It's beyond cliche to say that people are the most precious resource for any company.
It's also profoundly true.
Small teams of amazing people will out-execute large teams of mediocre people every time.
However, I’ve been spending more of my time with hyper-growth startups recently and they all have one thing in common right now: Massive hiring bottlenecks.
Here are some of my tips for accelerating your hiring process in these tough times.
Prioritizing
Discuss hiring as a priority at each all-hands meeting. Give an update on all of the subjects below.
Decentralize the problem. Encourage and empower each employee/team to source, interview and hire for their own team (as per tactics in this list)
Add hiring outcomes to performance reviews. Show your seriousness about making it part of everyone's job.
Add it to the onboarding education content for new hires (explain how to hire and why it’s part of their job).
Do lunch-and-learns to train existing employees on how to hire well.
Sourcing
Establish a great Careers page that explains the company's values, mission, and benefits.
Proactively target former colleagues and great candidates on LinkedIn. Pitch them hard. For example...
Great people often ignore recruiters. Have hiring managers send personalized, super leaned-in reach-out messages.
Invite candidates to come see the office or meet senior people in the company.
Invite candidates to have lunch with the team.
Do all of the above before the interview process even begins.
Incentivizing
Offer existing employees a meaningful bonus for successfully referring in their favorite former colleagues.
Make compelling offers to candidates. Recruiting is expensive. Losing a candidate over compensation packages is a very costly waste of time.
Interviewing
Do a quick hiring manager screen and as soon as they’re comfortable...
Don’t waste time. Do 1-day interview loop with all key functions followed by a debrief/decision meeting within 24 hours. You and the candidate should know the outcome within a few days.
Ensure the interview loop is well run so that the outcome is clear. The hiring manager should email all members of the loop and give them plenty of context about the role, the candidate and what specifically each person should be looking for (E.g. Sally, as Engineering Manager on the team, you're looking to understand how well this candidate will interact with your engineering team.)
Ensure the experience is great for the candidate - even for candidates who are failing during the interview process or fail to get an offer. Word of mouth should be awesome to encourage other candidates to interview too.
Closing
Get senior leaders to reach out and congratulate the candidate on getting an offer - perhaps even have the CEO do it.
Send “Love bombs”: The entire interview loop and the people the candidate would be working closely with should email and share their genuine enthusiasm about them potentially joining the team.
Maintaining
Don’t lower the quality bar. Ensure bar-raisers are part of the interview loop to mitigate bad hires for expediency,
Make sure that existing employees are engaged, motivated, and empowered to do their best work. Attrition is a killer. This might include firing low performers who are undermining team morale and effectiveness.