Reverse Engineer Your Hiring Success

The 7 Steps Process for Hiring Great People

Often hiring managers state the odds of hiring the right candidate is 50/50 at best. There are always a few unknowns when hiring, but if you put the time and energy into developing a strategic plan for the role you need to fill, you can significantly increase the chances of recruiting the best person for the role.

 We call this Reverse Engineering for Hiring Success…

 Our 7-Step process for increasing our ability to hire great people into organizations drives how we approach the recruitment and talent acquisition process…

 Step One – Define Success

Understanding what constitutes job and role success is critical. It's important to understand and define it from both the organization's perspective as well as the employee's perspective. If you do not know what success looks like, or what you expect from the new team member, or what your customers expect, how can you find the best person for the job?

At JNH Lifestyles, we had to completely revamp the hiring process for the Customer Experience team. Success was achieved when customers are consistently receiving a frictionless customer experience. Once JNH defined the actual meaning of a frictionless customer experience, we could plan what attributes a person would need to be successful in the role. Additionally, we could revamp training to ensure the team was fully equipped for their role and support systems were in place to help their success.

 Step Two – Build the Candidate Persona

Professionals in the marketing world are always telling us that we need to create buyer personas. The same holds true when hiring. We create a Candidate Persona to help us better understand our candidate's ambitions, professional goals, and key attributes that increase the likelihood they will succeed. When we build candidate personas, we often get very granular on the following parts of the persona -

1. Desired work experience

2. Desired education and/or certifications

3. Geographical location

4. Specific hard skillset

5. Specific soft skillset

6. Candidates preferred work environment

7. Candidates professional goals and motivators

8. Identify what fresh ideas, experiences, and personalities we want the team member to add to the organization.

Once we have built out a Candidate Persona, we can then start the process of crafting a job description that will be impactful.

Step Three – Cloning the Best (not really!)

We all have team members that we wish we could clone. Since that is probably not going to be allowed (or should be allowed!) any time soon, we use Assessment Benchmarks to understand what it is about our top performers that makes them successful.

By benchmarking specific team members that are already in the role, we better understand what attributes are required to help increase the chances of success and establish data points to help the hiring process. Assessments should never be used in a vacuum and there always needs to be context associated with the benchmark data.

Step Four – Standardized Conversation Questions

I am sure by now everyone has heard the phrase “hope is not a strategy”. So, if hope is not a strategy, why would you interview for a role and not have a standardized set of questions? By standardized questions, I do not mean the questions from the 1970s that ask you; where do you want to be in five years or what is your greatest weakness?

If you want to get to know each candidate, you need to craft thoughtful and meaningful questions that will ignite a true conversation. The questions should be designed to put the candidate at ease and transition the environment from a stressful interview to an everyday conversation.

The other key reason for developing a question set is to ensure that you can look at all the candidates on a level playing field. How can you evaluate different candidates if everyone is asked different questions?

Step Five – The Hiring Panel

Although we are all heroes’ in our own movie called Life, we all have unconscious biases that impact our decision-making. Establish a hiring panel will help you establish a diverse group of people contributing to the final decision. The hiring panel should be comprised of direct stakeholders and non-stake holders within the organization.

We typically build a hiring panel that can be divided into groups and then stagger the candidate interviews into two or three (max) different conversations with the different groups. After the conversations are concluded, the hiring panel can reconvene to compare notes and formalize the final pool of candidates.

Step Six – Assessment Time

Once a final pool of candidates is established, now is the time to issue the hiring assessments. The data that comes back from the assessment is reviewed against the benchmark data to help us remove some of the emotion from the hiring process.

The key to using assessments in the hiring process is to ensure you have decided on the assessment questions before you start meeting with candidates. There are several great assessment providers out there and we certainly have some great assessment partners that we can recommend.

 Step Seven – Start Recruiting!

With this new framework in place, now you can start recruiting. Remember to set the recruitment process and timeline expectations with every candidate and for goodness sake, do not turn the process into a three-month marathon!