Establishing a good hiring practice is vital to maintaining a strong company culture and a healthy balance sheet. The most important step in this process is identifying gaps in the organization crucial for optimizing performance. Formally completing this process confirms the need for the position and distills the role the individual will play in the business’s growth and operations.
Candidate Sourcing
The qualifications in a typical job posting are sterile and disconnected from the actual skill-set sought by the organization. Curating a job posting, job description, and hiring process to the true needs of the position sets the stage for a productive and committed new hire.
Padding job descriptions with degree requirements, years of experience, and software proficiencies rarely translates into hiring someone who is a valuable addition. The candidate pool is often filled with individuals who meet many of these empty specs, but ultimately don’t possess the qualities needed to move the company forward. Just because someone has been a CEO before doesn’t mean they’ll make a good CEO at every company.
Candidate Selection
Candidate selection is best left bespoke to each position – no two positions, even at the same company, require the same vetting process. Resume review, selection of interviewers, and the interview structure cannot be plug-and-play or determined solely by HR.
Ideally, the hiring manager takes the lead and lays out the guiding principles for all team members involved in the evaluation process. The concrete qualities include assessing for cultural contribution, intellectual dexterity, and emotional intelligence. The intangible quality is that each member of the team comes away with the overarching sense that the candidate will integrate well, contribute productively, and enrich the company culture. Curating the interview to the dynamics and requirements of the local work ecosystem lays the foundation for mutual assessment of alignment.
Candidate Integration
The hiring process doesn’t end when the offer is accepted – it is an ongoing process that can span the entire first year of employment. In some cases, it lasts even longer. New hire integration is crucial to establishing a resilient relationship. From introductions to one-on-one check-ins, and every step in between, hiring managers that create purposeful pathways for their employees sustain a positive culture and continually generate reasons for them to stick around.
As startups grow and evolve, different skills, abilities, and values are needed. The most successful management teams hire the people that contribute most effectively to the current trajectory of the business and take the added step of shepherding their employees to their full potential.
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