I. We've All Been There
Recruiting gets a bad reputation. Companies are frequently called out for their bad hiring practices. How many LinkedIn posts have you seen where someone says something to the effect of (and I'm paraphrasing): "I've sent out thousands of applications, interviewed a handful of times, and got ghosted after putting together a presentation. Hiring is broken!!"
Recruiters, as such, get a pretty bad reputation. They're the lightning rod for blame. Blamed for the inefficiencies, poor process, and lack of communication. Recruiters aren't the cause of these maladies though, but rather are the most identifiable part of a broader problem in hiring.
When working at the staffing agency, I vividly remember one instance where we were recruiting an executive assistant for a luxury fashion brand. This is probably a brand you've heard of. The firm was excited for the opportunity to work with this company so we could put the logo on our website and build our credibility. This could be the start of a fruitful relationship.
The role requirements were clear enough. They needed someone who would work for less than $50k/year with at least three years of experience in this type of role. They also needed to speak Italian and be based in NYC. This wouldn't be too difficult, and the strength of the brand and allure of working in the fashion industry would make selling the role easy, provided we could find the right people.
Thankfully, it wasn't hard to find individuals who met this description. I was able to quickly vet and line up a handful of candidates who met the requirements.
This is where the trouble started.
We sent three candidates to interview with the hiring manager. The hiring manager rejected one and wanted to meet with the other two again. When the candidates asked us what the expectations were for the hiring process, we didn't know. The client didn't tell us, either. I was convinced they didn't even know their own process for making a hiring decision. Even when we pushed, they made it seem like it was just "one more interview" away from making a hiring decision.
This led to a string of us scheduling interviews with candidates with little preparation on what to expect or who they were meeting with. The hiring manager at the client kept telling us "just one more meeting with so-and-so", but couldn't articulate a clear end date to make a decision. One of the two finalists dropped out after three interviews on three separate occasions with no end in sight. One candidate stuck through and survived seven rounds of interviews, multiple with the same person.
All in all, this process took roughly two months. The candidate told me they were burning their PTO to make time for all of these in-person conversations. Eventually, the candidate started the job.
They quit in four months because the role we sold them was not what the job actually entailed, and the hiring manager failed to articulate this to them during the process. Unsurprisingly, an indecisive hiring manager made for a fickle boss, and they ended up being asked to take on personal tasks for them versus the job description as a proper EA.
This was a huge waste of everyone's time and money.
This is a company with a global brand that can shape culture and trends, create and deploy fashion around the world in diverse markets, but they can't hire someone to manage an executive's schedule.
What went wrong? Well, a lot of things. While a lot went wrong in this particular case, different parts of this process go wrong at a lot of organization. Let's break this down.
II. The Job Is Not Well Defined
This is a two-pronged problem: 1) the job is poorly defined, and so thus 2) the person needed to fill the job is by definition, not well-defined.
Defining what's needed in a role can be difficult. Companies do themselves a disservice by moving the process along without putting in the work to define what the work actually is. In some cases, the work is put in, but the right stakeholders closest to the need aren't in the room to help shape the definition. In other cases, there isn't a strong understanding of what good looks like. In more nefarious cases, jobs are misrepresented to get someone hired, hoping they will stay in an unpleasant situation doing other types of work they didn't agree to, often for less pay.
In turn, this leads to interviewers only having a fuzzy idea of what the role entails, inconsistency among interviewers, and also the incorrect expectations for candidates should they make it through this process. This is particularly tough when people are hiring for jobs they themselves do not have familiarity with. I generally place jobs into two buckets:
1) Offloading known work -- a hiring manager is doing a job, but needs to prioritize elsewhere. They require someone with enough expertise to do this type of job well. Example: A sales leader hires a rep to take over a territory they haven't spent a ton of time on. An engineering leader hires a new engineer to handle support tickets because of the volume coming in. 2) Starting new or unknown work -- a hiring manager is not doing a job and needs someone to figure out this function or role. The manager probably does not have requisite functional expertise to know what good looks like, and needs expertise to define this. Example: A marketing leader who has a strong background in branding and events needs to hire someone who can manage customer education. A technical founder is looking to bring on their head of HR, etc.
The former is generally easier because the manager knows what the work looks like and has done enough of it to help define what's needed and identify what they want. It's a lot easier for me to judge the quality of a hamburger if I've eaten plenty of hamburgers. The latter requires guidance from an expert: I don't drink wine, so I may need the help of a sommelier to help me pick the best bottle to get as a gift for an aficionado.
