Hiring By Consensus Requires Employers to Get Their S#*! Together

There's a Forbes article making the rounds that tells applicants today how they should navigate the trend of interviewing with six to 10 people at the hiring company. This "hiring by consensus" is positioned as a gauntlet the applicant must successfully overcome by winning over every single person they speak to and hoping there's not a lone holdout who derails your entire chance at getting hired.

You can read that article if you want, but it's not the article I'm looking for, nor is it the article I think should be making the rounds in today's employment market.

Here's why:

• As someone who was included in the Mass Tech Layoffs of January 2023, I applied to over 400 jobs so far this year and endured this "hiring by consensus" on repeat. And I'm not alone.
• We - all those who have faced the hiring gauntlet of trying to win over multiple interviewers who display varying levels of interest, knowledge, and preparation for speaking to a job appllicant - are so very tired. Hearing yet again from a business publication that the onus is all upon us to get hired is not only a tired talking point, but it's also completely ignorant of the employer's responsibility in the hiring process.
• Interviewers at companies, from recruiter all the way through to CEO, need to be and do better at interviewing.

Thus I give you the article we all need and deserve:

Hiring By Consensus Requires Employers to Get Their S#*! Together

In the current job market, for every job posting there are on average 250 applicants for that job (Glassdoor by way of Zety). Anecdotally, I've heard of far more, especially for the senior roles that were cut back or out for most of this year due to fears of recession and caution from investors.

Let's assume your company adheres to hiring by consensus: enlisting multiple rounds of interviews, and thus multiple employees in your company, to participate in a gauntlet of meetings with candidates over the course of several weeks.

I'd like to provide my own guidance and advice to those who are tasked with interviewing applicants and have any interest in putting the "human" back into human resources. Let's begin.

How to Interview as a Gauntlet with Greatness

1. The Kick-Off Meeting. Every single interviewer and the lead recruiter for the role you're hiring should meet at the start to align on who you're looking for. A circulated job title or description doesn't cut it. The person who will manage this role needs to come to this meeting ready with explicit requirements, from hard skills to soft skills, to lend understanding to each person the applicants will talk to. Think of it this way: you're requiring your colleagues to spend their valuable time trying to help you hire a winner who will help everyone's results improve, thus you owe it to them to provide clear instructions so they know what you're looking for. You'll also mitigate against your colleagues allowing their own perspectives and biases for who they'd need or hire to sway them against the ideal candidate (or for the absolute wrong one).
2. Require preparation. Before each interviewer joins a call or meeting with an applicant, they should be required to prepare adequately for the discussion. They need to have a list of questions prepared consisting of a question or two about their capabilities for the role and team they're interviewing for. If the interviewer is not part of the team being hired, they should prepare questions to learn how the applicant can support and interact with lateral teams to be successful. The interviewer should also review the applicant's LinkedIn profile, their CV, and any portfolio or samples of work. Finally, the interviewer should come to the interview in the right headspace. This may mean you block off the 15 to 30 minutes prior to the interview to get your interviewing hat on.
3. Sync ups after each round. The full hiring panel, along with the lead recruiter, should have an asynchronous messaging channel to update once each interview round has completed. After each interviewer has finished talking with the applicant, drop your feedback, findings, and even what you weren't able to cover in the channel. These updates may determine if the applicant proceeds to further rounds, yet they also can help remaining interviewers seek out information that couldn't be gleaned from prior rounds.
4. Respect everyone's time, including the applicant. Hiring a team member is a business decision between two parties: the job candidate and the company hiring the candidate. While you corral multiple colleagues into vetting applicants for a role you're hiring, remember this: you're all getting compensated for every minute you spend in preparation and deciding. Your applicants, on the other hand, are not. How much effort you put into your side of this hiring by consensus gauntlet is being evaluated by the candidate just as you're assessing how well they're proving themselves in each interview. If one person on an interview panel can't attend, reschedule the entire panel. If one of the interviewers ghosts or is substantially late for an interview round, apologize to the applicant and reschedule. If you decide after any round not to move forward with an applicant (and not to hold them waiting as a "just in case"), let them know - with feedback - as soon as possible. Lastly, provide an equal amount of time for them to ask you questions about the company and the role. If you find they can't fill that time with their own questions, you have valuable information about the applicant.
5. Compensate projects and exercises. Pay your applicants if you're requiring them to perform work that would, in any normal circumstance, be considered billable services. Yes, that includes 30/60/90-day plans, a campaign strategy, a social media post, a messaging outline, a video sample, and anything you're requiring a candidate to create for you. I say again: every person in your company who participates in the hiring process is already being paid. It's nonsensical to assume and expect job applicants to put forth hours of preparation for interview discussions for free, only to then perform additional work without compensation. Think about how you feel when your employer piles more job duties onto your plate without increasing your pay or title; that exact inequity plays out for your applicants when you ask for unpaid work.

Provide the How-To for Your Interviewers

How many of us have entered an interview as an applicant and, within minutes, realize we're contending with an interviewer who isn't very good at interviewing? We can see the signs within moments: darting eyes to the side due to multitasking; disinterested gestures and fiddling; obvious tells that they haven't even looked at our resume before joining the call.

Just as we all know that so many people are promoted to people managers without having actual experience or skills in managing people, we must then realize that most people managers are unpracticed at the art of interviewing. While all people managers can certainly benefit from more and more and more coaching in how to manage humans, let's just tackle in this article how crucial interviewing practice and skills are for hiring effectively.

1. Practice once a quarter. Grab a friend or peer and ask them for 30 minutes of their time - perhaps in exchange for a coffee or lunch - where they can pose as a job applicant while you interview them. While you'll undoubtedly laugh awkwardly at points, you'll also get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It's never an easy thing to be talking to someone on video with the added pressure that they're asking you to believe in them enough to pay them into perpetuity and spend 40+ hours per week working with them. Even this small bit of rehearsal can help you be a better clutch interviewer.
2. Prep and revise your interview questions. If you think about your team and, more specifically, your best performers, you can list out traits and skills that make them stand out. These traits and skills can now be turned into questions you can pose to applicants. Stumped about what questions to ask to get answers to certain queries? Google is your friend: there are countless lists out there of interview question ideas. As your team and your deliverables evolve, make sure to tweak your questions on a regular basis.
3. Ask current and former team members about their interview experience. Nothing quite like going to the source. Your current and prior employees have a gold mine of feedback they can offer you about how they felt about interviews to be hired onto your team. While opinions can certainly be subjective, you can spot trends in their input and know what you need to work on for future interviews.

To wrap up this article, you may have divined that I'm firmly in the camp of employer = applicant (rather than employer > applicant). There are reasons for this, not the least of which is my experience of being an applicant vying for a job among hundreds of thousands of other applicants who were (and often still are) seeking employment in this market. I've also worked directly or closely with talent acquisition in a few of my roles, and I know the value of respecting job applicants, as well as the detriment of disrespecting them.

Being a job applicant is certainly more stressful than being the interviewer of a job. In my mind, there's no reason that disrespect and devaluing should be piled onto that applicant's stress. Not when the alternative is to ensure your company's interviewers treat each candidate like a fellow human.

Your Turn: I want to hear from both sides! If you're an interviewer, what has been your experience (good, bad, meh) as part of the hire-by-consensus gauntlet? Applicants, how about you?