Let's Build A Hiring Team
In this post, I'm going to talk about the hiring team. This is the group that makes up a hiring process, each with their own role to play in ensuring the team brings on strong employees. This post is going to focus on the components of the team. I'll likely talk more later about how to ensure each of the folks involved do their jobs well, but for now, let's introduce the actors on stage and the phases of hiring.
I break out hiring into three phases: pre-hiring, interviewing, post-hiring. This is simplistic, but should illustrate the "before, during, and after" of a search at the level the majority of people will interface with. There are, of course, more steps and we could break this out more granularly, but for the purposes of this post, let's go with three three to start.
Pre-hiring: This is before a search is kicked off. This is the time to plan and determine who you are searching for, the target salary, requirements, how they will be evaluated, decision criteria, and the process for getting there. This is important planning before you start seriously engaging with candidates. This phase closes when the team has the job role, interview panel, and target candidate profile sorted.
Interviewing: This is the process of engaging and interviewing candidates. Engaging candidates is often referred to in the industry as "sourcing". Sourcing typically refers to actively engaging and finding passive job seekers on the market through channels like LinkedIn, but this can also be through more "passive" channels like a job posting. Once the candidate is found and they seem like a potential fit, they go through the interview process. The phase ends with a decision to hire or reject the candidate.
Post-hiring: This is after the candidate is formally offered the role and accepts. This leads into the onboarding period. For recruiting, this is the time to reflect and adjust based on learnings from the process.
Every company will manage this process differently, and pending the power structures of your organization, the owners of decisions and drivers of the process will vary. What I present here is what I see as an ideal state, assuming everyone is a reasonable person and the company has made hiring a strategic priority. Obviously this doesn't always happen and companies are dysfunctional, especially when they aren't incentivized to do this well or don't need to do this often.
If this isn't your company today and you feel like your company isn't doing this well, I hope the below serves as a blueprint so you can drive change. This is hard, but knowing "What good looks like" gives you something to strive towards and drive change.
Candidate
The candidate is the person being considered for the job. They're the reason companies have recruiting teams and hiring managers.
I know this article (and most of my written work), will focus on things from the lens of the company, but it does take two to tango. Candidates hold a significant amount of power in this process, as they ultimately need to agree to the offer made by the company.
The process the roles below play a part in facilitating are all to evaluate the candidate's suitability for the role in question and sell them on the opportunity.
I dislike the narrative I've seen in some places around "candidates as the customer" of a recruiting team, because companies don't need to scale the number of candidates they hire in the same way a company needs to scale the number of people it sells to.
Recruiting is more like being in buying or procurement, where you're looking for the right partnership to meet a need. Candidates, too, are looking for the right deal that suits their career goals and meets financial needs. Pending the broader needs of the company (such as how fast they're looking to grow), recruiters may need more candidates, similar to how manufacturers may need more suppliers to keep up with demand.
I think of Candidates as an investment versus a cost (even though it may appear that way on a spreadsheet). The interview process is the due diligence to ensure the company makes the right investment: good people with direction and alignment to a common goal can accomplish a lot.
Recruiter
On the company side, we have the recruiter. Sometimes you may see these roles with titles such as "talent acquisition", or "TA". For the purposes of consistently, I'm mostly going to use recruiter and recruiting. There are additional roles within the recruiting department (such as sourcers and coordinators), but in smaller environments, a recruiter will typically own the "full cycle", or every step of the recruiting process.
The recruiter is the main point of contact for the candidate throughout the hiring process. The recruiter designs and owns the hiring process in partnership with the rest of the team. Let's break down their role across three phases of hiring:
Pre-Hiring: Scope out priority experience and attributes with hiring manager. Dig into requirements to understand what the hiring manager is looking for. Recommend interview process design based on requirements. Good recruiters can challenge hiring managers to think more critically about what they need and which types of skillsets are transferrable versus looking at simple pattern matching on resumes.
Interviewing: Once prep is complete, the recruiter leads efforts to actively source candidates and review resumes. Recruiters guide candidates through interview process and serve as their main point of contact throughout the process. They prepare candidates for each step of the process. Recruiters prepare interviewers to conduct their interview. After the interview is complete, the recruiter organizes the debrief so that a hiring decision can be made. The recruiter lets the candidate know the result. In the event of a hire, the recruiter negotiates pay.
