Failure to Communicate

A hidden theme in diagnosing interviewing and hiring problems: failure To communicate. Here are 6 inflection points in your hiring pipeline you can improve: 
 
1. Define the role. (Communicating with yourself and your teammates.) 
 
Get the results you expect in writing. And get aligned with your teammates. It's shocking how this isn't common practice. 
 
People are under the illusion of alignment, but are actually interviewing with a different ideal candidate in mind. 
 
2. Communicate clearly with recruiters. (Setting expectations.) 
 
Huge gap between the functional needs of the business and what recruiters/HR is doing when it comes to interviewing. The gap is even more severe if you're using an external agency. 
 
I cannot emphasize enough how little the agency knows about what you *really* need in the role until you clarify it and communicate with them in an honest and high-bandwidth way. 
 
Err on the side of honest and transparency and plan on multiple iterations. 
 
3. Keep recruiting yourself. (Communicate with your network.) 
 
If you're a founder or manager in charge of your own hiring, never fully delegate recruiting. Keep communication lines open with all the top performers in your network. 
 
(You can hire people + leverage AI internally to help with this.) 
 
4. Communicate during the interviewing. (Communicating with the candidate.) 
 
You do this by cultivating rapport (curiosity + fascination + non-judgment), asking great questions, and asking great follow-up questions. 
 
Your goal is to get the candidate communicating with you. The typical interview is just a "performance" where the candidate is giving a bunch of overly spun, polished, semi-BS answers in an attempt to impress you. 
 
This is not a helpful form of communication. You want to get to actionable, reliable data about their past performance. 
 
5. Making a decision. (Communicating with other interviewers.) 
 
You need to listen to the data you've collected during your interview. (You took great notes or had an AI do it for you, right?) 
 
You need to listen to what the data is telling you—not what you're "but I need to hire someone ASAP!" short-term thinking fear is telling you. (Exceptions exist, but this is directionally correct.) 
 
You also need to share the data with your teammates. But never share your impressions prior to their interviews—otherwise you will bias them. Doubly true if you are more senior than the next interviewer or you are their manager. 
 
Conduct a roundtable discussion where you share ratings backed by data and then have a holistic discussion. 
 
6. Selling the candidate (Communicating the offer.) 
 
Main problem here: failing to *customize* the selling themes and message based on what you've learned about the candidate.