Many entrepreneurs, no matter how savvy they are about business, have relatively little recruiting experience. If this describes you, join the club. It may be that you were always too busy with other business issues to get deeply involved in the hiring process. It may be that until your recent growth spurt, your company didn’t have many hiring needs. It may be that you’ve emigrated recently from the corporate world and always had human resources professionals to help with your people requirements. And of course, it’s possible that you’ve recently opened your first business and have never needed to hire anyone before.
Whatever your situation, it’s possible that you have little experience with some or all of the three stages of the recruitment process: sourcing, screening, and securing. While all of our previous discussion may have prepared you for these three stages, you may be lacking some of the knowledge and nuances that only come when you’ve enmeshed yourself in recruiting candidates.
To help you gain the information necessary to make a good hire, let’s look at what happens as you move through the recruiting process and the skills you need at each stage.
Consider recruiting within the context of volume and skill. In the sourcing stage, the key tasks require high volume and low skill. More specifically, you’re identifying scores or even hundreds of candidates through various means, but you don’t have to be particularly discerning at this stage about which candidate makes the best fit. In the screening stage, you must exhibit a higher level of skill as the volume goes down; you have to be astute about whether a candidate meets the job’s technical requirements as well as if they seem like they’d be a good match for your company, given your mission and values. Through interviewing, you reduce the list of candidates to a much smaller group of qualified individuals.
In the securing stage, the volume is low but the skill is high. Here, how good you are as a recruiter can result in hiring a great candidate who will mean a lot to your enterprise . . . or in losing that candidate to someone else. You may say the wrong thing during a discussion with your candidate of choice and turn her off. You may make a hire based on your gut rather than a thoughtful, values-driven process and bring in someone you get along with but who contributes little to the company.
Perhaps the biggest problem for neophyte recruiters is that they lose sight of the essential humanness of the process. They focus primarily or exclusively on a candidate’s qualifications for the job; they attempt to sell the candidate by offering a high salary, perks, or titles. What they fail to do, though, is connect with the candidate on a personal level. This doesn’t mean just being buddy-buddy during an interview. It means making the effort to find out what a candidate really cares about, what he hopes to achieve in his job, his career, his life. And it means responding to that personal mission by sharing what the company’s mission is, and exploring whether there is a match.
It also means being sufficiently empathic that you put yourself in a candidate’s shoes and anticipate what’s going through her mind as she considers your offer. When I first started out, I didn’t realize the importance of seeing things from a candidate’s perspective. One of my first major hires was for an IT vice president at a startup, and I moved through sourcing to screening without a hitch. I found a guy, we’ll call him Jerry, who seemed extraordinarily well-suited to the startup, both in terms of his skills and his fit in the culture. In fact, during my last meeting with Jerry, I was given the go-ahead to offer him the job, and he accepted.
Done deal. Only it wasn’t. I failed to prepare Jerry for what might happen during his exit interview, especially given who he was and his value to his current employer. I simply assumed that he would tell them he was leaving. Instead, when he told them he was resigning to take another job, he expressed regret that he was departing and talked about how much he had enjoyed working there. To his boss, it seemed as if he were leaving the door open a crack—this wasn’t his conscious intent, but it’s how it sounded. The boss put together a new compensation package for Jerry and leveraged their personal relationship: He made Jerry feel guilty about leaving. Jerry eventually opted to stay with his company and reneged on his acceptance.
This was my fault, a result of my inexperience. I should have prepared him for his exit interview, instructing him to state definitely that he was leaving, both in writing and verbally. Without this instruction, Jerry acted like he was asking his boss for permission to leave.
The lesson I learned was never to neglect the human element. To secure candidates—especially talented, in-demand ones—you need to take into consideration their personalities, their positions, and their hopes and dreams. Essentially, you need to manage the process until they formally accept your offer and they show up for work in their new role on day 1.
Entrepreneurs who are heavily involved in recruiting develop a mental checklist of tasks that will help ensure good hires. They recognize that recruiting the right person for a job—especially an important job—is more difficult than it might appear. As a result, they know their involvement has to be process-driven and address key issues from the time they start searching until they secure the candidate of their choice.
