Speaker 1 00:00:02  Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.

Speaker 2 00:00:27  Hey gang! Today's topic is how to hire slow and how to hire well. Previously in the earlier podcast, we we identified the theme and it was a trail marker about firing fast and hiring slow. And the point about hiring slow is not so much that you want it to be a slow process, but you want to hire well. And that implies that sometimes you want to take your time to make sure you get it right. And today we're going to talk about how to actually do that. The key to do that is using a structured hiring process. Structure and data is the key to increase the quality of your hires, and you're going to be using standardized hiring tools to make sure that you can get it right. Simple.

Speaker 2 00:01:13  The simplest, summary is we want to have standardized job descriptions, standardized scorecards, and a standardized process. And by doing that across your teams consistently, you will get better and better at this. And you can make hiring a competitive advantage. Now, why are we talking about this today? You know we we said fire fast, hire slow. And we kind of left it there and said that's just important. We talked about why that's difficult. And one of the reasons it's so difficult is that hiring is hiring is difficult. And some people are intimidated by the hiring process. And one of the reasons that your your instinct isn't to go slow is like, you have a job that's open. You have, work that's not getting done. You have anxiety about the process. And so you tend to reach sometimes we all do. We tend to put hope into our equation. We tend to read experiences into candidates, hoping that they can develop into what we're what we're looking for, which is a solution, rather than using a data driven approach that really can help you both stack rank your candidates in a consistent manner.

Speaker 2 00:02:22  Get the input from all of your hiring professionals who are involved. Do it in a consistent way and get better and better at it. And most importantly, if you get to the point where you have a great process, you can have confidence that you can go hire an A player. Well, guess what, then you're not going to be concerned about, you know, not firing someone faster when it's not working out. You're not going to try to rush a process because you're going to have that confidence. So our our whole goal today is to talk about how to hire slow and how to hire. Well, okay. Now the reason we're bringing this up is I have had conversations with management teams all the time, and I am surprised how few teams really take the time to create a structured hiring process. In fact, in many cases, hiring is as simple as passing out resumes and getting people on calendars and then having, you know, a slack exchange regarding, you know, who do you like best? What did you think? What did you think? you might have you might take think about all the time you're taking you're taking an interview time for candidates.

Speaker 2 00:03:26  You're taking members of your executive team for hours to, to get do these interviews. And then maybe you're getting back together, but, you know, maybe it's, it's a little bit less formal. That's very expensive process. And you multiply that times five candidates, ten candidates, whatever it might be. Of course, this is an intimidating process. And you're you're really anxious to get it done quickly. And you're really anxious that you might make a mistake. There's lots of risk. So you know that that is not the best way to do it. And that leads to that that dynamic where you're anxious anxious to fire fast and high or slow. And when you're not data driven, when you're not consistent, you can end up using circumstantial clues as to I liked that candidate or, you know, what do you think about that candidate? Okay, you like them, I missed maybe maybe I missed something in my interview must maybe I like them as well. Or you might default to kind of the resume too much and say, oh, I like that person who worked at so-and-so company.

Speaker 2 00:04:24  Let's just go with them. That feels like the safe hire, right? The old adage, no one gets fired for hiring IBM. You know, same sort of thing. Maybe no one's going to get fired by hiring someone who's got a great resume, but you're still maybe missing something because maybe they got lucky and got to work at a great company, but really weren't critical for that factor. All these things can lead to mistakes, and mistakes can create mis hires. and, you know, ultimately you're back in that same doom loop where now all of a sudden, if you hire someone poorly, you've wasted all that time, wasted all that money and fixing the problem. And now you're stuck saying, man, should we stick with this person and give them more chance? Or should we fire fast? And then because you're not confident in your hiring process, you get stuck in that doom loop even longer. So that those are all the reasons why I want to suggest it may be worthwhile spending some time really refining your hiring process and putting a little structure into it.

