Vetting Prospective Hires

Recruiting team members is always a high stakes process. And that is especially true in a startup. Hiring mistakes are costly, so it is worth taking care to vet prospective new hires well.

I have hired hundreds of people during my career – and I have made mistakes along the way. Those mistakes were always incredibly painful for all involved. Sometimes I can trace the mistake to a rushed or less-than-thorough recruiting process.  This post captures some of the approaches I use to vet potential candidates and hopefully reduce the risk of making a hiring mistake. 

Of course, before launching into a hiring process, I am assuming that you have done the hard work of deciding the time is right to hire a new team member, determining what skills and experience you are looking for, and sourcing candidates. Each one of those aspects of hiring deserves its own blogpost, and someday I will unpack them further.  For now, let us assume you have identified some candidates and are deciding whom to hire.  While it may not be possible or appropriate to use them all, here is a menu of techniques I often use:

• If You Believe, Pray. As a Jesus-follower, I invite God into my leadership and decision-making at my startups. Bringing the right team together is pivotal for the success of a startup, and I believe God has a plan for connecting people with one another in remarkable ways. While not always, I have had some spectacular hiring God-moments.  For example, one time I was at the end of my rope and prayed, “Lord, I just don’t know what to do. Please send help.” Seconds later, my phone rang with an out-of-the-blue call from a believing friend who blurted out, “I just had to call and tell you about this person I think needs to join your team.” They proved to be a perfect fit and a great add.
  
  More commonly, I bathe the recruiting process in prayer and ask God to send the right candidate to me and shut the door on the wrong candidates.  More than once, I have had what seemed like great candidates abruptly withdraw themselves from consideration after that prayer. It is always a bit frightening when that happens, but I often find out later that there was a serious problem lurking under the surface we had not seen yet.  The lesson?  This technique is only available to those who believe in the power of prayer, however, if you are a believer, engage the Lord in your recruiting process and feel free to reach out to me for more details on this one.
  
  
• Ensure You Source Multiple Candidates for Every Opening.  This concept comes from when I was hiring dozens of people into a management consulting firm.  As a Senior Manager, I was one of a five-member Hiring Committee that was responsible for all consultant hiring and empowered with a “no-reason-needed veto” over any candidate we were evaluating. To improve our success rate, I analyzed the future success of the people we hired. One dimension that I examined was whether a consultant was hired as part of a group process or a single candidate process.  Overwhelmingly, those evaluated as part of a group process had greater success within the firm. I believe the reason for this pattern was that when you are considering just a single candidate, the evaluation team asks itself, “Is this individual sufficient for the position?”  When you are evaluating a person amongst a group of candidates, the evaluation team asks itself, “Which of these individuals is the best fit for the position?”  The second question is an inherently higher standard than the first.  The lesson?  Force yourself to find and evaluate groups of candidates in parallel, so you are always looking for the best fit, not the sufficient fit.
  
  
• Include A Subject Matter Expert in the Evaluation Process.  When you are hiring a specialist in a function, typically, you are looking for someone who has greater expertise in that area than you do. That is the point of hiring an expert in the field! However, it also means that you are at a disadvantage in evaluating their specialist skills. When that is the case, make sure you find someone either on your team or an expert friend you trust to do a functional skills interview. 
  
  Here are a couple examples of applying this approach:
  • I was hiring a CFO who needed to be able to support our growth across the globe with all the complexities of currency risk, consolidated financial statements from an international subsidiary, and other highly technical accounting and finance matters. While I have a finance degree, I am not a CFO.  In that case, I asked one of my Board Members, who was a veteran CFO, to help vet the candidates’ technical accounting and finance expertise. 
  • In another case, I was hiring a new PhD-level experimental physicist. Evaluating the quality of the work in their thesis and their technical problem-solving capabilities was way beyond my expertise.  In that situation, I asked the experimental physicist who was departing on good terms to be part of evaluating potential replacements. We needed his ability to distinguish what was good and what was not-so-good relevant work.
    
    The lesson? Recognize when the role you are hiring for requires specialist skills and make sure to have someone with specialist skills at least equivalent or greater in that function participate in the process. Make sure to listen carefully to their evaluation.

• Use Case Studies and Skill Demonstrations. One of the challenges in interviewing a candidate about their skills is that the candidate knows more about their experiences than you do. It can be hard to identify when they leave something out, and they may have done lots of work polishing their stories. One way to change the dynamics is to include a case study or skill demonstration as one of the evaluation interviews. 
  
  For example, when hiring consultants, we created a case study based on a real client situation. We would give the case to the candidate to review for 15 minutes. Then an experienced consulting team leader would join the candidate and essentially have a planning meeting as if the candidate were preparing to meet with the client. The team leader would ask questions and evaluate the candidate’s thinking and problem-solving approaches with the information they had only received a short time before.  This close approximation to the real work that we did was often very revealing.
  
  Another example was when we were hiring a mechanical designer. One of our requirements was experience with a software package called SolidWorks.  We had three finalist candidates who seemed promising and claimed expertise in SolidWorks.  For one of our last interviews, we gave them a straightforward mechanical device design problem. We asked them to solve it using SolidWorks while one of our mechanical engineers (who was a skilled SolidWorks user) observed. That settled the matter. One candidate quickly and expertly solved the problem in a matter of minutes. A second candidate could not handle the 3D aspects of the question. The third candidate had clearly never worked with SolidWorks before. 
  
