand group: they had talent and connections, and were often able to network their way into strategic roles at notable companies. We were not the only companies they were talking to, which made standing out more difficult.
We spent a lot of time searching and had an unreasonably low success rate as a result. This led to the job staying open much longer than it should have. In a venture backed business, not growing and inching towards profitability meant we were continuing to burn cash -- limiting our runway and closing our window. Others had to fill in the gaps, meaning that other work fell by the wayside, like growing existing accounts or working on company infrastructure needed to support growth in other areas.
II. Let's Break It Down
I share this anecdote because this experience echoes what I hear from others and from my own experience as a job applicant: the median company looks for pattern matching on surface-level factors without digging into why these factors are relevant proxies. This could be working in a specific type of company (e.g. management consulting firm), working at a competitor or within the same industry (e.g. think of a company like Visa only wanting to hire from Mastercard.), or holding the same job title elsewhere.
Are these proxies useful shorthand? They are, but it's also the most obvious comparison point and easy for others with limited insight to understand. There is a comfort in finding someone else who is steeped in the same industry and willing to come over to your company. It can be an ego boost to leaders to see them poach talent from competitors. Maybe it can feel easier to onboard them because they have some familiarity with the type of business and customer problem. But this is also something that everyone does. This makes it hard to stand out, which makes recruiting harder and more expensive when the same few companies all want the same few candidates. When your industry is zigging, there's an opportunity to zag.
What we want to do is understand 1) why we like these proxies and 2) what are the discrete competencies, skills, and experiences that actually make a difference.
From there, we can work backwards from these to design interview processes to evaluate if candidates have the skills we identified and a search plan to find them.
This helps break the noise of industry experience or specific role experience, and instead enables teams to evaluate a wider pool of candidates to assess if they have the capacity to function in your unique organization. This helps you find talent where others aren't looking, which helps makes teams more diverse and increases the likelihood of uncovering new insights or opportunities that other companies are missing.
I'll note that this isn't a "one size fits all" solution. Every company will have nuances that you'll need to sort out. Your goal is to craft the persona of a successful person in this role, or more broadly, at the company.
Certain roles may require specific industry expertise, but I doubt every role needs to come from the same sort of company. The pool will dry up too quickly and you'll leave jobs open for too long.
I look at this in five key steps to define each of the following:
- Values
- Job Scope
- Ideal Candidate Profile
- Search Plan
- Interview Plan
With a strong understanding of who you're looking for, what they need to accomplish, and why they may want to work for you, you can then shift your focus to defining how to find and evaluate their suitability for the company and the role.
With this approach, you don't actually start spending time sourcing candidates until you have alignment on what the hiring team needs and how they will be evaluated. This complete understanding of the search will help recruiters operate more autonomously and earn trust with job seekers, as they'll be much more informed than the median recruiter. The hiring team will be clear on what they're looking for and how they plan to evaluate it.
I cannot stress this enough: getting alignment upfront before you bring any candidates in will help you move faster and avoid frustration. It's easy to jump into a search without doing this level of work. Your teams may be skeptical that they need to do this much prep, but hiring mistakes are costly and so is asking full-time recruiters to search for people who may not even be what they're looking for.
This entire process needs to be measured with feedback shared so we can learn and assess if we got this right, or if we were off and sharpened our opinion through candidate interviews.
It is rare to get this 100% right the first few times you do it, so adjustments should happen. You'll want to make sure there are regular search check-ins to gauge what you're seeing in the market, what you're hearing from interviews, and if this actually matches what you thought you needed for the job. This continuous improvement and feedback loop helps sharpen the company's thinking, getting closer to achieving the goal of making strong hiring decisions.
III. Values
Corporate values often trigger collective sighs and skeptical glances, but when done well, they can shift from empty corporate platitudes into an operating manual for the organization.
Culture might sound like another overused corporate buzzword, but fundamentally, it's the practical manifestation of an organization's core values.
These values serve as an unwritten handbook, defining the boundaries of acceptable behavior and providing a nuanced roadmap for navigating workplace interactions, making decisions, and achieving success within the company.
