Five practices to build a strong hiring culture

I have rarely met a CEO who doesn’t believe that acquiring and retaining great talent is key to their organization’s success and future. But rare is the CEO who has made it a personal priority to build a strong hiring culture.

Sure, many CEOs get involved in important hiring decisions, ensure they make a compelling offer, call the candidate to make sure they accept the offer, and maybe even shape the onboarding experience. But none of that in itself creates a strong hiring culture.

David Ogilvy was spot on.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

A company of giants doesn’t happen just because you want it so, or have a strong hiring leader, or use machine learning to screen resumes, or have a robust recruiting automation software. It only happens when you create a strong hiring culture that values talent, makes hiring a key strategic process, and equips individuals to make the right hiring decisions.

What does a strong hiring culture look like?

I look for these attributes:

• People across the organization care deeply that they are bringing on board the best talent possible. No amount of process sophistication can replace this. When people care, you will get passionate debates, strong opinions on who should/should not be hired, and frustration when they disagree with a hiring decision. You need to sustain and fuel this passion. The day your people are apathetic about who you hire, you are staring at a problem far beyond one individual hire.
• You have a shared understanding of what great talent looks like, and a structured approach to assess for that. A job description (JD) is a part of this, but this is much more than a JD. What you need is a shared understanding of behaviors – attributes that make your organization, and importantly your clients, successful. Many organizations have these attributes enshrined in their values, but do not extend these systematically to the hiring process. As a result there is no predictable way for interviewers to assess for these attributes. Do not be that organization.
• You make hiring decisions usually by consensus, and never without a debrief. If you are hiring candidates without a formal (and structured) debrief, I'd assert that hiring is an administrative process for you, notwithstanding anything you'd want to believe.

So how do you create a strong hiring culture?

Here are five practices I have learnt over the years.

1. Create a structured process.

Define the stages of your hiring process, as well as the role of that stage in your hiring decision. For example, here are stages you can choose to have:

Each step should identify any areas that subsequent interviewers need to probe on. Unlike a process where interviewers may potentially ask the same questions, this approach makes the emphasis and expectations clear, reduces the overlap between interviews, and makes the hiring process a learning experience for both interviewer and interviewee.

2. Use behavioral interview techniques.

Hiring is an imperfect process. You are making an important decision with limited information in a short time. If there is one thing that can improve your odds to make a better decision, I believe it is behavioral interviewing. In this method, you as an interviewer are looking to assess how the candidate will perform in a given situation based on how she may have performed in the same situation in her past life. The questions are fairly specific (“can you share an example from your past experience when you confronted a client for missed commitments?”) and the interviewer needs to know how to follow up with further questions to validate the candidate’s answers. You ask a specific question for each attribute you are looking to check for.

Behavioral interviewing is an art. You need to get trained, but you only get better with practice.

3. Train your people on how to interview for your organization.

When was the last time you allowed a person to walk unprepared into a client meeting and pitch your company?

Yet organizations think nothing about letting their people interview candidates without preparing them for it. When an interview doesn’t have a clear purpose, it doesn't matter how you do it. But if you define your hiring approach with each stage having clear expectations on outcomes, it stands to reason that you need to prepare your people on how to get to those outcomes in a short time.

I recommend you train all your interviewers on your approach, the expected outcome of each stage, and specifically on doing behavioral interviews. When you need to add to the pool, have individuals shadow one of your experienced interviewers, and don't make exceptions for anyone, no matter how senior.

An important outcome of this training is that it elevates the importance of the hiring process. You are telling your people - this is important, you need skills to do this, we will invest in it.

4. Don't skip the debrief.

I have seen organizations that automate the hell out of the process, have many people interview the candidate, and then have the hiring manager make a decision based on yes/no inputs submitted by the interviewers. 

What a waste of everyone’s time! No one has learnt anything more about the candidate than they did through their own interview, and the organization certainly didn’t learn anything as a whole.

The debrief is important because a) it surfaces nuances that are otherwise difficult to get to, b) it improves hiring capability as everyone can learn from everyone else, and c) it reinforces the importance of hiring great talent.

A debrief should be a short meeting where everyone shares their feedback on the candidate, highlights concerns, shares feedback on what support the individual might need to be successful, collectively makes the hiring decision, and provides any feedback on the overall hiring process. While it's not necessary that all decisions be made by consensus, it is essential that everyone is heard, and no opinion is brushed aside. Debate makes the decision better, and drives collective responsibility.

Asking a simple question during the debrief like “Does this person make our company better?” acts as a terrific reminder of what everyone is trying to do. Hiring ceases to be an activity you need to take some time out for, and becomes a strategic process for becoming a stronger organization.

5. Value the candidate experience.

Ensure that every interviewer understands that the candidate experience is as important to the organization as the eventual hiring decision. Beyond the obvious point that today’s candidate may be tomorrow’s client (or refer other candidates), this is a great way to reinforce your own values with your people. When your people continuously reflect on how to elevate the candidate experience, show up on time, listen deeply, invite questions, provide and seek feedback, you are not only giving the candidate a good experience, you are also reinforcing the foundation of your own culture that will serve you well in not just hiring great talent, but elsewhere in the organization as well.

It is my experience and belief that building a strong hiring culture is among the best long-term competitive advantages that you can create. Better talent will not only help you win in the marketplace, even the conscious pursuit of better talent will make you a better organization.