Post-Hire: If the candidate is hired, the recruiter walks them through the next steps for onboarding and what to expect. This typically involves a handoff to HR to get them onboarded and ready to start. If the candidate is rejected, the recruiter loops back to the top of the search assuming there are no learnings from the interview that require a change to the initially scoped job description.
In summary, recruiters generate demand for job roles and identify relevant candidates to bring through the process. They're the market and candidate experts who help hiring managers find the right people and evaluate their fit for the role.
Hiring manager
The hiring manager is the primary decision maker in the process. They partner with recruiting to define role requirements. While recruiters should be equipped with expertise in the market for the role, pay, and interview process, the hiring manager should know their needs, the attributes and skills needed for the open job. They should be responsible for crafting the set of criteria to evaluate and nominate the interviewers to help nominate them. They partner with the recruiter to build out the ideal hiring process based on the needs established upfront.
Hiring managers will also help calibrate recruiters towards the right types of candidates. This is especially critical if the recruiter is less familiar with the type of job they are recruiting for. As an example, when I first started recruiting entry-level salespeople I leaned heavily on my hiring manager to help me calibrate to understand what good looked like and how to evaluate effectively. Later on, when the hiring manager left and a new manager came on board, I was able to advise them on what worked well instead and modify based on what I learned. Recruiters and hiring managers should have a tight partnership and help fill in each other's gaps when it comes to functional expertise needed for the role, calibration, and designing the right process to collect the data needed to make an effective hiring decision.
Hiring managers are the final decision maker and play a key role in determining if the offer gets made. In most environments, the hiring manager is the unilateral decision maker here: they use the data gathered from others to make the call to offer, typically having an established budget from finance to work within. In cases where they need to go above budget, they typically advocate for the additional spend to hire the right person. In ideal scenarios, recruiters can help here if the candidate is exceptional, but more expensive to hire than initially planned, bringing in the market perspective and data on other candidates for comparison.
Other companies may use alternative processes to ensure a check on hiring manager power. We've all been in environments where we needed a role filled yesterday, and giving hiring managers control without any checks to the process could lead to making poor hires: For example, if recruiters are evaluated on the speed of hires (time to fill) and hiring managers have a need to fill a role to get work off their plate, the incentive to hire someone who is "just okay" is quite high. This could lead to long-term risks for the business if mediocre people are brought on board just to make the numbers look good.
Amazon is well-known for their use of a third party in the interview process, called the bar raiser. This person facilitates the interview debrief and typically meets with the candidate as well as part of the interview loop. They will align with the hiring manager on a decision and use their neutral perspective to ensure the candidate clears the quality bar for a hire at Amazon. In cases where the hiring manager is not inclined, but the bar raiser is inclined, the bar raiser will work with recruiting to find another open role for the candidate that may be a stronger fit for the company. Amazon's ethos is not to hire for a particular role: while functional fit is important job-by-job, they also want to hire "for the company" and for long-term growth. Functional fits with low potential for growth may be passed over if they do not get past the bar raiser.
As a side note, Amazon's large size enables them to quickly find the right fit for solid candidates that aren't meeting the precise needs of a large job. In smaller environments, it'd be good just to keep in touch with the candidate. Most companies reject and forget about people they interview, but relationships should continue to be maintained, and strong recruiters think about the network aspect of recruiting vs. filling role by role. At an old company, many candidates I interviewed who weren't a fit at the time or came to us without a good role available later joined the company, which I take as a personal point of pride.
In other cases, more senior leaders may step in to evaluate and make a decision, especially if a hiring manager and recruiting duo is green. Regardless of how decisions get made, it needs to be clearly communicated and aligned to an agreed upon rubric or set of standards to ensure that the hire is strong. We'll cover this process more in a later post.
Interviewers
The interviewers are responsible to evaluate the candidate. Interviewers usually help evaluate the candidate from different angles, typically coming in with a different level of experience or perspective. For hiring managers and recruiters, it is important to choose interviewers wisely: they play a critical part in the candidate's experience while also providing unique insights.
For example, interviewers may be selected based on their functional expertise, be in the same role as the open role, or be a stakeholder to the candidate if hired. This provides benefits to both interviewer and candidate, as each side will get to see more of who they'd work with and get a complete picture of the job and what a working relationship would look like.
Interviewers are not decision makers, but provide critical feedback and inputs. They should be empowered to voice their opinions in a debrief and ensure their perspective is heard and understood.