While this list becomes second nature to entrepreneurs who do a lot of recruiting, some of the steps may not even occur to you if you’ve never been heavily involved in hiring people for your company. Here are six recruiting to-dos that will help you effectively undertake what is often neglected or addressed improperly:
1.Raise the candidate’s enthusiasm levels. Sell emotionally, not just factually. Let yourself be enthusiastic and even passionate when talking about the company and the opportunity for the candidate who takes the position. Some entrepreneurs may think allowing emotion into the conversation isn’t professional. In most big corporate settings, the human resources people might agree. But entrepreneurial environments are smaller, culturally more cohesive entities. To use a cliché, entrepreneurs treat people like family. A job isn’t just a job to most candidates; it represents more than a way to make money. For some, it’s a chance to make a difference. For others, it’s an opportunity to learn and grow. For others, it provides a place of affiliation and inclusion. Don’t fake emotion when you speak to candidates, but you should be genuine and speak from the heart about the company.
2.Provide an intellectual spark. The previous point doesn’t mean you should make the entire pitch emotional. Balance it with a description of what about the job will challenge candidates. What will the job help them learn? How it will help them meet their career goals? What’s the most difficult aspect of the job? The most rewarding?
3.Evaluate technical chops against 100 percent of what is required for the role. Think in advance about the level of expertise you want a candidate to possess. Don’t make the mistake of simply comparing candidates against each other because you might hire the best candidate and still only achieve 60 percent of the technical chops required. Aim high when it comes to the knowledge, competencies, and experience you’re targeting.
4.Seek a core values fit. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Mapping a candidate’s personal DNA against the ability to amplify the cultural DNA of your organization requires you to think about these issues in advance of making your choice. Which candidate is best suited to carry out your company’s mission and which one best reflects your values?
5.Assess compensation and market analysis. Before interviewing the first candidates, design an offer and structure it in a way that will work for you AND for the finally selected candidate. This is the key to maximizing your talent acquisition strategy. Get external market data on a compensation range for your target hire and validate this along the process of interviewing different candidates. Put together a final financial compensation package that is reflective of both the market comparables as well as the level of expertise this candidate possesses.
6.Create a closing strategy. This is the most sensitive part of the entire recruitment process and most offers are delivered with the blunt sensitivity of a fast food happy meal; or, as in my story, without preparing your choice adequately so that you make sure he doesn’t turn down your offer.
Here’s an “extra credit” exercise that you might also consider integrating in your “to-do” list as you get ready to embark on your closing recruiting pitch:
Have finalist candidates present a 90-day plan before you make an offer. After the second or third interview, inform candidates that they’re in the running for the job and that you’d like them to prepare a roadmap for hitting the ground running. They are free to ask deep questions and reconnect with anyone they’ve already met. Creating this plan in advance of the final offer will help them and you visualize success together. It will help set proper expectations on budget, resources, and performance metrics. It will clarify the social contracts, fact finding, and collaborative capabilities necessary to get stuff done and will raise enthusiasm levels for what is possible. You will be able to discern how much time and care they’ve taken for preparation of this presentation. And, most of all, it will give you a sense of their professional virtues, values, and mission alignment.
Closing is not only the most sensitive part of the process, but it’s the one that entrepreneurs often take for granted. Hubris is a danger, especially for business owners whose pride in their companies may blind them to how others see those companies. Lois, for instance, runs a medium-sized family business, and she’s helped it double in size over the past five years. Because the business has been consistently profitable, she has been able to provide her employees with great benefits—daycare for kids, an exercise room, generous vacation policies, and so on. Lois believes that her company is a tremendous place to work and that people are lucky to work there.
Lois was involved in the recruitment process for a sales manager, and after interviewing a number of candidates, she had decided that Marcia was an ideal fit for the company. She made an offer to Marcia during their third interview, and rather than accepting immediately, Marcia asked Lois a number of questions about commission increases if her group met or exceeded quotas as well as about senior leadership position opportunities if Marcia performed well. Lois had expected Marcia to jump at the offer, which she felt was generous. Consequently, she avoided answering Marcia’s questions directly, offering only a vague assurance that if things went well, Marcia would be compensated fairly. She also kept repeating how Marcia was going to love working for the company, how it was a great environment, and how Marcia would be supervising great people.
