Hiring Managers: optimize the hiring funnel and have a robust, reliable, and repeatable recruitment process with the best results PART I

Hiring Managers: optimize the hiring funnel and have a robust, reliable, and repeatable recruitment process with the best results

PART I

No one said technical recruiting would be easy, but it also doesn't seem like it should be this hard. Engineers want to make money and build cool stuff. Companies want to pay them to build it. What's the disconnect?

It's the unoptimized hiring funnel.

And maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but hiring is teamwork, in the sense of cooperation between a recruiter, interviewers, and the Hiring Manager.?

Recruiter's job is to find the candidates most likely to succeed. The interviewer's job is to keep the false positive rate low (a bad engineer being hired and later fired), and the hiring manager's job is to make a final hire/no-hire decision.??

Bad hires are very visible and expensive to a company (in salary, management cost, and morale for the entire team). A bad hire sucks the energy from the whole company.?

Dear Hiring Manager, invest your time, in the beginning, to save it later?

Understanding the complete picture of hiring makes you a better hiring manager with better results. As simple as that.?

The Recruiter only usually sees the overwhelming hiring tsunami, while everyone contacting them is focused on their particular slice of the hiring funnel (don't take me wrong, I know you have a full-time job, and that is not hiring). Hiring is an internal process like everything else.

Everything is happening at once:

• Engineers are slacking Recruiter to reschedule an interview for this morning that they booked 5 days ago.?
• You wonder if they've found anyone to interview yet because you don't like any candidates they sent you last week.?
• Leadership is asking your Recruiter if they're on track to meet the hiring goals for this quarter...
• Your Recruiter's Slack is screaming with red notification circles; email is in triple digits, the calendar is covered in Zoom invites, and ATS is just a mess, with candidates who bring their agendas and schedules to the table.

It's a firehose of digital "wants" and "needs" coming at Recruiter from every direction,?ALL PRIORITY ONE, ALL THE TIME

• Engineers hate getting pulled from work to run too many interviews with a "no."
• Team leads are worried that their current team will get so fed up with interviewing and covering the gap work?
• You, as a hiring Manager, need new hires to execute the projects slated for this quarter
• Your CTO wants to scale at lightning speed with smart minds behind keyboards yesterday.

So, start from here:?

• Decide with your hiring team how to communicate - I'd suggest a dedicated Slack channel for each role you are filling in together.?

It works well. I usually invite a hiring Manager and Interviewers to join the channel. Slack has great options, so I can quickly announce upcoming interviews, cancellation of interviews, find urgent interview replacements, and talk about all subjects related to this specific role.?

My hint

Don't discuss candidates on Slack or email using their names or any nicknames that can identify them according to the GDPR rules. First, because they can ask to remove all data related to them and look for any data to pull from Slack or email makes it more complicated and challenging?to be compliant with GDPR rules. Second, you have ATS, so keeping all candidates' data and notes in one place is much easier.?

Have a code of conduct:??

It's usually me as a Recruiter who prepares Slack channels and a code of conduct, so everybody in the hiring team knows what to do. Still, as a Hiring Manager, you can suggest to your Recruiter something like this.?

In my code of conduct, you will find, for example:

Holidays

Dear Interviewer:

• Please inform your Recruiter on Slack about your holidays 2 weeks before it starts. Interviews are often scheduled 2 weeks ahead, so it's a proper time for a Recruiter to be informed not to schedule interviews with you;
• Find a replacement for yourself and inform your Recruiter on Slack; it's important to keep interviewing during your absence;

And more.?

Have a workplace with all hiring topics covered:

When I join a new hiring team, I prepare the whole workspace in Notion (my favorite) or any other tool the company uses. It's the easiest way to introduce everybody from the team to the hiring process step by step.?

So I post there:

• how the recruitment process looks step by step,?
• what's the recruiter's role,?
• what's the interviewer's role,?
• what the Hiring Manager is responsible for,?
• how to prepare a good job description,?
• onboarding to the new role,?
• code of conduct,?
• how to interview,?

And more.?

Again, it works well so far because all info and rules are in one place. The whole process and communication have structure, and everybody from the team needs to agree on it and commit.

Select default interviewing hours for your recruiters:

Oh my, scheduling interviews is the worst recruiter's nightmare. First, candidates have their schedules, and second because, interviewers have their plans. Imagine asking both sides about their availability whenever you want to schedule an interview. It's not only time-consuming but also messy, and it leads to frequent mistakes. Instead, select default interviewing hours, ask your interviewers to block their calendars, and voilà. The Recruiter can now offer default interviewing slots to candidates to pick up.?

My hint:?

From my experience - if the candidate is interested in the company, they will find a way to have an interview during your default interviewing hours. And you don't need to fear losing the candidate because of their unavailability. It's better to have morning and afternoon default interviewing hours so candidates can pick up the time that works for them better.

Create an Ideal Candidate Persona and technical requirements so you can onboard your Recruiter and start hiring:

List attributes you want in a candidate, from experience to interpersonal skills.?

Understanding your perfect candidate helps:

• create a targeted job advertisement,?
• Search, screen, and select suitable candidates,?
• prepare working technical interview

Decide what skills you're looking for:

There is not a single set of skills that define a good programmer. Instead, there is a sea of diverse skill sets. No engineer can be strong in all of these areas. The first step to running a good recruitment process is deciding what skills matter for the role. I recommend you ask yourself the following questions.?

• ?Do you need fast, iterative programmers, or careful, rigorous programmers?
• ?Do you want someone motivated by solving technical problems or building a product?
• ?Do you need skills with a particular technology, or can a smart programmer learn it on the job?
• ?Is academic CS/math/algorithm ability essential or irrelevant?
• ?Is understanding concurrency / the C memory model / HTTP important?

There are no correct answers to these questions. I work with successful companies that come down on both sides of each one. But what is key is making an intentional choice based on your needs. The anti-pattern to avoid is picking interview questions randomly (or letting each interviewer decide). When that happens, company engineering culture can skew in a direction where more and more engineers have a particular skill or approach that may not be important for the company.?

Define each skill listed, so everybody in the team understands exactly what you mean.

It's not the end of optimizing?the hiring funnel. You will find more tips&tricks in the PART II article.

In the meantime, I have created a LinkedIn group for Hiring Managers in tech. It's a safe place for Hiring Managers to share their doubts about hiring, increase their knowledge on hiring & interviewing and simply grow together to give the best experience for candidates and have the best results in hiring.?

?Realistic&working solutions in hiring that are easy to implement for Hiring Managers

? Tips on interviewing?

? QA?

Feel free to join - Tips & tricks on tech hiring for Hiring Managers??

If you are a Tech Recruiter reading the article, you are more than welcome to join a Li group for Tech Recruiters in Europe.

The main goal of this group is to build the biggest and the strongest community of tech recruiters across Europe to grow together?? Weekly press on recruiting & sourcing in 1 place ???

Info on free courses ???

Contracting jobs for recruiters ??

Feel free to join - Tech Recruiters in Europe??

Aleksa