I generally recommend not having too many interviews. In most cases, I wouldn't recommend having a candidate meet more than 4-5 people pending the job role and scope. It's not only a lot of interviews for the candidate, but also a lot of time to invest -- striking a balance and figuring out the right number of people to get the data needed to make a hiring decision is a constant push and pull in recruitment.
HR / Compliance
Human Resources, or HR, also plays a role in the hiring process. While the ideal scenario has a recruiter, sometimes HR may play this role. In environments with dedicated recruiters, HR plays a compliance role, ensuring that the team is aware of legal requirements and diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations. They should be evaluating the processes to ensure that they are equitable and enabling the team to find diverse candidates.
Once hired, the HR team is responsible for facilitating the onboarding process and ensuring the candidate can legally work for the company, managing all appropriate paperwork to get them on board.
Finance
Finance controls the money and makes decisions on investments and budgets. Hiring, typically at a department level, is determined by finance. Finance plays an important role to ensure the team hires responsibly: both in terms of volume of hires and salaries, to ensure the company can continue to pay its bills while making the right investments in growth.
Hiring is one of many items a finance department controls. It's arguably the most important and one of the most expensive. However, while finance typically decides what happens, they need good inputs from others closer to the work being done to make a judgment call.
In ideal settings, finance views well-crafted plans from the team on a regular basis to understand current performance and needs. Finance helps the team craft a budget to achieve these goals. Hiring managers and recruiters need to partner to build plans that help finance understand the need for hiring, putting together an analysis of the estimated investment required and benefits for that investment. HR may also be involved pending the setup, but usually finance is the final decision maker.
Amazon is noteworthy for its operational planning process, known as OP1. At Amazon, teams write their plans and the investment requested to get there. This gets filtered up and tested through the organization, ultimately arriving at the most senior levels of leadership (including finance). They ultimately make the call on which investments get made and how much headcount to allocate to each group. Writing a compelling OP1 plan and a good estimate of what's needed to get the job done and why it is valuable is critical here. While other environments may be less formal, it's still good practice to be able to articulate why this work needs to be done and the estimated payoff for doing so.
How Does The Team Function?
Balance of power shifts between roles pending the size of the company, the tenure and skillset of people in each role, and the importance placed on hiring. Hiring is one of the most expensive things a company can do: interviewing, writing and sharing notes, discussing and debriefing, plus all of the preparation, onboarding, etc., not even counting the actual cost of the new person -- hiring is a huge investment with significant costs. Making this function well will help mitigate cost. Finance should act as the "adult in the room" and ensure that hiring is done strategically. They'll likely have the best view of the whole business and can facilitate responsible decision making. Individual hiring managers and teams will have deeper insight into the problems they need solved and may over-sell the number of people needed to achieve their goals.
But what is the ROI of a hire? Does that not justify the cost?
This is tricky and hard to quantify. We often hear of the 10x engineer, or an engineer so proficient that they can do ten times what the average engineer does. Anyone at the top of their game can have an outsized impact -- but this is notoriously hard to scale and replicate. Sometimes you hear these people referred to as "unicorns" or "purple squirrels", as is popular in recruiting circles.
A critical goal of hiring is to attract the best talent possible. Paying at or above market rates for roles will help, but pay is only part of the puzzle. Interviewees appreciate their time being valued and participating in a thorough and thoughtful process. The best talent has options, and if they sniff any BS in the process, whether from lackluster interviews or sloppy process and communication, they will drop out. Companies will then be left with the most desperate of people.
Common sense applies: if you have a poor process, you'll have a poor outcome. Maybe sometimes you get lucky, but luck isn't a strategy. I'm a big believer in good process increasing the "surface area of luck", giving you more chances to have a positive outcome.
Hiring is no different. Put together a good process. Give the team clear roles. Be consistent and fair in your evaluation. Chances are, good things will follow from this at a higher rate than haphazardly trusting your gut and not having a clear rubric for what good looks like or how to make decisions.
Sure, you can win the lottery, but chances are you will not.
Interviewing is not only an evaluation, but a signal of what the company values: good interview practices indicates the company is serious about its employees and creating a good workforce with a strong culture. Building a hiring team that can play their parts (like what's outlined above) is one way to help get there. So to answer the earlier question, you'll get a better ROI if you're spending time wisely to find the best candidates.
I'll refer back to these groups and terms in upcoming posts. The goal here is to lay out ideal state to work towards so you can bring this to your business.