Marcia told Lois she needed to think about it for a few days and talk to her family. When she got back to Lois, she explained that she had decided to turn the offer down and take a position with a larger company that would give her more opportunities to advance.
You’re not going to secure every candidate you seek, but you will have a much higher batting average if you listen hard to candidates during the close, anticipate what their concerns or conflicts might be, and respond to them. Listen especially attentively to how candidates hope to develop within your company. If you’re hiring for an individual contributor position, determine if the candidate expects opportunities to develop more expertise and experience—a reasonable goal—or if he anticipates being developed as a manager or a leader. If that isn’t your intent, then you must make clear what this candidate can expect so that there isn’t a disconnect in expectations from the start. Similarly, it’s a red flag if a leader or manager anticipates technical development when you hope she’ll grow as a leader.
To close the deal, never forget that the individual you’re courting may be in high demand. Either she’s already got a good job or she’s received (or is likely to receive) more than one offer. If you’re hiring for an important position, you’re probably pursuing someone who has a significant amount of expertise and experience. Given this, you need to close with a bang and not a whimper. Follow a time tested process for reading their emotional data and securing their commitment. Here are three suggestions about how to do so:
Anticipate that someone—the candidate’s current employer, other companies—will try to keep or hire the person you want. It’s great if you can offer this candidate a terrific compensation package, but as I’ve discussed, this isn’t necessarily what’s going to clinch the deal. Instead, you can preempt the counteroffer during the close by asking the candidate these three questions:
1.Do you know what the role is and what it will take to be successful? Do you have a full understanding of this role?
2.Do you think you can have high success in the role? Can you do the job?
3.Do you want the role? Do you want to do this job?
By asking these questions and receiving affirmative responses, you remind the candidate why the job you’re offering is the best job.
In addition, expect that the candidate’s employer, upon hearing that he’s departing, will fight to keep the employee. To win the fight, describe all of the possible and impossible terms that their boss will offer to keep them. Be relentless until they say something like, “I would never take a counteroffer!” or “Even if they offered me the moon and the stars, I wouldn’t stay” or “They’re not likely to do that and I wouldn’t stay even if they did.”
During the close, you’re inoculating the candidate against whatever offer his employer makes (or an offer someone else makes). By telling the candidate what the offer might be in the most optimistic terms possible—i.e., suggesting the highest salary that might be part of a counteroffer—you make it much more difficult for that offer to have a significant impact. For one thing, the offer won’t be a surprise; you’ve discussed it with the candidate. For another, the candidate has told you that he won’t accept it; most people will honor their word. For a third, the counteroffer the candidate receives may be less than the grandiose picture you’ve painted; it will be underwhelming and he’ll reject it.
By the close, you should have an understanding of what is most important to your final candidate. Focus on the candidate’s priorities rather than your own. Too often, entrepreneurs try to close by talking about themselves and their companies while ignoring what’s top-of-mind for the candidate. Delivering the offer with impact means in the right order (from the candidate’s mindset) and in the fullest of value. If cash is the most important tangible aspect of the offer for the candidate, discuss that first. If the offer is $200,000 base salary with a 30 percent bonus, talk about it as cash compensation of $260,000 on a $200,000 base. The very first number is the one that sticks in her mind. Then discuss the other things you’re offering—benefits package, travel, title, and so on. Get the order of the offer presentation right and also the presentation of the offer.
In the close, this is what should have the most impact on candidates. Many great athletes visualize their success before their performance. Likewise, help candidates picture what life on the job will be like in the coming months and years. What will life look like working with colleagues, building a team, and performing their best work? Help them project how as they grow in the job and with the company, they will fulfill their personal mission and work according to the values they hold dear.
