Navigating the startup hiring rollercoaster: Align, design, decide
Yes, hire slow and fire fast. But also hire fast, because you’re a startup. How? Honesty, transparency, and alignment.
Most startups are too small for a people team, leaving founders or a team member with some people ops chops with the sole responsibility of project managing the hiring process. While you don’t need to build out a full people function in the early days, the baseline infrastructure for establishing a talent acquisition process needs to go one step further than “Create a job description, post it, and start interviewing”.
While tracking time-to-fill metrics is likely unnecessary with a team of heads of ICs, nothing will crush your team’s productivity more than guiding candidates through a ping-ponging interview process, only to realize at the end that a key decision maker (be it your co-founder or yourself, if you’ve delegated this to a talent hire) has to reject the candidate due to something that could have been caught in initial conversations.
how DO you fill your open seats ASAP without an unnecessary, prolonged (or redundant) interview process?
Create an alignment system for team member non-negotiables.
Why This and Why Now?
As soon as you recognize you need a hire, you’ll realize that you needed that hire about a month ago, and the longer you wait, the longer you’ll feel the pain. Whether you’re bringing on a FTE, agency or freelance specialist, or embedded operator/startup generalist, anyone whose work will intersect with this role should have the opportunity to communicate their non-negotiables.
This only compounds as the company scales; additional stages in the process, more roles to fill, and a growing workload means less time to waste. Establish this as a foundational step to start any hiring process and bake it into your culture to make the hiring process easier and build a more cohesive team.
how We Do: Design a pre-interview hiring process to decrease time to fill and increase team cohesion
Design your strategy, then commit to the process
To effectively design your strategy, ask yourself and your team these questions to better understand what system will connect your existing processes and people into a knowledge-sharing machine.
Tools 🛠️
Choose a documentation tool that allows you to capture the non-negotiables from stakeholders. Basic is better. Plop it into your people's knowledge base, and use it as a reference.
ATS tools can be cost-prohibitive in the early days. When ready, Ashby is an of All Trades favorite, an all–in–one ATS that, in the founder’s own words, is something special.
“What we’ve set out to build is a product that empowers hiring teams in ways that existing recruiting software does not. In addition to a customizable and powerful ATS we’ve decided to make analytics, scheduling and sourcing automation core parts of our product. We have built all of this with a recruiting operations mindset - always thinking about how operationally minded teams can leverage and customize Ashby to improve recruiting workflows for both their teams and their candidates.”
People 🫶
Identify who’s in “the room where it happens” upfront - and stick to it.
Bouncing candidates across your org for interviews is not only a poor candidate experience but ultimately leads to poor hiring decisions. If all candidates meet with the same team members and do so sequentially, you’ll reduce bias and ensure consistent data across candidate conversations.
Further, this allows team members to better prepare their schedules to interview candidates on top of their existing workloads.
Determine where these team members will convene. Will there be a final hiring meeting that includes all team members? Will feedback be gate-kept from interviewers to reduce bias? Make decisions on how and when this group will make the ultimate decision – who to hire.
Rules (Process) 📝
The pre-interview process can be a simple one: review, document, decide, & screen.
Review: Work with your team to review the JD across all departments. This doesn’t mean getting buy-in from everyone, but rather making sure that nothing is missing in considering their cross-functional work.
Document: Document the nice-to-haves vs. must-haves pertaining to the role for each team. This goes beyond what’s in your job description, roles, and responsibilities. The job listing is a marketing tool for prospective candidates, as well as a clear outline of the initial job they’re agreeing to. But there may be more than meets the eye. Make the implicit explicit.
Decide: Decide on the hiring review and decision-making process. Use a quick RASCI framework to identify who is Responsible, Accountable, Supportive, Consulted, and Informed. This will ensure candidate data consistency and preserve a great candidate experience while increasing your velocity throughout the process.
Screen: Screen for biases and non-negotiables embedded within the process upfront. Front-load these into questions and exercises at the tippy top of your process. Don’t wait until the last interview, having to start from scratch with new candidates.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
Have each hiring team member review the job description. (1 day)
Most cross-functional team members may have a sense of what the job description for the role might be, but unless they are reading it as written by the hiring manager/founder / TA manager, the likelihood is that they’re assuming what the role should be instead of actually understanding what the role will be.
Document each team member’s non-negotiables (30 min)
Either individually or in a group, document non-negotiables. This is different from “nice to haves”. Non-negotiables include unwritten requirements in the role that impact others on the team. Is your company adopting ChatGPT across the organization, and you need this hire to be able to be part of the process? Know this upfront.
This should go without saying but is crucial to state – screen non-negotiables for hiring biases (race, gender, age, etc), and ensure a diverse and unbiased hiring experience. Disregard all biased non-negotiables.
Make it known which non-negotiables matter and who the ultimate decision maker is (30 min)
While it’d be a gift to the team if all non-negotiables across hiring team members and interviewers align, they won’t. Whose non-negotiables are truly non-negotiable and whose are nice to have?
Who is the ultimate decision maker (regardless of non-negotiables? (see #4)
Be honest – who can make the ultimate decision on hiring this candidate, you as the founder or the ultimate hiring manager, if not you? If you aren’t ready to give away these legos and want to make the final call, let the hiring manager know. Clarity and transparency in decision-making is the #1 mistake of the early stage process that leads to kerfuffles of discontent at the time of offer that can continue after a hire has joined the team.
Front-load non-negotiables into the initial interview (Ongoing)
Whether the initial conversation is done by the founder, people operator, or hiring manager on the team, orient this first call to cover non-negotiables.
Before you go
Addressing team member non-negotiables upfront is pivotal. By creating an alignment system, designing a pre-interview process, and identifying an ultimate decision-maker, you can streamline your hiring process and build a cohesive team. This approach not only decreases time to fill but also ensures a more efficient and effective hiring process, allowing your startup to thrive and adapt to the ever-evolving business landscape.
Writer: Britt