  In other cases, we had mechanical technician candidates demonstrate their skills with common wood and metal shop tools, electrical technicians solder a chip to a board, data scientists analyze a dataset, and application scientists use a flow cytometer. The lesson? Identify some of the core skill(s) that the role requires and be creative in coming up with a practical, but not too difficult, way to have the candidates demonstrate those skills.  These case studies or skills tests can be incredibly revealing!
   
• Intentionally Evaluate Stage and Culture Fit. When hiring for an early-stage startup, it is essential to evaluate a candidate’s comfort level with the intense work pace, ambiguity, and volatile dynamics of a startup.  Prior successful startup experience is one of the most telling indicators.  A majority of those I have successfully hired into startups have been in a startup before. 
  
  If someone has not yet had startup experience, I will probe much more deeply into their need for structure, well-defined processes, many supporting functions, and their ability to get hands-on. Sometimes those coming from larger organizations are just not ready for the degree to which startups demand that you jump in and start solving problems in areas that you may not be expert in.  I also try to have a blunt and direct conversation about the risks we face, our funding horizon, and the culture of the team. If it does not feel like a fit, I would rather they opt-out.
  
  A couple of examples of mismatches in this area included a woman who joined the startup and then quit on her first day because we did not have the company cafeteria she was expecting.  One engineer asked about how his career path would progress over the next decades leading to retirement. One business leader proposed becoming the Chief Operating Officer in my 5-person startup. In several meetings, he demonstrated that he had nothing to contribute to figuring out the right path for the startup beyond big company-style cheerleading for others who were actively solving the problems. The lesson? Startup cultural fit is essential. Make sure to explicitly evaluate it and do not be dazzled by famous big company experience as it is often not relevant.
  
  
• Intentionally Pay Attention to Interview Trajectory Patterns.  I tend to be decisive and have noticed that I will conclude an interview with either disinterest or excitement over a candidate. Clearly, candidates with failed interviews do not continue. However, for candidates I am excited about, I discipline myself to schedule a second interview a few days later. Once I do the second interview, I can evaluate the trajectory of the interviews in sequence. For some candidates, the second interview does not generate the same excitement. Earlier in my career, when I ignored this, I found those candidates often did not pan out as hires. For other candidates, my excitement keeps building, and they often prove to be winners.  A single interview is not enough to establish a pattern. The lesson? Pay attention to the trajectory of excitement about a candidate over at least two interviews in a series over time. When in doubt, schedule an extra follow-up interview. A rising trajectory is an excellent sign.
   
• Personally Check References.  Some of my worst hiring mistakes were when I was rushed and failed to check references thoroughly.  For example, I hired a senior executive under time and Board pressure. He had a great resume, seemed to get what we were doing and what we needed, and I did not think I could take the time to check my customary three references. Ultimately that hire proved to be such an utter disaster that I had to fire him as well as several of those he hired to help him over a year later, and it cost our startup terribly. After the fact, I was talking to a CFO friend. She said, “Oh Jen, I wish you had asked me about him! I would have saved you all that pain.” She had hired and fired the same individual – and her company was on his resume. I could have picked up the phone and asked had I just taken the time.
  
  Now I have become much more disciplined about asking to speak to at least three references. I will ask finalists for at least three references, including at least one superior and one peer. If someone is not able to produce references, that is a red flag. If I know anyone senior at the companies on their resume, I will call my contacts directly. Of course, I am always careful to be respectful and protective of a candidate’s current position and would only contact a current employer with explicit permission. Do not assume all references will be good because, if you ask about fit for the role you are hiring for, sometimes, references will highlight gaps or other areas of concern. For early hires and direct reports, it is worth it to talk to the references myself, so I can listen carefully to the tone of the references’ comments. If the new hire will report to someone else, I insist that they check the references and then brief me on the results so I can coach the hiring process. The lesson?  A failed hire is far more costly than a few days checking references.
  
  
• Try Before You Buy. In a startup, whenever possible, I look for opportunities to try a candidate before hiring them. Sometimes it is possible to hire a candidate on a consulting basis or for a limited scope project to get a feel for both results and the process of working together. I used this process to hire my Chief Commercial Officer. By mutual agreement, we worked together on a part-time consulting basis for over six months before we both agreed it was a great fit, and he committed to moving his family across the country.  In another case, I consulted for a startup I was considering joining for several months to assess the fit before formally joining. In another case, we hired a software developer for a short-term, limited scope project both because we needed to complete the project quickly and because it would give us a chance to assess the quality of his work. While each of these cases resulted in a great fit, at times we just gracefully concluded the project and moved on without extending the relationship. The lesson? If you can work together before committing fully, it can be a wonderful way for both sides to evaluate the fit.

Building a team is one of the most critical tasks for a startup leader, so it is worth being intentional and careful in the process.  Take care to do the work to find team members who are a great fit!  I would love to hear about any other tips and techniques that have proven useful to you.

Special thanks to Jody Steger for asking the questions that led to the topic for this blog post.