Hire learning

I spend a lot of time trying to help people build teams. That involves lots and lots of hiring.

Most people are solving the wrong problem when they are trying to hire someone. Most people are trying to solve a problem they realized they had yesterday, as opposed to hiring someone who will prevent them from having similar problems tomorrow.

The best way to fix this is to seek “best athlete” candidates instead of “best fit” ones.

Admittedly this is pretty “early team” focused. A lot of people looking for deep domain experience in a particular space may have a good reason to do so. You want to keep your Google shareholders happy if you are Google, and hire a VP of Very Good Search to run your core Very Good Search business. Or if you are in the business of Repairing Critical Body Parts, you will want to find a doctor who is very good at Repairing Critical Body Parts.

The truth is that this is really only true for a fraction of the roles out there. Most companies should be focusing on someone who can learn their surroundings quickly, start making changes and measuring results.

To do that, you really have to focus on one thing: Is the person in front of me sufficiently talented to be successful?

Instead, most companies try to hire people who are the closest fit to what they have in a checklist. A great many people fixate on the shape of the qualifications and it creates a whole lot of problems.

For example, “I need a software developer with 5-7 years of experience in McGuffinSpeke” sometimes is not really what you are looking for, especially if McGuffinSpeke has only been out for 3 years as a language (and yes, this happens a lot).

Over many years of hiring, I have adapted my personal practices towards finding talented people—and I have had some pretty amazing results. I have written it into my own personal playbook and I apply it very effectively into organizations where I work.

Here are some things that I have learned.

1) Stop trying to find the perfect candidate

You should be able to better define the “must have” and “would be nice” for what you need from  your future employees. Quite a bit of the time, people can come in and get comfortable with new tools and new technologies, but it is important to understand if they are capable of doing so. So you should…

2) Establish how fast a candidate can learn

This is a big chunk of what I look for. Oddly, the person who has had several jobs that are 18 months to 3 years in duration may look like a red flag and a “skipping stone” for some companies, but that candidate is a fast learner who makes quick decisions. That is incredibly valuable if you can apply it correctly. Especially if you can…

3) Figure out how to attract more candidates to you

This is the biggest and most important of these. You actually do not really find talent. You enable talent to find you. I always tell people that recruiting is more like fishing than grocery shopping. Talented people do not simply throw themselves at checklists for skills that hiring managers have placed on display. When they do, many of them are getting eliminated in the process because they do not sufficiently line up against the checklist for the role. Accordingly, you should…

4) Identify and reduce “false negatives” in your hiring process

This is most of what I do for people who need help with team building. There are so many different false negatives in the hiring cycle that it takes weeks to months to debug that process for many people. False negatives include excessive resume screening, poorly structured interviews, and even interviewers who drive away candidates. Every time you can remove a potential false negative trap, you increase the likelihood of filling your role faster.

So where do we go from here?

For starters, if you have had 10 open hires for six months or longer, you are probably doing something wrong.

You are looking too hard for a candidate that doesn’t exist, you probably have a lot of false negative filters in your hiring process, and you are probably not marketing your roles to the right people. 

Often it is all three.

If you have a budget for 10 new hires, you are probably sitting on a very good market opportunity. You are letting it slip between your fingers every day that you are not taking action. 

You should be willing to make some changes, as I have in the past, to hire people more effectively, more efficiently, and with better results.

I see a lot of discussions about the interviewing process. It is a process filled with failure.

• The failure of white board coding tests (“You and I self-identify as compatible because we both had the same clever solution to this crafty puzzle”).
• The failure to ask the right questions in the interview.
• The failure to get stacks of qualified candidates in front of hiring managers to be effectively screened instead of put through a checklist filtering machine for buzzwords.
• The failure to get enough resumes into the pipeline to have candidates come onsite for interviews.

You should identify where your failures in your candidate pipeline are and come up with some ways to fix them.

Are you struggling with this right now?

It never hurts to get a second opinion on your hiring process.

Feel free to reach out if you need some help!