I really cannot stress enough how much this matters -- being able to function in the company is much more critical than any industry or functional expertise they might have.
Most companies paste their values on their website, typically on an "about us" or a "careers page", but few companies go the extra mile to reinforce these and rally the team around it. Mission, vision, and values are all important parts in understanding what we do, the world we want to create, and what we need to exhibit to get there.
You probably won't need to redefine or revisit your values each time you start a new job search. If you do, that's a problem! Values should be timeless and applied at the organization level, not the team or role level.
Some values may be more important for specific teams and roles, but it should feel cohesive. Different members of Wu-Tang may take the lead on different tracks, but the overall album is a cohesive piece of art. Regardless of whether the song was written by John, Paul, George, or Ringo, it still sounded like The Beatles.
So how do we define values? This happens in two ways: 1) at the outset by leaders who are defining what they think are important and 2) reflecting on what's made them successful after doing the work. Like the feedback mechanism described above, values should continue to be refined and reflect working reality. It's good to start with what do I want in the people I work with? and continuing to adjust in what are emerging as the true values of our company? Time and the trials a company faces will help shape the values of the organization, but it starts with the ideals.
Amazon is famous for its leadership principles, which helped operationalize Jeff Bezos' management philosophy. The principles were designed to serve as a comprehensive guide for decision-making, hiring, and performance evaluation across the organization. By articulating values like "Customer Obsession," "Bias for Action," and "Invent and Simplify," Bezos sought to create a set of guidelines that would help Amazon maintain its entrepreneurial spirit and innovative approach even as the company grew rapidly.
What makes the leadership principles more relevant than most corporate values is that it extended into decision-making and communication, becoming a shared culture internally that enable teams to deliver their best work. Of course, they are used to help inform hiring decisions, too.
So how should we define our values? Let's say you're working at a small company that's been operating for a few years. You're the first hire tasked with helping them scale their operation -- getting them to the next phase in growth. Chances are, to this point, the founders and executives have been able to be close enough to every hiring decision that they've made, as well as most (if not all) business decisions and customer conversations. With a degree of product market fit achieved, the company's seen a windfall in profit. They now want to reinvest some of their new funds into growing the company and investing in new areas.
However, as the company grows, leaders who got the company to this point won't be in the room for every decision: simply too much will be going on at once for any one leader to be effective if they're involved in every decision.
They need to define the values of the organization to help guide the team effectively, even when they are not in the room: this creates a cohesive working culture, a shared decision making framework, and enables leaders to scale their philosophy to all levels of the organization.
To do this, the company needs to define what their values are. What should the values be?
- Clear and easy to understand: It should be simple to communicate what the values are and easy to visualize how this translates in practice to both senior and junior employees.
- Aligned to how the organization actually operates or aspires to operate: they should reflect how the organization wants to get work done
- Actionable and measurable: They should provide concrete guidance that can be translated into specific behaviors, performance metrics, and evaluation criteria, enabling leaders to demonstrate these principles in practice.
- Adaptable and flexible: as the company grows, the work and skills may shift, but the values of the company should continue to guide how people do this. You don't want values that will lose relevancy as the company grows.
- Inspire and motivate: They should get people excited about delivering on the organization's mission. They help people see the big picture.
- Reinforced: To remain relevant, leaders must embody these: not just give lip service, but actually live by them at work: even when it isn't convenient.
As a side note here, it is important to remember that values can have their meaning distorted over time. While not Orwellian, misused values can become a tool for suppressing dialogue and serving the agendas of manipulative employees, ultimately undermining genuine workplace communication.
Andy Jassy notably got flack for telling employees that it was time to "disagree and commit" to five day RTO, which sounds in line with the leadership principle, but also distorts the spirit and intent of it to begin with.
While having strong hiring practices helps mitigate the risk of bringing in bad actors to begin with, it's important to remain vigilant. Values should not be wielded like a cudgel to justify decisions.
With an understanding of why we need to have values and what they need to help us accomplish, let's get into how to define these.
