Getting Great Hiring on Rails (Part 1)

If you’ve been through one of our trainings, you already know our 5-step talent algorithm. Here it is as a recent reformulation into a “TALGO” acronym for easy recall:

Target the specific outcomes and competencies you need for this role.

Aim for high performers—even if they're not actively looking—from diverse pools of talent, and rely mostly on internal referrals (1st and 2nd degree connections). Everyone should act like a part-time recruiter.

Learn about the candidate and their past experiences, deeply. (Well-coordinated process + structured interviews + high rapport = data goldmine.)

Gather all inputs and make a data-driven decision. Minimize bias and groupthink as much as possible.

Offer the right candidates an invitation to join that is tailored to what they most value. Avoid selling in your own image or defaulting to a one-size-fits-all pitch.

Ensuring that all participants have been trained and are aligned on this methodology is the prerequisite. But what then? Let’s go through a checklist to see how we can map our methodology into an actionable process.

If you can’t confidently say “yes” to each of the following questions, it means you may have an opportunity to upgrade your current approach, and save tremendous amounts of time and money over the long-run. (There are few things more expensive or time-wasting than a bad hire.)

Targets (Role Definition)

• Is a Target required for every new role?
• Is there a QC mechanism in place to ensure that Key Results are well-defined and Competencies are crisp and non-vague?
• Are Qualifications stress-tested so that only the essential ones remain?
• Are all company-wide cultural Competencies consistent across all roles?
• Is there a clear owner for each Target?
• Are there SOPs and SLAs around the creation of the Target (i.e. whose input is sought and how long they have to submit it?)

Aim for Top Performers

• Does every person at your company have the mindset that they are a “20% recruiter”?
• Are they reaching out on a regular cadence to a diverse set of top performers in their first- and second-degree networks?
• (Do you have incentives—cultural or otherwise—to ensure that people feel these behaviors are honored and rewarded?)
• Do you provide internal recruiting leverage to help people efficiently track and reach out to their networks?
• When sourcing, before cold DM’ing a candidate, do you first check to see if there is a closer connection from someone within your company?
• Does everyone feel comfortable with the principles of the “Hook Call” so they can elicit great info without coming off as too pushy or salesy?
• Do you experiment with non-traditional or unconventional sourcing strategies and track your results so that you can validate/invalidate sourcing hypotheses?

Learn About the Candidate

• Do you have a process for reliably converting the Target into specific interviews, each with their own interview guide of initial questions?
• Do you have a process for on-boarding new interviewers to give them training, practice, feedback? (That way, when they start interviewing you know they’re at the bar for both rapport, data elicitation, and data interpretation.)
• Do you schedule and arrange interviews in such a manner that they are occur quickly without undue delays?
• To this point, do you have multiple calibrated interviewers for any given interview format to avoid schedule meltdowns when someone is unavailable?
• Do you create space on the schedule or otherwise ensure that interviewers do not arrive to interviews late and also have a few minutes to briefly process their notes after each interview?

Gather the Data + Decide

• Do you have a central repository for ratings + notes that does not require the interviewer to give a holistic “yes” or “no” for the candidate? (Instead, they should just rate the Facets on the Target that they’ve been assigned for their interview.)
• Do you have QC in place to ensure that 80%+ of ratings are clearly traceable to data elicited in the interview (or from references, public info, etc.) rather that mere impressions from the interview?
• Do you have a safe environment for calling each other out when rationales are too steeped in vague, positive language such as “I could just really see him working out here”?
• Is everyone on the team consistently using and applying a rubric (e.g. 4/3/2/1) with calibration around what each rating means?
• Do you have a consistent process for making decisions on candidates (whether in a live candidate roundtable, or otherwise) to reduce groupthink and bias as much as possible?

Offer to the Right Candidate

• Do you have a process for aggregating the questions the candidate asked + the motivational data points you gathered to build a “selling profile” for each candidate regarding what they most value in a job?
• Do you emphasize the above points when making the initial offer and in conversations with the candidate?
• Do you have a process for deciding who should make the offer?
• Do you anticipate or otherwise have a game plan for what happens if the candidate receives a counter- or competing offer?
• Do you have a process for taking what you learn in both interviews and reference calls, along with the Target, to build an “onboarding success plan” for each candidate?

The above is not a comprehensive list, but it’s a reasonable start. In future posts we’ll go through some of these areas in more detail in terms of what a “Turnkey Playbook” could look like.

The end goal of this is for each of you to be able to take this and—combined with quality interviewer training—use it to significantly level up how your companies approach interviewing and hiring.