Everyone makes mistakes, even the most experienced recruiters. Over time and with the learning that comes from doing something repeatedly, these mistakes become less and less frequent. But you can also avoid mistakes if you know what they are and keep them in mind as you’re sourcing, screening, and securing candidates. Let’s review the major errors and what you can do to avoid committing them:
As I’ve emphasized earlier, you can’t recruit by the seat of your pants. Some entrepreneurs learn this lesson the hard way; they wing it and end up with an employee who is ill-suited to the job or the company. After making this mistake a few times, business owners wise up and start using a more formal process to find the people they seek. As important as entrepreneurs’ gut instincts are to their decision making, this is an area that often defies instinct. During all three states—sourcing, screening, and securing—rely on a formal process. In this way, you’re not making a hiring decision based on a “false positive,” a deceptively strong feeling about a candidate based on personal traits rather than professional and mission value. Admittedly, it’s tough to resist false positives, especially if you’ve never been involved in recruiting employees in the past. As counterintuitive as it may be, focus on skills, values, and mission fit in a structured, logical manner.
As you might have figured out, this word is an amalgam of zebra, horse, camel, and vicuña. As you also know, this creature doesn’t exist. Neither does the perfect candidate. You may want to hire a marketing executive who has twenty-five years experience in a given area, possesses great skills in advertising, sales promotion, and online selling, and has values and mission that line up with your own. In reality, you need to prioritize certain abilities over others and make trade-offs to obtain a candidate who will do the best job, both now and in the long run.
Thinking in terms of priorities and trade-offs can be a challenge if you haven’t been involved in search and selection before. You may find yourself overly focused on gaining the approval of others you respect—board members, team members, investors—and trying to make a hire that will please or impress them. As a result, you may hire someone with the most impressive credentials or who was recommended to you by one of your investors. This prevents you from assessing trade-offs and priorities objectively. For instance, let’s say you’re hiring for a leadership position, but this leader will also be an integral part of a team. What’s more important: the ability to delegate versus the ability to contribute to the team dynamic? Similarly, you may have a list of competencies for the position, but which ones are more important than others? And what if a candidate seems to value the same norms as you do and her goals dovetail with the company’s direction, but she lacks some prioritized skills?
Being able to weigh all these factors as you move through the recruiting process can make the difference between a great hire and good one.
This is a common beginner mistake, made with the best of intentions. You founded a startup and everyone is relatively new to the business. You’re worried about recruiting, and so you create a committee consisting of investors, board members, and consultants to help you make key hires. The problem: Too many cooks spoil the broth. You’ll end up with too many candidates and too many arguments over who is the right candidate. Instead, keep the number of people involved to yourself and up to three others to advise you. Be sure to select for your interview committee people who are adept at both selling and assessing against your Blueprint. In this way, you’ll get a diversity of ideas but not a paralyzing and overwhelming amount.
You hire someone based on the recommendation of someone you respect or who is in a position of power—a leader in your field, a consultant, an accomplished friend. They tell you, “Hire Joan, she is brilliant and worked for me at Company X and performed at a consistently high level. She’s looking for a job, so make her an offer immediately so that no one else hires her before you.”
Instead, ask yourself this question: Is this the right hire for us? These two little words change everything because then it’s about a process to define and articulate the right profile, conceptual models, and methodology for securing the right hire for the company, the role, and the team. As much as you might trust and respect the person who is recommending a candidate, that person probably is unaware of your culture and mission—all the recommending person knows is that this individual performed well in a similar role in the past. What the recommender doesn’t know—and you do after reading this book—is that fit is crucial. Joan can perform brilliantly for Company X but not for Company Y because of this factor.
Speaking of teams, recruiting with this structure in mind is relatively new for many entrepreneurs. While teams have been the basic structural component in tech startups for quite a while, the same isn’t true for other types of small businesses. They still retain a classic pyramid structure or some variation on it that relies on individual contributors for success. Entrepreneurs relish individual contributors, and rightly so, but teams are becoming the norm for all types of companies.
Recruiting for leadership or executive teams requires all the same principles I’ve discussed throughout the book. But beyond that, it helps to look for certain “types.” I’ve found that the teams that perform best in entrepreneurial settings usually contain five distinct styles/abilities. Let’s look at who these types are and how you can identify them during the recruiting process:
You may already have this person on your team—you. Typically, founders and CEOs are the ones with a grand idea and purpose. If you’re a visionary for a railroad company, you’re the one who discovers new, potentially profitable routes and decides if trains should go to these markets. It’s possible, though, that you don’t fulfill this role or that you need to hire someone with a fresh vision—someone who is more tied into new and emerging markets, for instance.