I would recommend meeting with leaders in the company to have sessions to craft these. This shouldn't be a mandate from any one person in the organization: there should be agreement from representatives throughout the organization.
If I was doing this, I'd want founders, senior leaders from different functions, and tenured employees who have been deep in the weeds and grown in the company. If there are any employees who do a lot of hiring, I'd prioritize them for this type of session. Leaders should also find others who they feel embody "what it means to be great in the company". This will be a gut feel, but in a small company, it shouldn't be too hard to find someone that embodies the organization's values: even before they are defined! Like proxies for jobs, it gives us something to break down and discuss.
Once I gathered the right people, I'd ask them to do some prep work to think through the following:
- List 3-7 adjectives that define traits of the best employees and ideal future hires.
- For each adjective, describe what this looks like in practice in a few sentences. For example, if the adjective is "diligent", define what this means in practice. We may have different opinions on what this word actually means.
- For each adjective, add a real example of how someone on the team (not yourself), embodied this adjective, why it was good, and what result they drove.
This should be done as homework for the people who will be involved. For this first round of value creation, I'd keep the room small -- besides a facilitator, I'd probably look to have no more than eight people present. Three to seven adjectives is arbitrary (you can do more or less), but I figure if you make the ask too big you'll make the less willing participants even more skeptical to participate.
In the meeting, set the ground rules for the discussion. Remind them who is facilitating this session and how to ensure an orderly and respectful sharing of ideas. What's good here is that this session should feel positive and inspiring since we're talking about ideal state versus identifying what went wrong in the last sprint. However, in rooms with mixed status, making sure that the loudest leaders don't dominate and that more junior employees can share their POV will be critical to making sure the session is impactful. Your goal is to get multiple perspectives and consolidate these into a first pass at values -- it's hard to do that if people are too scared to participate and share or only one person is active.
To start, you can do this in one of two ways: 1) ask everyone to read copies of what everyone wrote or 2) jump into verbal sharing, having the most junior people start first. Junior employees are less likely to share viewpoints that diverge from leaders, so getting their perspective first ensures they are most honest. This is why we ask for homework here, too. We want honest opinions that haven't been filtered or watered down too heavily.
By asking everyone to read, you can immediately see the trends across what people are saying and their written examples, then discuss what was read and distill into a first draft. Pending how much tolerance the group has for reading and how much time you have, you may just want to jump in and have the discussion.
Using a whiteboard, ask people to list off their adjectives. Give everyone space to share what they wrote -- ideally not "word for word" (copies of what's written should be distributed), but with their own voice and spin. There are things we may not put to the page that we'd articulate verbally, so don't hesitate to encourage people to go off script.
Write down the adjectives and gauge the responses in the room. Are people nodding along? Do they verbally express agreement? Don't focus too much on categorizing the adjectives at this stage, right now you want to ensure everyone feels heard and is engaged with the exercise. Writing the adjectives down on the board will help. After going around the room and getting peoples' perspectives, then you'll want to discuss the trends. We can use a lot of adjectives to describe roughly the same thing, so start to bucket these accordingly. This should be a way to gauge how many distinct values you have and the volume of repeats or similar sounding words should signal that the group agrees these are the things that are most important.
From there, talk through the terms and start to think through more how these show up and are operationalized. This gives you a chance to talk through more about what makes people who exhibit this adjective effective and allows you to get crisper on how to frame this.
For example, above I used the word "diligent", which is a nice thing in almost any environment, but it's also bland and hard to actually know what this means in practice. Let's break down diligence and think through what it looks like in reality -- this is why we ask everyone to write tangible examples and descriptions of what it means to them.
Diligence may manifest itself in different ways, but perhaps it means "Persists despite difficulties", "works to deliver quickly", or "ensures high quality and thoroughness". People who do these things all sound diligent, but what is resonating most here? Breaking these words down into phrases like this helps get everyone on the same page since these words can carry different connotations pending numerous factors. Getting discrete helps ensure clarity and shared understanding, which is the foundation for getting this right.
