As a hiring manager, you have a mandate to get your company's hiring process under control. Look for the warning signs.
In Howes’ experience, the process that needs the most attention — hiring — is the one companies too often put on autopilot. “From getting résumés or referrals in the door to phone screens and interviews to integrating employees, the first thing you need to understand if you don't already, is that something along the way is always broken. I have literally never seen a hiring process work well for more than a week at a time,” he says. -First Round Review on Tim Howes
Assessing candidates for a job that probably won’t actually be available any time soon due to impending budget cuts is largely a waste of time. Throwing poorly-trained interviewers at people and asking the wrong types of questions will certainly result in unimpressive return on investment. Excessive technical assessments that reveal little about an engineer’s personality, goals, and values often result in misfit new hires that don’t stick around very long.
Treat hiring like the critical business process that it is, instead of leaving it to chance. If you don’t put forth the effort to improve your interview process, you’ll get a lot of practice doing it poorly. Your poor technique just becomes more entrenched and your turnover rates stay high. Because you keep interviewing people this way to replace your losses, you perpetuate the cycle of abuse in an ever-widening arc. The people that you do manage to hire and keep will continue use of your poor processes in all future interviews they conduct on your behalf, eating at your profitability.
These are the tell-tale signs that a company has no control over its own interview process:
No interview training is done.
The job descriptions are poorly constructed.
The job application method is error-prone, too long, and unresponsive.
Applicant reviewers are overwhelmed with too many applicants, or distressed because there are too few.
Recruiters are missing much of the critical information candidates need to know.
The interview panel rarely meets to discuss plans before candidates come in.
The interview panel rarely meets to compare notes after candidates come in.
The candidate does not receive any preparatory information about the interview.
It’s a struggle to provide the candidate detailed information up front about the compensation/benefits package.
There is no coherent plan for a given interview session.
The goals of a candidate assessment are unclear or there are conflicting preferences.
Time is wasted interviewing for a role that was never really available, or the wrong role.
An over-dependence on flawed technical or behavioral questions.
The same technical questions are repeated multiple times by different interviewers.
One single person gates all candidates for all roles.
Avoidance of asking or answering the questions that really matter.
No one keeps the candidate informed regularly about the process.
Interview segments are conducted by arbitrarily selected and sized panels.
New hires are assigned to start working closely with people they never met during interviews.
Company leadership refuses to take ownership of the hiring process, or farms it out to HR.
Things that should be measured, tracked, or reviewed are not.
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