Four rules for a hot hiring edge
by Miki SaxonCan you, as a start-up or small company, compete for people in today’s overheated labor market?
Absolutely!
Best of all, it won’t cost you more dollars or time—it actually saves on both—and significantly improves your retention rate. ,
To compete, you need to implement RampUp’s four basic hiring rules:
- Complete Req Rule,
- Minimum Hiring Rule,
- 70% Rule, and
- Five-to-Seven Rule
described, including real-life examples, below.
1. Complete Req Rule Too often managers “figure out” what they are looking for through interviewing trial and error. Writing a viable req provides you with better screened candidates to interview and helps you identify all the neat things you have to sell. Finally, to guarantee success (yours, the candidate’s, the team’s, and the company’s), remember: You are not hiring a skill-set suspended in time and space or a cyborg that can be reprogrammed if needs be; you are hiring a living, breathing human being with all the pluses and minuses that entails. Once you know the process involved in writing a good, i.e., fillable, req and adhere to it, you will find that the entire hiring process becomes easier and faster. Here’s what you need to know:
The 12 ingredients of a fillable req
Company culture — If you are not conscious of, or don’t understand in depth, your company’s culture, it will be difficult to use the information as a selling tool during the interview.
2. Management style — Whatever your management style, it is critical to accurately describe and discuss it with a candidate. If your style turns off that specific candidate, then you are ahead—you found out before hiring.
3. Job description — This is a comprehensive description of what the job entails
4. Responsibilities — This is a detailed explanation of what is required of the person in the position.
5. Team synergy — Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the other people on the team allows you to define the new position in a way that will best complement and strengthen your team
6. Department interaction — People no longer work in a vacuum. You need to evaluate your department’s culture and be aware of the personal characteristics of your people.
7. Interdepartmental interaction — In today’s environment, no department can successfully function completely on its own; you must know how the interactions affect the position and to have agreement among all managers, direct and matrixed, as to the skills and personality needed.
8. Other managers/people to interview — For whatever reason these people are included, they must understand exactly what is in the req or they will be unable to contribute effectively to the project.
9. Trade-offs — There are trade-offs in any req and it is important to think them through ahead of time. The most fillable req is the one with the fewest absolutes.
10. Reality check — A good yardstick in assessing your req is whether you yourself would have wanted the job (making allowances for the difference between then and today) at the corresponding point in your own career.
11. Experience — The reason this is last on the list—instead of number one where most managers put it—is that knowing all of the prior information allows you to be both more specific about the experience needed as well as more creative about how to get it.
12. Minimum needs — The final and most crucial point, not only in the req but also in all of hiring: What are the absolute minimum requirements, from skills to personality, needed for the job? Boil down all your previous work and, since hiring should involve more than one interviewing manager, be sure that all of them are in agreement on the minimum acceptable experience and skill level for the position.
2. Minimum Hiring Rule: Hire the first person you interview who meets your minimum requirements. Short and to the point, there’s no hidden agenda and it’s not open to interpretation. It does require that you should put significant thought into number 12 of the req.
3. 70% Rule: You should be 70% sure that you want the candidate should be 70% sure that they want you before the first on-site interview happens.
To accomplish this it’s important to remember that interviewing doesn’t mean eyeball-to-eyeball. Your interviewing team can use in-depth phone interviews to make sure that you never invite candidates in to interview who don’t meet all your minimum hiring requirements—they won’t grow new skills between the time you set up the interview and the time it happens. If a critical interviewer is traveling, use additional phone interviews rather than lose the candidate by waiting.
The team had identified a potentially hot candidate but was unsure whether certain esoteric minimum skills wanted by the Joe, the CTO, were present. Bringing Katy in wouldn’t help because Joe was traveling; they couldn’t wait because she was interviewing with another company and due to get an offer. After explaining their concern to Katy they arranged an on-site interview for Thursday conditional on a phone interview with Joe Wednesday night. They the web to mimic Joe’s normal whiteboard interview style. The interview results were positive on both sides. By then the team was pretty sure they wanted her and Katy was so excited she brought her references with her on Thursday. The in-person interview confirmed what the team had felt—Katy was the right choice. By the end of Friday the references were checked, an offer was extended and it was accepted on the spot.
4. Five-to-Seven Rule: From first contact through resolution takes no more than five-to-seven business days (less is better).
Impressive doesn’t mean expensive. Speed is the most impressive action you can use to affect candidates’ decisions. People hate not knowing. They hate waiting. They hate bureaucracy. Create a hiring process in which all screening, interviewing (including multiple phone interviews), negotiating, reference checking, etc. gets done in five-to-seven working days and you will run rings around your competition.
Tracy had gone through three rounds of interviews when he read about a start-up that sounded interesting. He emailed his resume and was surprised when Jody, the CEO, called him back almost immediately and said they would like to interview him. Tracy was willing but leveled with Jody that he was due to get an offer from the other company that week so there wasn’t much time. Jody said fine and was he free to talk? Their conversation lasted about 40 minutes and Jody asked Tracy if he could talk to Kent, the engineering VP. Tracy said sure. Jody put him on hold, and a minute later Kent came on the line. That conversation lasted 30 minutes, and Kent asked if Tracey still had time. Fascinated, Tracey said yes. Over the next hour and a half Tracey talked to the team leader and two other engineers, then he was transferred back to Jody. She asked him if he could interview that evening around six and would he mind sending his references immediately. Still more amazed Tracey said he would be there and set the email. That evening Tracey interviewed with two other managers as well as all the people he had talked with earlier, then found himself back in Jody’s office. He waited nearly 10 minutes before Jody came back. She apologized but said she had wanted to get feedback from the others before seeing him. Based on the feedback she had gotten after the phone interviews Jody had already checked his references and now everybody had confirmed that they wanted him so she would like to work out an acceptable offer before he left if he didn’t mind staying a little longer. The offer was cut and Tracey accepted on the spot, saying that any company that could move that fast was where he wanted to be.
Staffing is a science—just like engineering—that can be learned. When competing head-to-head for people in any labor market, let alone a hot one, you need to use every advantage possible. Many managers see staffing as a chore and perform it grudgingly. By treating it as a chance to shine—taking time to think through your reqs, streamlining your hiring process and becoming a speed demon—you create an environment that attracts the best people at all levels.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:21 pm
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