Speaker 2 00:05:22  And I think the good news that I want to share with you today is it's not that hard. The key is structure and standardization and getting everyone to be on the same page. There are four things I want I want to talk about. The first is the standard job description okay. Then a standardized candidate scorecard, then a standard hiring process. And then ultimately, you know, a, a standard, review of all that to, to keep making the process better and better. Okay. So let's go through those one at a time. A job description Everyone has job descriptions. This is pretty straightforward. But you know, obviously you should have a standardized company description. I shouldn't have to say that, but I literally I've been at companies where people are creating their own ones. So marketing's got one job description, R&D has another one. You know, the sales and marketing team may have a different one, may have a different one. There should be a standardized company description that's attractive, that is is marketing oriented and really helps your company shine.

Speaker 2 00:06:25  That probably comes from the HR department, just like the last section of your job description. The compensation next steps that should be standardized probably come from your HR department. Okay, then there are three sections that really should come from the hiring manager, the person responsible for making this hire, and who has the problem that they're trying to fill a role. Okay. Those three sections are the role responsibilities and outcomes, the professional qualifications that you'd like to have for this, this candidate and the personal characteristics. Okay. So there's just three groups. Let's go through them one at a time, okay. Roles and responsibilities and outcomes. Okay. It's basically what is it that we are hiring you to do in this job? And the reason I like outcomes, if you can get to an outcome, you're not just saying, hey, you know, you show up and do this job, you're saying this is what success looks like, right? So if I'm hiring a financial professional, it's not just close the books.

Speaker 2 00:07:19  It is. The books are closed by the 15th day of the month, consistently and accurately. And, you know, we improve our clothes from the 25th day to the 15th day. That's an outcome. It shows the candidate what you're trying to achieve, shows them what success look like. And yes, it also explains the responsibility. Now, it's important not to just put so many, responsibilities and outcomes in there that you just, you know, you, you, you use a shotgun approach, okay? You're probably to come up with a list of ten. I'm going to encourage you to do no more than five key responsibilities. Just like the same with qualifications and personal characteristics, I would encourage you to have, you know, a total of maybe 12 to 15, which means you have 4 or 5 of each. It doesn't mean that those are the only ones, but very importantly, it means they're the most important responsibilities. They're the most important professional qualifications. They're the most important personal characteristics.

Speaker 2 00:08:17  Remember, we are trying to really focus on the most important ones because everyone's going to probe on those criteria, and we're going to stack, rank and score the candidates on those criteria. So if you have ten responsibilities and ten qualifications and ten characteristics, guess what? First of all, you're scattered. You can't really find a unicorn that has everything great. So if everything matters, nothing really matters. But secondly, you're not going to naturally go and have consistent comparisons because some people are going to focus on numbers six and eight and ten. Other people focus on two and four, and you're not going to be able to have a consistent comparison across interviews. And you're also not going to be able to score that many items like 30 different items, it becomes just unwieldy. So I like to see you have three groups times four would be 12 or 3 groups of five. You have 15 total. Okay. So you have that and that's what you put in your job description. So you got company description.

Speaker 2 00:09:14  You have the job responsibilities and outcomes number. Section two. Section three is the professional qualifications you're looking for. Section three are the personal characteristics of the person that role. That would be great. Then you have a standardized compensation. Next step. You put that job description out there. And that should be a very straightforward process okay. Now we get into the interviews. For process wise, I like to have a screening interviewer who is going through and screening and making sure that they have the professional qualifications, salary and availability taken care of. And that allows you to take maybe it's a pile of 30 or 40 candidates and whittle it down to 5 or 6, right? So I definitely encourage you to have a screening process. You're not taking your your executives time for screening. By the time they get to you, you know, they have the qualifications. You know that the salary and the job description works in terms of where they have to be location, availability, salary, all those things. So you can get really down to the most important outcomes and responsibilities and the most important personal characteristics.

