Background
Taylor and I were talking about challenges of hiring tech talent. Interview processes are short (even if they're long). Even a week long interview sometimes doesn't filter out the wrong candidates. I think this is why big corporations default to no hire. It's more costly to hire the wrong person than it is to miss out on the right one. It's also costly to have poor retention. But that's a conversation for another time.
Each hire is an investment and investments have different levels of risk. How do you effectively reduce that risk?
There are a few different roles in the hiring pipeline that can help with success or failure.
The Pipeline
System > Tech person > Manager > HR > Recruiter > Candidate
Challenges
From my perspective there are two problems when it comes to hiring. One is the technical problem of identifying what you need to actually hire for. The second is communication. Hiring is a big game of telephone and quite a complicated dance of competing interests.
There are a number of barriers to communication (cultural, psychological, language, physical etc).
Strategies
Reduce Interview Bias
I see this as the strategy that most companies leverage. I believe that there's too much stock put into the outcomes of this work. Clear candidate communication about expectations should be a given. I think some companies get this wrong, which is a shame. But honestly, this is the end of the pipeline, I'd say that there are other leverage points where the decision should have been made before the interview. I think interviews have one of the highest chance of bias. So systemizing those interactions to very specific signals is key.
Reduce candidate variability
The pipeline for getting candidates into the pipeline is a huge leverage point. I think there's a happy medium on the scale of a Denial Of Service attack on your candidate pipeline to screening out everyone. I think it's up to each company to figure out what their schedules can support when trying to find a right candidate fit. Recruiters can help to focus that funnel to specific leads. Resume reading and initial phone screens are a skill. Hiring managers and HR can be good at these skills on individual basis. However, it shouldn't be their day to day job and those skills could atrophy.
Extend signal gathering
Using the contract to hire model folks can take an extended period of time gauging candidates success at the company. The two challenges here are justifying the investment in time (as compared against a candidate that's hired and fails) and how for some candidates this may be a less favorable situation.
Clear job requirements
This is the highest leverage work that leads to great hiring experiences. This is also the most challenging work. There's no single position that can be hired to do this work for you, it's truly a team effort. Every one needs to be on the same page from the leadership allocated funding to the hiring manger pairing with the individual contributor (IC), to the codebase itself. The ICs need to understand and communicate the needs of their system. The manager and ICs need to have good communication to be able to forward those requirements to leadership for funding and HR for a job description.
Conclusion
There are a few leverage points where to increase the chance of a successful hire. Clear communication throughout the pipeline is key. This is a big game of telephone and is really important. Good hiring practices lead to retention, and are an advertisement of company health to candidates and can build or depreciate a brand.
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