This may be an all-day exercise. Your objective is to get a first draft of the big themes. Let them marinate a bit and give people time to refine their thinking. Revisit in a few days with the same group and sharpen the language, then start to share with others who couldn't be there to get their opinion. Your corporate values will resonate more if everyone has a say in shaping them, even if it's just taking a pass before their published officially. No one likes to be told what they should value without getting to share feedback. By coming to the broader group with a list prepared, you at least can frame the discussion around these areas that the select group felt was most reflective. These additional rounds of reviews should help continue to validate and sharpen. It will expose any disconnects between the idealism of execs and realities of people on the ground.
Realistically, you probably won't get everyone involved, but you should strive to get a good number of people involved in this process so they feel included and a sense of ownership in the direction of the organization. When values are ultimately revealed, they should feel like a reflection versus a directive, and it should excite and inspire the team.
If the company previously established values, but doesn't actually use them for anything, it'd be good to review these and get a sense from the group if they actually still resonate. I'd likely make this audit part of the homework prior to the meeting and reframe -- instead of asking for 3-7 adjectives, I'd instead ask them to talk through which values resonate most with them, what they mean in practice, and then list out anything they feel is missing. This will help validate if the original values set are still relevant. This will help sharpen the language so that it better reflects the current state of the business. Adding in the opportunity to fill gaps with anything they feel is missing helps inject fresh perspective and items that may have been an oversight the last time this exercise was conducted.
Once values are aligned on, you'll want to design 1) a rubric that shows what embodying these look like in general terms and 2) interview questions that gauge if a person embodies these values. The rubric helps codify what is bad, acceptable, and good (important later when we talk about performance management). Interview questions will be good to craft for the search process, so that everyone is asking relevant questions to evaluate the candidate's likelihood of embodying a particular value. Paired with questions to assess functional competency, you'll be able to get a near complete picture of how the candidate will function at the company and in the role they're interviewing for.
Perhaps I'll write a more detailed guide on how to execute this effectively as a facilitator, but this quick summary should help you get started. I'll also likely write another post that goes into interview question design and planning.
I recognize this section was lengthy, but values are the foundation of the company and will be important later when we start talking about how we assess for these values.
III. Define Job Scope
With values set, let's focus on the job at hand -- what are we hiring for?
Your desired output from defining the job scope will be an internal rubric for what to target: giving everyone a shared understanding of what good looks like in the role, as well as an external facing job description to attract candidates and accurately sell them on the opportunity. While I'm generally of the belief that job descriptions are more of a suggestion than a by-the-letters description of their duties, it should at least set expectations and ideally excite.
Bigger companies may have internal documentation around expectations for people at different levels of seniority to provide a more "objective" gauge of performance across teams. I look at job descriptions as the external facing version of that. Both are descriptive and help the reader evaluate an individual, but job descriptions also need to sell people to want to apply and work for you.
For the purposes of this exercise, let's focus on creating a job description that will be the same for both internal and external use.
I'm not dogmatic about the approach taken for job descriptions. In general, I skew towards simplicity. Keep it short and transparent. Usually, I'd structure a job description like this:
- About the Company: A few sentences that describe the organization, inclusive of mission and values
- Challenge: Drill down into the core problem the person in this role is aiming to solve. Provide a short description of what they will do in the role and how it ties to the above. Highlight the team the person is on and the title of who they're reporting to.
- Description of duties: Bullet points of the types of tasks and deliverables this person will own. It should read a bit like an ideal resume
- Qualifications: This should include the desired background and experience, key soft skills, and hard skills needed to be successful.
- Pay & Benefits: List out the target salary range (no funny business), details on workplace expectations (remote, hybrid, etc.), and any benefits or a linkout to a page dedicated to speaking to the company-wide benefits program.
- Details on Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), highlighting that the details shared will be confidential and that the company doesn't discriminate.
Most of your work will be defining the description of duties and qualifications. The rest dovetails from that.
I'll add a note on qualifications: You should caveat that the list is a suggestion, not a requirement. This will help mitigate the risk of people self-selecting out of the process who may be a good fit.
