Upand$tarting

The Hiring Process – work to do before you start interviewing

Everyone understands that hiring is probably the most critical thing you will do as a start-up.  Let’s start this post by outlining the hiring process.  We will assume that the need for this position was identified during the planning process and at that time your team talked through the responsibilities and skill set needed for a successful candidate.

- Identify Hiring Manager
- Survey starting salary
- Determine title or titles
- Identify and create a bullet list of skills and appropriate level of experience
- Is this position an individual contributor or manager?
- What is the preferred industry background for a successful applicant?
- What are the preferred ways of building an applicant pool?

Next, we need to build a substantial job description using your bullet list as a guide, make sure you identify skills as “need to haves” and “like to haves”; as well as personality traits that you are looking for.

Develop a series of quarterly goals for this individual for their first year in the job.  This helps crystallize the position in your mind and allows you to give the candidate a very detailed feel for the work involved.

Determine the career path and promotion potential within your organization.  Sure, you haven’t even hired the person yet, but having a good idea of where the candidate can go within your organization is an important step to determine the right traits for the right hire.

These last two items may seem like overkill, but they will help narrow down your list of applicants based on a well thought out plan for their first year and your expectations of their growth.

Develop a recruiting plan

Develop a recruiting plan in which you identify the avenues you are going to take to attract applicants.  Will you use an online job posting site, a retained search firm or internal postings?  You should also identify a list of resume screens that will automatically pre-sort your applicants.   The average craigslist and monster job posting gets 300 – 500 resumes, most of which are not a good fit.  Pre-determined screens are vitally important for the hiring manager to make the most effective use of his time.

Don’t skip detailing out the interview process; identify the pool of employees who will interview the candidates, the order in which they will interview, your expectations for each interview and ground rules for the post-interview huddle you will have.  Also, you should create a base list of questions that each interviewer should ask and information they need to have at the end of the interview.  It wouldn’t hurt to review what you are not allowed to ask or talk about as well.  This is a very important step that most companies don’t do.  Do not assume that your employees are good interviewers.  I can’t tell you the number of interviews I’ve had with potential employees that resulted in the interviewer talk on and on about nothing.  Or, have an interviewer ask me what type of fruit I most identify with because they heard that Google asks esoteric questions.

Scoring your candidates
You should develop a scoring system and identify who has the final word in case there are two or more excellent candidates.  Finally, you need to identify a salary range, bonus and option level for the position.  This range should be broad enough to give your hiring manager leverage to go after a strong candidate.  Most savvy and senior level candidates will want more information concerning the equity structure and the proposed options; you should be prepared to discuss this.

Having prepared a detailed hiring process, the selection and close should be relatively easy.  It is important that the offer come from the hiring manager with a call from the CEO (again, depending on the level of position) to help close the deal.

One last piece of advice, do not discount personality and how the candidate will fit within the corporate culture you have created.  A candidate who is perfect on paper, but is an introvert in a company of extroverts will ultimately produce at a lower level than the candidate with the right personality for your company.