A few ideas to hack your talent acquisition practices.

So this is my first article on LinkedIn, and this topic is a great one to start with...

Lately talent acquisition practices have been targeted as one of the most important things to achieve talent density. If you haven't heard about Talent density concept, it got famous in Reed Hasting and Erin Meyer book, in this best seller edition of "No rules, rules" about Netflix culture.

And one important thing that comes out of this book is that talent density, among other factors, will drive you to inexorable success. That's why it is so important. Easy to read, hard to achieve.

What is really interesting is that it has different amount of relevance from the standpoint you want to take speaking about small, mid-size and big companies considering employees #.

For small companies, including all growing startups in this statement, talent density is the core of your early success, and early success means you will keep your company alive. Your business model could be amazing, your added value could be the greatest, your company could be even in that Zero to One logic, following Peter Thiel, were you are offering something that changes the game, but if you don't have talented people working alongside talented people, everything could fail. So, you have to pick wisely.

Speaking about mid-size and big companies, this concept gets blurry. Because you stop looking for the core. The business is already up and what these companies are looking for is maintenance. How to keep the company up-and running, doing the trade-off of people leaving, even letting the founder team go, or more commonly named "the first hundred" leave the house. But, best mid-size and big companies that are still aiming for talent density, are easy to identify.

So...how to achieve this "talent density" without messing it up? Here are a couple of ideas I'd like to share.

1. Be transparent from the beginning, even if what you will communicate is 99% uncertainty. Your company momentum, structure, salary range to hire, issues, value, culture needs to be well pitched from the first interaction.
2. Train your interviewers. Forget about people having years of experience interviewing, trusting them could be one of your biggest error, because people avoids hard conversations, so they forget about topic N°1.
3. Explain why. Most of the time, roles are presented as standard functions to be done in a period of time with certain context. That's bullshit if you have an uncertain context. Use N°1 and N°2 topics to be able to explain why you're requiring the person with that set of skills and knowledge.
4. Be flexible to trade-off technical knowledge. This is one of the industry's pain in the ass. We are not programmed to think about learning curves, we are always thinking on having a perfect match. Not even Tinder ensures that, and they made "match" concept really famous. Always use timeframes to understand what's "hire-able", using scenarios of profiles+learning period to accomplish whatever is needed in the N°3 topic.
5. Be descriptive. Please don't say you have a great/good culture/environment/teams/leadership. Humans interpret, interpretation generates perceptions, perceptions creates expectations, and expectations are really hard to handle. Because whenever the wrong expectation is consolidated, it is too late. Most of the times you already hired the person without creating the correct picture. Joaquín, what's the correct picture, read N°1, 2, 3, 4 topics. Focus on describing the context, forget about trying to emotionally engage the candidate through your emotional words by your personal perception as an interviewer. Be passionate while describing, but don't put those blurry and promising words on your mouth if you're not using N°1 concept as your axiom.
6. Don't hire by your "guts feeling". As we are human beings, intuition is one of the most powerful source of perceptions, but it's going to be the really LAST resource that you will put into the game when the time comes to choose whoever is advancing/getting hired on a process. If somebody comes with "I have the feeling that this is not the candidate", push that person to use N°5 topic to explain to you that perception. If this person is unable to do this, bias is on the way and you need to put your N°2 topic in action.

Happy to help and happy to connect if your ideas are similar to this, but I would be delighted to connect if you think otherwise.

I won't reject a coffee invite.

My articles are all made in one attempt, so sorry if you find any wording mistake ;)

If you made it until here, thanks for reading.

Joaquín.