In addition to the page on benefits, you'll probably want to have a page that shows people what to expect in the interview process so people can prepare. Not a hard requirement, but a good practice to work towards as you formalize this. Everyone complains about companies with bad interview processes. Worse, are those that are unclear. Lay out how the candidate will be evaluated to set expectations and show you're serious about hiring -- and not just winging it.
With that, we can focus on getting to the description of duties and qualifications. Here is a list of questions I'd use to start this conversation with the hiring manager.
Questions on description: * Walk me through at a high level what this person needs to do. * What are some of the big projects they'll take on? * What metrics will the own? Success measures? * How typical is the set of duties in this role? Are there unique points about this job that we want to highlight? * What could this job grow into?
Don't just ask these questions in a row. These should serve as a guide to give you a sense of what's needed at bare minimum. I'd probe into specific areas to challenge the hiring manager's thinking and sharpen my own understanding of the job.
By getting these details and synthesizing them into a document, you can easily get alignment with the team on what the most critical deliverables are that this person will own. It is something that gives the team a shared vision of what the role will accomplish, but will also serve as a mechanism to defend against rushing to hire because headcount was approved. You'll want to ensure there is alignment once there is an agreed upon scope and objective for the person you're going to be bringing on. This exercise helps ensure there's an understanding of what we need people to do before we spend resources hiring them.
IV. Define Ideal Candidate Profile
With the job scope understood, we can now turn to thinking about the right person for the role.
I would likely cover these in the same meeting. The goal is to narrow down the search and ensure we are finding people who have a chance of being a good fit and not wasting the time of people who aren't.
Questions on qualifications: * How senior is this person? What's the minimum years of experience you'd expect for someone who would be a good fit? * What types of industry or functional expertise should this person have? * Are there any education requirements (and equivalents)? * Are there specific types of people who would make a good fit for this? Any specific types of professional backgrounds that would translate well? * Which values does this person need to embody most to be effective in the role? * Budget to hire this person? How much should they be paid? You'll want to do research to validate this, but getting ballpark from the HM (or at least what's been approved) will be good if you don't have this already.
This part should give the recruiting team a running start on where to proactively source candidates from and flesh out the qualifications for the job description. You'll want to gauge which of these are "must have" for the job versus "nice to have" or areas that a candidate could be coached on once they come on board. For example, if I'm hiring an early career account manager, having industry expertise is probably not nearly as important as a desire to learn and grow in their field. But if I am hiring someone to design a highly technical and esoteric system, I probably will need them to have direct experience here. It probably isn't a "nice to have".
You'll want to document all of this internally then publish a candidate-facing version for the qualifications for the job description.
V. Search Plan
With all of this written out and aligned on, you can now shift to coming up with a search plan. This should include how you're going to go about finding this person and what investments you may need to make. This should help the team understand the sources you'll use to find the right candidate.
At minimum, this should include a posting on the company's career page. Pending the role, you should explore other areas as well. Refer to data from your applicant tracking system to see what's worked historically. In absence of this, don't hesitate to get creative. Research relevant meetup groups, job fairs, niche job boards, alumni networks, and so forth. There are a lot of places where you can pay a nominal fee to post a job. If nothing else, it'll be a good experiment.
You'll also want to spend time actively sourcing candidates. I typically do this via LinkedIn, using their recruiter platform to find candidates and send them personalized notes encouraging them to apply. Pending your company, you may need to lean on this time-intensive approach more. When I recruited at a startup, we had little brand notoriety, so top talent wasn't lining up to interview. Reaching out directly was an opportunity for me to introduce them to our company and articulate the role and why they may be a good fit for us.
Active sourcing also helps you find people who aren't on the job market. What starts out as an exploratory call could lead to an offer a few weeks later. I always talk recruitment calls if there's any chance it could be a fit -- you never know where it will take you.
Lay out your search plan and any budgetary considerations. Pending the size of your team, you'll want to include this on whatever sort of tracker you're using to manage the team's capacity and active jobs.
Once you have all of this, you're fully prepped to start searching.
The last piece here will be the interview plan, which I will cover separately (this post is massive enough).