Speaker 2 00:10:23  That's where you have your senior people doing the interviews. Okay. So what I recommend doing is creating a standardized scorecard. And I say standardize. You should create one template for the company. And then the hiring manager should customize the specifics for each job role. And guess what? Those specifics the responsibilities and outcomes come right off the job description. So you take the 2 to 3 most important responsibilities and job outcomes, and you put them right into the scorecard. Then you take the most important 2 or 3 personal characteristics, and you put them right in the scorecard. And guess what? This is the same responsibilities and characteristics for everyone. They're going to have the same scorecard. So Max you're going to have six grading criteria. Let's assume you go and take three and three. You're going to have six responsibility or outcomes and six characteristics. That becomes the grid that you're measuring scores on. Okay. Guess what. That also becomes your interview guide. Now you go through you have maybe five minutes of niceties and background.

Speaker 2 00:11:30  You kind of describe how much time you're going to take for asking questions, and then boom, you're going down those six sets of questions that you're trying to ask to get compelling evidence. Okay, so if the responsibility is to to hire and train a sales team, okay, great. I've got to come up with a grade 1 to 5 on this person's ability to do do that. And has that person driven that in the past? What is the compelling evidence I can use to give this guy a grade, or this woman a grade on their ability to hire and hire and train and manage salespeople? Well, I'm going to ask questions specifically about that. The scorecard is going to have a section for compelling evidence that, you know, what are the types of things that I'm going to look for. I might ask, you know, have they done it in the past? I might ask them to tell me stories about how they solve problems with sales teams in the past. I might ask them how they recruit.

Speaker 2 00:12:27  and I have a section on that scorecard for both the types of compelling evidence I'm looking for, as well as the notes. The answer, the question. Okay, again, this is a lot of structure, but it gives everybody a consistent way to evaluate how can I come up with a score on that specific criteria, of a of a job outcome. Another one might be a personal characteristic. Same sort of deal. Okay. Personal characteristic might be, you know, a get it, you know, get stuff done type of character who doesn't quit until the job is done and is consistent, consistently completing work to to to above above standard. Right. Okay. So that's a personal characteristic, you know, what does it mean? Okay. What's the compelling evidence? I'm looking for evidence of doing it in the past. I'm looking at examples like, you know, where you know, how they how they manage to do that. I'm looking for, examples as to why they're driven to to be detail oriented and get work done, and they can't stand not having things done.

Speaker 2 00:13:28  So I've got some clues in terms of what compelling evidence looks like. I'm going to ask those questions, and then I'm going to take the notes. Right. And if someone knocks it out of the park, excuse me. If someone knocks it out of the park, I might be really impressed. I'm going to give this person a four or a five. I'm going to have the notes. Why? Oh, well, remember that story that this person told about, staying up till midnight? Because they had a board meeting the next night and they just had to get it done. I'm going to. I'm going to reference that story later on in the process, or I'm going to, you know, I'm going to take the notes related to what the evidence suggested. If I have a low score, maybe it's a one. Hey man, this person's only worked a couple times. And, you know, they really couldn't speak to, you know, getting stuff done and taking that personal responsibility. In fact, some of the conversation made me a little nervous.

Speaker 2 00:14:18  I might take a note about what made me nervous and put a one down there. Okay, so standardized scorecards, they have 4 to 6 responsibilities and characteristics. They have the type of compelling evidence you're looking for. They have a section for notes and they have a section for a grade. And you have to put a grade in one through five. All right. At the end of this process, when you've completed your interview, you are going to have a number. You know, it's maybe it's a 3.5, maybe it's a 1.5, maybe it's a 4.5. And your first interview, you're going to have a number. You're like, okay, well, I think I think this person was a 4.2. That's what my average was. That's pretty good. It's a it's in the in the fours. Now I go and interview 3 or 4 more people and I get better at this interview. Right. So let's say I'm doing the sales person hire or the sales leader hire. By the time I've done the fourth one, I mean, I thought, you know, a four was, you know, candidate number one answer.

Speaker 2 00:15:14  But man, candidate number four really blew me away. I can go back and change my grades. The key is that the individual who's making the grades stack ranks everyone they interview on that 1 to 5 scale. So if the best person I interview is much better than the second best person, and I get given that second best person, maybe a 4.4 or a five on something, and then someone sets the bar as this is what a five looks like, I can go back and say, okay, well, the second candidate, I'm going to give a five and I'm going to move that that first candidate back to a three. As long as you're stack ranking the candidates compared to each other, that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to you know, get the best candidate from the group that we're able to to bring into the process. And if everyone does that consistently within their own scorecards, that's perfectly fine. And when you add those scorecards up, ultimately I'm going to have a grade for this candidate.

