Ask the Right Hiring Question

Success in hiring the best new employees, especially when every new hire makes a massive impact like in a startup, depends on some simple process decisions that ensure you are asking the right hiring question.

Hiring is complex. Finding the right match for each open position can be quite challenging, especially when you need to find specific skills while also seeking the right temperament for the uncertainty and intensity of a startup. Almost always, the process happens when you are under the gun trying to get the resources you needed yesterday to support the backlog of work that is slowing your progress. The pressure is on to solve this hiring problem fast!

Yet, that very pressure should also set off a warning light because the costs of hiring the wrong person are high. Imagine that you hire someone after a quick vetting process, then pause the hiring process, wait for your new person to start, invest time and resources in onboarding and training them, and ultimately discover perhaps months later that this was a hiring mistake. You have lost all those invested resources, all the time trying to get them up to speed, and ultimately, all the energy confirming that this is not working, then the legal, emotional, and time costs of termination, only to have to start all over again.

Hiring mistakes are very, very, very costly on so many levels. Therefore, it makes sense to force yourself to take a beat and make sure you take some care during your hiring process to try to avoid all that pain. It is unlikely you will be perfect. Mistakes will still happen. But you can minimize the risk.

Let me tell you about something I learned when doing lots of hiring of management consultants – and that I have incorporated into my hiring processes as a startup leader.

Focus Your Process on the Right Hiring Question

 Most hiring starts with thinking about the qualifications you are looking for. A typical first step is to write a description outlining the job title, responsibilities, required qualifications, and possibly working conditions. Then, you start sourcing candidates from your network, online job postings, and perhaps recruiters.

Now, here is the risky way to proceed. When you get a candidate that seems like they might be a fit, you push them through the process of screening, interviewing, and ultimately to a hiring decision. Candidates like this often come from your network or a “quiet” posting, and you are eager to see if you have found a match and to shut down this time-consuming hiring process. The problem with this approach is that the question you and your colleagues ask yourselves in the process is akin to “Does this person meet our requirements?”  Essentially, you have established a threshold and are trying to evaluate if the candidate exceeds that threshold. If you believe they meet the requirements, you extend a job offer. If not, you keep looking. The natural pressure on the inherently complex and multi-dimensional decision-making process of the hiring team is to compromise on some of your requirements (usually the list of requirements is far too long for someone to excel at every one of them!) and conclude, yes, I think they have enough of what we are looking for to do the job.

The alternative approach is to screen only and wait until you have at least two or maybe four “good” candidates, then run them through your evaluation process simultaneously. The key word here is simultaneously because when you evaluate multiple candidates in parallel, you change the question that you and your colleagues are asking yourselves in the process to “Which of these good candidates is the BEST CANDIDATE?” The mindset has shifted from a question of sufficient to a question of optimum. All of a sudden, the whole process facilitates finding the best rather than settling for good enough.

The difference between these two questions is often unconscious. It is facilitated by the process conditions the team is operating under – and most people do not even realize that there is a difference between sending candidates through one at a time and making a hiring decision after each process as opposed to sending a group of candidates through at the same time and making hiring decisions on all of them at once. I know that I did not realize there was a difference until I did an informal retrospective study of a whole bunch of hires and looked at the type of hiring process used. The subsequent difference in success rate was astounding. The chances of a hire succeeding were dramatically higher when we used the “group” approach and asked ourselves “Which is best?”  We made a new policy that we would only hire that way and radically reduced the cost of failed hires for the organization.

In startupland, I essentially apply the same policy to myself and others in the organization by pushing for us not to proceed with interviews until we have at least two good candidates. This is not always easy, but it makes a difference!

My word to the wise is that the times when I have decided to skip this tip have resulted in some of my worst hiring mistakes in my career. I encourage you (and myself) not to succumb to the urgency at the expense of wise hiring!