How to Improve Your Hiring over 90% with 3 simple steps! ;)

PATH, Weeks 39 & 40

These past two weeks have been all about finding connections and strengthening my own self confidence.

I've found about 30 potential people to reach out to from about 10 of my top companies. Out of those, I was able to find emails for half of them and have made contact with two out of two people I have sent messages to... for now.

As you can see, it has been relatively uneventful on that front, so I will primarily share a written version of a podcast I recently released about the hiring process. This has been on my mind for years, ever since working at EmployToy.com, but it has now crystalized into a clear idea of what needs to be improved on both sides of the process.

Talent acquisition is always a very difficult endeavor for many businesses. It is so difficult that many of them rather outsource and downplay the task instead of doing it themselves.

Many businesses rather throw together a process that looks like what everyone else is doing to quickly be done with it.

In so doing, they make it harder on themselves in the long run.

By trying to take the easy way out and ignoring the small little details, they make it even more difficult to actually build all-star teams.

As a new job seeker who has previously hired nearly two dozen people as well as interviewed scores of hiring managers, recruiters, and talent managers I am now fairly familiar with many sides of this problem.

I've come up with a few ideas that I think will make this process so much more enjoyable for both parties.

I'd love to test these out myself, but hopefully others can test them out for me :P

Here are 3 relatively simple things any business can do to 'instantly' improve its hiring experience for both the employer and the applicants.

1 - More informative team/staff profiles

Many companies would benefit simply from providing a list of their staff with their actual roles (what they do on a daily basis, not their 'official' titles, especially for C-suite executives), their interests, as well as their contact information (this could be a personal website, or public social media page the employee wants to share).

By sharing more information about the staff, people who are interested in working there can make more meaningful connections. Instead of having to internet 'stalk' people to find their hobbies, interests, and guess at their openness to communicate; applicants like myself can more easily and reliably know who we should reach out to and for what.

Likewise, the staff will also be able to see if this person is the right person for their team. Because nearly any good applicant will be happy to reach out to the team before ever applying for a job. Instead of the job application being the first time most hiring managers ever hear about the applicant, they will now expect to have heard about an applicant earlier on in the process.

Instead of networking being some shadowy thing you know you should probably do but don't because you have no idea where to start or how to go about it, networking becomes a systematic process that anyone can do. Networking goes from being a barrier to being an open gate of entry.

2 - More transparent company pages

In the same vein of sharing more information about its employees, companies should share actual content about what it's like working there. These can be as simple as candid videos and podcasts featuring employees doing real work, to 'fly on the wall' recordings of real meetings, or even fun highlights of real outings. Either way, this content need not contain sensitive business information, but it must be an authentic window into the actual day-to-day business.

In this manner, companies can more easily communicate what the culture is like. No longer will companies need to depend on kitschy 'About' sections that read more like marketing landing pages with more fluff than meat.

If you don't want to read yet another resume filled to the brim with buzzwords and bull??, then don't make career pages and job descriptions all but begging for them!

3 - Recording every single interview

Finally (but not really), companies can improve their internal process by just recording all their interviews. This can be as simple hitting 'record' on their Zoom call, or sticking a smartphone camera in the room for in-person meetings.

Label it with the date, name, position, and round. Store it in the cloud drive that you're probably not even using enough in folders; organized per cohort>position>round. You can even go the extra mile and include a transcription of the meeting along with the set of questions, the interviewer(s), and the applicant's resume/application.

The benefit of recording your interviews is the standardization you will create. You will now be able to very clearly see the patterns of star applicants that become star employees. You will actually have a record of how people answered questions, of whether or not an application, resume, or portfolio really mattered. You can run data analytics or just have days where your team goes back and reviews all the best interviews.

The best way to predict talent at your company, is to find patterns with the talent you already have. But instead of depending on surface-level things like fancy credentials and name-brand work experience that serve as signals, you can go right to the 'source' and analyze their actual responses.

In addition, this will serve as quality control for your interviews. This will help to both continuously increase the bar, and introduce more transparency internally. This will have the added benefit of making it easy to scale that high standard. It will also allow employees to see their own interviews and remember where they started, and why they wanted to work for this company.

These are simple ideas. Simple actions that any business can do to instantly improve its hiring. In doing so, people like me can more easily do the work to connect with a potential team... to see what you actually need and how I can help. I can do things like recording myself answering a set of precursor interview questions, or showing how I work, or just going through the effort to show how much I genuinely care about the same things you care about.

Removing the black hole from the hiring process will empower both sides to make meaningful connections, and more informed decisions.

What do you think?