Speaker 2 00:16:08  You're going to have a great for this candidate. We'll have hopefully 4 or 5, and we're going to have grades for every candidate. And we're going very quickly. See okay, you know who's who's winning in the stack rank candidate scorecard for total score. And then we can go see, you know, we can look at the scores for every character characteristic. And that gives you so much data. Think about that process. Imagine, you know, we've taken two weeks, we've interviewed five candidates and we have data. We know where everyone stands between 1 and 5. And we can drill into okay, how are they at this outcome. You know, what's the evidence. You know who's who, who scored them where. How are they at this personal characteristic. Why. You know, why is this person higher than that one. You have all the data now and and you can make a data driven decision, Okay. That is that is the scorecard process. Then after that, obviously you look at the scorecard, this is typically done in a Google sheet or a spreadsheet.

Speaker 2 00:17:07  So it's a live document. You know, you can you can, once you've done your interviews, you can compare notes and you can get together and you can drill down and really go into the specifics of where you have conviction. And maybe there's an area where you didn't get to make every question, finish every question you wanted. Well, you can go to other people and say, hey, you know, on this on this criteria for I didn't get a great story there, but I also didn't have evidence that they're not good at it. And you can go to someone who may have gotten a good, good story score and say, tell me what, what you what what did you hear on that, on that, characteristic that made you, give you the confidence to make that that score and their conviction is going to help you, and it's going to be specific. It's based on a specific characteristic you're looking for. It's going to be based on specific interview feedback that they got. It's not going to be the kind of conversation I referenced earlier, like, well, I really like the guy, or I really like the gal or, you know, I think that, you know, this guy is going to do a good job.

Speaker 2 00:18:06  She seems seemed like a good egg. You know, whatever it might be, it's going to be data driven, okay. And you get together and you look at that and guess what? If you don't have a 4.5 or someone like whatever your criteria is, that feels great. Keep interviewing. Right. So you maybe have five. Let's let's interview ten and we've got ten. You're going to have a a bell curve. And you know the top candidates are going to become obvious just from the data. And you know using this process I haven't had a situation yet where, you know, I've had just like I didn't feel best in my gut about the people with the best grades. It tends to line up, but it gives you much more conviction. Okay, so that's the process. I think it really helps the reason we want to do this, why do we want to do it this way? It's really not a lot much longer. It doesn't take much more time. It takes a little work up time up front.

Speaker 2 00:18:55  It takes a little more discipline to make sure that everyone follows the process, but it ends up giving you data so you can make data driven decisions, and ultimately you're going to have better outcomes. So that's the process. we, you know, again, we comes back from fire fast and high or slow. That's really hard. It's painful. But if you actually hire in a structured way. So I might posit that instead of hiring slow hire in a structured way with data and with consistency, guess what? Maybe it doesn't have to be so slow. Or at a minimum, it's not going to be so painful. And when you have confidence that you can hire an a player, then firing someone is not risky because you know you can upgrade the position because you have a competitive advantage. You hire a players based on a data driven, structured process, and that gives you confidence to do that. And you can have that confidence if you have a structured job description, a structured candidate scorecard and a structured interview process.

Speaker 2 00:19:59  All right. So that is our trail marker for the day. I hope it's helpful for you. we have a blog about this at Growth elevated.com. If you want to read there's a little bit more detail there. And as always, please check out, other podcasts and blogs at Growth elevated.com if you want to learn how to be a better leader, and if you got topics for us or guests for the podcast, please send them our way at info at Growth elevated.com. Thank you.

Speaker 1 00:20:28  Thank you for listening to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please follow us and subscribe on your favorite podcast player and we'd be grateful if you recommend it to a friend. If you'd like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at Growth elevated.com. We'll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.