The latter is usually tougher because unless you spend the time to build enough expertise to know what good looks like in a field that is not directly related to your own experience, hiring managers end up relying on intuition and assumptions versus their experience. In the latter cases, it's important to have a mentor or some form of outside help. This may come in the form of an external firm with expertise in a particular function, a board member, or a friend who knows the field well enough to help provide context.
Regardless, both types of jobs need to be adequately defined prior to interviewing. Jobs shouldn't be defined through the interview process and the candidate you meet, but rather intentionally planned and thought through before you invest in the search. A clear rubric to work back from will enable you to design the right process to identify the attributes needed for the job.
III. Untrained Interviewers
Interviewing is a skill that needs to be learned. In addition, interviewers are representing your company with candidates, who will share their experience engaging with your company to others. Untrained interviewers pose twofold risk: 1) reputational risk to the company and 2) they don't know how to evaluate people effectively and sell them on the job. In most disciplines, you wouldn't send someone untrained to do something they have little experience in, but interviews don't always get the same level of rigor.
Untrained interviews also lead to rework. The candidate we sent to the fashion brand went through seven rounds of interviews, in no small part due to the interviewer's lack of experience. Besides not having clear decision criteria, they also kept needing to bring them back to touch on topics that the original interview didn't cover.
As an outside consultancy who gets paid for placing candidates, our advice and questioning was met with skepticism, since we only get paid if the candidate is placed, not if they are successful in the job. This is one of my issues with recruitment services in general, which I may cover in another post.
IV. Poor Process
Like jobs, hiring processes need to be well-defined before you begin. This sets clear expectations for the candidate, as well as clear exit criteria for the business to make a decision. Most importantly, a clear process enables speed and reduces bias.
Too often hiring is done haphazardly, wasting the time of everyone involved. Part of this is due to the irregularity of hiring in certain companies, especially lower growth businesses. For example, in my past life, hiring sales development representatives to sell technology was a well-oiled machine. We had a clear process, trained interviewers intimately familiar with the role, and enough volume because we were always hiring for these jobs. Everyone was well-calibrated and bought into the process, enabling us to move quickly and decisively.
Other, more niche roles only came up once in a while, with hiring managers who hadn't flexed these muscles and needed to design a new interview process each time they had an opening on the team. Getting the reps in helps refine the process, and one-off, low volume roles generally don't get the same level of rigor because they happen so irregularly. Regardless of volume or role type, strong process is needed to hire effectively.
Companies need to have structures in place so that the process can help gather the data effectively to make the right hiring decision, without over investing in time. Remember, job candidates often are not only interviewing with a single company -- they want to make a decision quickly, and companies need to make sure they don't lose people during the interview process.
V. Lack of Prioritization
People are busy, especially leaders. Hiring can fall by the wayside, feeling more like a nice-to-have versus a true business objective. This not only slows things down, but signals to the candidate that they are not important. If the process is too slow, candidates inevitably drop out and go with competitors.
The hiring process is more than the core inputs and outputs. It's also a chance for someone from the outside to interact with the company's brand. How the interviewee is treated will affect future hiring. Even in cases where the hire isn't made, the interview process will give people a preview into what to expect and what to think of your brand.
Businesses need to treat hiring as a strategic priority to achieving outcomes. If it isn't, then I question why bother opening the role at all?
VI. So What Do I Do About This?
These problems may sound familiar to you.
It's also important to remember that a lot of this advice (and most of what I will advise through these posts), will vary based on context. My goal is to help raise the floor. If you are in the top percentiles of hiring managers or organizations, you may be able to get away without having robust mechanisms in place for hiring. Everyone knows stories of a founder finding an amazing person and making a unique job for them. Startups inherently require people who can flex more to meet the needs of a growing business in its infancy, but also sometimes you can hire opportunistically and "make a role" for someone. I know this can happen and have seen it play out a few times in my career.
However, good intuition doesn't scale and large organizations that make hundreds or thousands of hires per year have different needs than startups or small businesses.
At scale, mitigating mistakes is arguably more important than finding the best people. Ideally, you do both! But when a large company needs to hire, it needs to ensure its mechanisms attract strong candidates and can identify them effectively. A strong culture around interviewing and investing time to build out the right processes will be tremendous in getting there. Improving the hiring process improves perception of the brand -- people will want to work for companies they like and that treat people well in interviews. Positive reputation helps build demand, attracting more and better talent. This creates a flywheel and enables the business to find the best people to help drive it.
In later posts, I'll break down these issues and over suggestions on how to build an effective hiring process and recruiting machine.