To find this individual, look for someone who can articulate a future for your company that is based on data, but who speaks about it with enthusiasm and conviction. People who can talk about all the great things they can do with your company are a dime a dozen; most leadership-level people talk a good game. But does this person support his vision with data—with a discussion of trends, market numbers, proven social media strategies? And does he talk from the heart, not just the head—is his vision something that he’s passionate about?
The analytical, detail-oriented operator is a necessary counterbalance to the visionary. This person is working behind the scenes, figuring out tactical execution to drive the unit economics of the business and achieve performance results. This person will ensure operational excellence and that the trains run on time.
To identify the operator, review the lessons of Chapter 10 on getting things done. Be alert for individuals who are detail oriented and task driven. They aren’t the ones who spend the interview discussing theoretical business concepts or strategy; they aren’t the visionaries. Instead, they relish budgeting and planning, figuring out solutions to knotty tactical problems. They don’t mind working hard, and when you talk to them about all the tasks associated with the position, they respond positively.
A cousin of the operator, this person contributes to teams by filling the role of master crafter. In tech companies, this may mean heading the design team. But even in non-tech companies, this is a crucial role. Engineers design and build products or are responsible for creating and maintaining services.
During recruiting, it’s relatively easy to identify engineers. Sometimes, they’re obviously the ones who design the software or create the products. When it’s not so obvious, search for people who love to build things. They like nothing better than sketching out ideas on napkins in restaurants or using whiteboards to sketch out their concepts. They create stuff—stuff that makes the company money and helps systems operate effectively.
Even the best and most innovative products don’t sell themselves. You need a master dealmaker to lead distribution. This person has a knack for creative relationship building and can orchestrate the marketing and sales deals that fund your operation with the right pricing model.
Dealmakers may come from sales and marketing functions or they may be from other disciplines, but they are relationship builders and alliance makers. They’re the ones vendors and customers call when they have problems, and they understand how to move people toward consensus, even when they are initially miles apart. During interviews, they like talking about the deals they’ve done and how they got done. The “how” is an element to seek; it shows that an individual relishes the process of dealmaking that gets results.
This individual will have a high degree of emotional intelligence and a background in sales, recruiting, or other role interfacing with people. Individuals who facilitate teams can come from any function. What distinguishes them is an ability to bring the right people together in the right way and make sure they’re doing the right things. In some tech companies, this individual is called the Chief People Officer, and it’s an apt title. In a knowledge economy where data and insights are the differentiator, someone needs to take active responsibility for making sure that employees know how to work together to maximize their insights.
While recruiting, focus on candidates who can discuss teams from a deeply human perspective. In other words, they don’t just use jargon to discuss team-building techniques but express their ideas about how to handle conflicts within teams, manage dominant personalities, and the like.
Not every entrepreneur wants to be involved in recruiting. If you’ve managed to avoid doing it in the past, you may be entering into the process reluctantly—either out of necessity (you have to hire someone fast) or because others are requesting your involvement. It’s also possible that you want to be involved but there are many other things distracting you from this responsibility—you’re dealing with a difficult customer or trying to fix a broken system.
Whatever the case, here’s my advice: You can’t be effective in recruiting if you do it halfway. If you just show up at the final interview to pick a candidate or make a hiring decision based on what your people have told you, you’re not doing much good.
Even if you don’t have much experience with recruiting or feel you’re not very skilled at the tasks required, you need to be committed and involved through sourcing, screening, and securing. Never forget that you’re the one who knows the company best—you’re the one who is aware of the company’s DNA and how you hope it evolves in the future. This knowledge will go a long way toward hiring the right person; it will go a long way even if you think you’re a lousy interviewer or aren’t that perceptive about people or lack the patience to review a long list of candidates.
Have other people help you do the recruiting tasks you’re not that great at or aren’t interested in doing. But stay involved, contribute your ideas, and meet with finalists for key positions. Even if this is the very first hire you’ve ever made, this involvement will serve you and your company well.