⏅ The 4 Pillars of Recruiting
By: Franck Nussbaumer
Tags: Recruiting, Startup, Recruitment, Process, Hiring

Recruiting is like a box of chocolate. You better know what you’re going to get!

Hi everyone!

Welcome to the TRY ANGLES weekly review where my job is to share with you new readings, methods and tools that I have found and tested.

Today we will start a journey on recruiting. How many writers, how many business leaders are telling us that recruiting is THE most important thing to help your business performance.

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Two years ago I had not hired anybody in my life, yet I needed to build my teams. That’s how I jumped into the pool of recruitment. I was not ready for this.

Recruiting is extremely time consuming and contains a lot of complexity because of the interpretation skills involved in the process.

Designing an effortless recruiting process has been a fun thing to do and enabled me to save time and select great candidates over 200 people averaging 2 interviews each.

At the end of this article you’ll have a grasp of the building blocks necessary to have an effective recruiting pipe.

Here is what you’ll find in today’s article:

How to use recruiting agencies

Build an effortless recruiting process

Get your team involved

Take It Easy With Recruiting Agencies

Recruiting agencies appear like the savior when you have no idea how to recruit. Honestly they have had a bitter sweet taste for me, and in hindsight I do not believe that you should use them when you have an early stage company.

They will help you to find candidates, but the price to pay is high and it will still be your responsibility to select the right person. There’s no shortcut for this.

Even though most of them are rewarded on success fees, if somehow things do not match with the candidate, you find yourself locked up with the recruiters holding your cash.

Now, candidate is gone, cash is gone and you can only hope the recruiter will introduce you with better ones. If you fill in the position by any other means your cash is lost. It is not an ideal position to be in.

It’s no secret that in the first years of your young company you’ll have to iterate a lot, and recruiting is part of the iteration. Try to keep recruiting in house as long as you can. It might save you a couple of thousands euros.

Nevertheless a possible alternative if you want to save some time is to use recruiters specialized in the sourcing of candidates while keeping the selection process under your control.

Now the fun begins! There is no shortcut: you need a good recruiting process.

The Building Blocks Of Recruiting

How do you start if you don’t have any idea how recruiting is done? As usual, you’ll find help in books and articles. The main source of information for the recruiting process I have designed has been the book “Who”.

This book has helped me understand the key building blocks of an effective recruiting process and I wanted to share them with you. The method is separated into 4 sections:

1. Scorecard — Job description on steroids

The scorecard is a more elaborated job description composed of four main pillars:

The mission : why the job exists

: why the job exists The outcomes : how performance will be assessed

: how performance will be assessed The competencies : how to match the role, the culture and the candidates’ skillset

: how to match the role, the culture and the candidates’ skillset The alignment: ensure that the job matches expectations with other roles within the company

2. Source — Spread the word

You will use mainly three ways to source candidates:

Referrals , thanks to current employees, and first or second circle network

, thanks to current employees, and first or second circle network Recruiters , responsible for a large scope from sourcing to selecting the candidates

, responsible for a large scope from sourcing to selecting the candidates Researchers, responsible for the sourcing part of the recruiting process

Recruiters and researchers can have a variable scope based on what you want to keep internalized or outsourced. More on that in future articles.

3. Select — There can only be one

You have a scorecard, you have candidates. Now the show must go on. A good recruiting process is composed of four types of interviews:

Screening interviewCheck the fit of values and interest from the candidate

interviewCheck the from the candidate Who interview Dig deep into the candidate’s achievements and previous experiences

interview and previous experiences Focused interview Develop a specific part of the candidate experience , where you need more insight. It is a good opportunity to include your team members in the process.

interview , where you need more insight. It is a good opportunity to include your team members in the process. Reference interviewHave a chat with the candidate’s references, and cross check facts and information looking for redflags.

You might also want to add an extra step, which is why I added the:

Skills and Test interview. The goal of this interview is to test the motivation of the candidate, the skills and the mindset.

You can substitute it to the focused interview, if the process becomes too long, or add it in between the Screening and Who interview

No need to mention that you might adapt the process based on the seniority of the candidate. You won’t have the same criteria and process if you hire an intern, a sales person or a CTO.

4. Sell — Bring it home

It doesn’t stop there, because even though you have selected someone, you need more than ever to continue selling your company and the project you want the candidate to be onboarded on.

Now would be a terrible time to lose the chosen candidate after all the efforts you’ve made to reach the end of the process.

Do not let the chance slip and keep a close relationship with the chosen candidates until they are onboarded in your company. Stay in touch with them and make sure to prepare for their arrival before hand.

Involve Your Teammates In The Process

Even though you might be responsible for most of the recruiting process (especially for smaller companies), it is important to have your teammates involved in the process design and (ideally) in the interviews.

It has two benefits:

Help to identify red flags and cut candidates based on complementary point of views

Build diverse criteria of selection, based on every participants in the process. Eventually it will help to have a better fit with the company’s culture.

If you had no idea how to build a recruiting pipe, now you are all set to go with this framework.

There are many ways we can go from there and we will have a look at them in the next episodes.

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Upcoming episodes

The next episodes will be digging deeper into each step of the way to help you implement the method.

The Scorecard

The Screening Interview

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Resources

Who — A method for hiring — Geoff Smart and Randy Street

That’s it for this weekly review I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Thanks for reading and until next time!

Cheers,

Franck ⏅