Why you need a talent selection process

As a manager, there are few moments which can be both as exciting and refreshing as bringing new talent into your team. As a new manager though, there are few moments which can seem so unnerving. I still vividly remember my very first hire as an engineering manager, taking over a team that faced numerous challenges on both the technology and people fronts. We were a small team of only 3, and 2 of the team needed to be replaced almost immediately after my arrival. We had loads to deliver, and I was feverishly working through a pipeline of candidates.

Finally after several weeks, I interview the guy I think might solve a number of our problems. He was clearly smart, had the relevant skills and experience we needed, and had worked for a couple of big name companies. Not long after I made him an offer and he started within a couple weeks — only to quit after 3 days! I arrived that Thursday morning to an email with a list of reasons why he was done, every single one of which we could have accommodated or worked around. In hindsight, I was actually really lucky here and sidestepped a case of having the right person in the wrong environment. Little did I know it then, but I’d probably learned one of the most important lessons of my career as a hiring manager — failing to incorporate functional AND behavioural interviewing techniques into a hiring process is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. I’m still shocked to see how many interviewers fail to dig into competencies across both areas when bringing talent into their teams, because absolutely nothing is more important to your business than your people.

Oh I hear those of you out there who might think your technology or next round of funding or whatever are more important. And sure, those things truly are important. But let me ask a different way — who is going to buy or use your product? People. Ah, you’re a B2B company, so that’s different, eh? And what are companies made of but…people?! And who is it that’s going to build this fabulous product of yours? I refer you to my previous point RE:people. “But we’re focused on breaking things, disrupting, and we’ll get back to this soft stuff later.” Cool, have you ever heard of a company called Uber? They represent a classic example of a company that failed to recognise the importance of people both inside and outside the company.

Look, when it comes to your builders and the employees that can take your idea from good to great, hiring the wrong person can be a poison pill for teams. Bad hires are proven to have an immense cost on time, productivity, and trust within an organisation. In my case while it certainly sucked that I was back at square one for filling this role, my poor hire was barely around long enough to have an impact on morale. I certainly felt a bit foolish, but in a world of contract employment versus at-will employment, I could have set myself up for a very lengthy and onerous process of managing someone out. Thankfully my mistake occurred while in the US; had I moved to Europe already the outcome could have been much different had the candidate not been so eager to leave.

I know the importance of having a clear talent selection process and exploring a candidate’s functional and behavioural suitability because I’ve seen it work in organisations that do so, and have seen the reasons why companies don’t and the resulting outcomes. My time at Amazon offered probably the best insights into an organisation that drives for clarity around role requirements, assesses whether one can do the job at hand, and digs deeply into whether the candidate will succeed within Amazon’s culture from a behavioural point of view. As an Amazon Bar Raiser, I’d have led hundreds of interviews and saw the impact that this approach had upon on our success and retention rates as we grew from a company of a few thousand when I joined to over 350,000 by the time I moved on. Sure, we didn’t get every hire right. We did observe over time however that ? to ? of all failures were most often not down to an inability to perform the functional requirements of the role, but due to behavioural and values misalignments that made it harder for such employees to succeed culturally.

So what can you do to get better today at your own hiring, you ask? Here’s a simple checklist to start with:

1. Know what the heck you actually need to hire for from a functional perspective. It’s critical to understand the skills you need to bring into your company to support your success. Get specific, because this isn’t like choosing a new app for your phone to handle a task. You’re talking about bringing a real-life person into your company and them possibly leaving another role or even moving to join your team.
2. Understand how to assess the behavioural & cultural fit for your company. A great place to start are with your company values (or leadership principles as we called them at Amazon), so long as they truly represent the behaviours which are valued and recognised within your company. Know what high performance looks like in your company, and develop questions to see if your candidate demonstrates them in their past behaviours. Another simple way can to be ask if the person you’re about to hire is someone you’d admire yourself and from whom you might learn something.
3. Assemble & organise the right people to gather the right data to make an effective decision. Choosing people across teams and disciplines can be useful to understand how a candidate might interact with their peers. Having people at the right level who can assess decision-making expectations for the candidate’s role is also key — a noob software developer probably can’t judge architecture that a principal engineer would need to build. Divide and conquer and give everyone specific areas to cover. Having 6 people ask the same question wastes everyone’s time. Assess successes AND failures — everyone has some form of the latter and those who don’t are often full of BS.
4. Create a mechanism for objective decision making. This could be as simple as a hiring meeting where all interviewers share and discuss the candidate’s answers. Interviewers should be able to substantiate their decisions. The Bar Raiser veto at Amazon was also highly effective at maintaining objectivity and preventing overzealous hiring managers from making offers to the wrong candidates.
5. Don’t compromise and be ready to move on. While it can feel frustrating to get through an onsite interview and feel “close”, listen to your gut unless you can effectively manage the risks. Don’t settle for second best when it comes to your company’s paramount resource. Remember, the costs of a bad hire may not seem evident upfront but they are massive.
6. Create your own fast-fail mechanisms for when you do mess up. Remember that both your company and the candidate have a lot invested here, so maximise chances for success by introducing onboarding programmes and mentors who can help orient and model what your new employees should strive towards. As a manager be sure to provide regular feedback both on the spot and scheduled at critical points along the first several months to ensure there are no surprises. And of course, be sure to include probation periods for new employees so that there’s always a ripcord to pull in the worst cases.

Hopefully you’ve already incorporated many of these ideas into your own process or are beginning to do so. If this sounds like something you’re not doing or only doing okay and want to improve, we’d love to help you go from good to great. I was lucky to learn my big hiring lesson very early as a manager and avoid making that mistake so easily again. What mistakes have you made yourself in hiring, and what have you done to improve your own hiring process?

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