People procurement
Most people have only been exposed to hiring that looks like this:
Hiring need recognized. Something on the plan/roadmap requires a skillset that the team will can only add via a new hire, or the team’s workload capacity must increase.
Job spec’d. Team scopes the work, and the Hiring Manger creates a job description, and gets a budget allocated for headcount addition.
Job spec posted. Job posting goes up online, and there is some broadcasting through social networks to try and drive attention to it.
Candidate sourcing. In parallel with posting, someone looks through resume databases - external or an internal - to identify Candidates that align with the Job Description; this someone might be on a Recruiting team, or at smaller companies might be the hiring manager or even the Founder if very early stage.
Applicant filtering. Applicants to the posted job pour in (or don’t - there’s never an in-between). Reviewing applicants costs a ton of time and headspace, reply with rejections (yes you need to do this - ghosting is lame), and mark some for consideration. Total crapshoot on quality.
Then: phone screen the best, interview some, offer to one, references are an administrative checkbox.
The result? Stuck at the bottom of the world’s worst sales funnel full of noise and junk, hires are of dubious quality. Tons of time and effort spent to get one person in the door, and starts over for every new hire.
What a nightmare.
Guess what? Now, with job seekers using AI tools and “reverse recruiting services” the volume pumped into the world’s worst garbage funnel just got cranked up to 11.
It doesn’t have to be this way, especially for scrappy startups.
What to do? Go old school.
People pro
Time to invert things, turning that funnel into a flywheel. This is how a pro people person works. How do I know? Because I’ve been doing it for over 20 years and been training it for almost that long.
Workforce plan. Plan 18 months out and identify the types of people needed, broadly. Understand that this will evolve as hires are made, work progresses, and roadmaps shift. Use this plan to define some boundaries on candidate pool & pipeline. If there’s a requisition authorization process, front-load it here. Don’t overcomplicate things.
Activate a referral network. Four months before a new hire needs to start, reach out to a network of people with a request for referrals; some may want to become candidates, but this is NOT a candidate pool. The key is to get people to pass along the job info to generate more referrals. Candidates are two or three degrees of separation down this chain of connections, so make that request compelling and as easy to pass along as an email forward.
Build a candidate pool. Build a list of potential Candidates through referrals, as well as any searches. Keep Candidates warmed up with an update every couple of weeks as things progress, but do not start start interviewing. Some will fall out of the pool over time, this is fine - they will provide referrals if you treat them well.
Hiring flow. Two months before the needed start date, drop the top 5-7 candidates from this pool into a hiring flow that’s fast and tight. Minimize time from first screen to offer, try and keep it under two weeks. Effective interviewing is a sprint, not a marathon; the longer it goes on the worse the outcome because people lose interest or get scooped up by competitors. Offer goes out, always with a backup candidate in the hopper in case the first-choice bails. Make sure new hires can give 2 weeks notice and can take 2-3 weeks of downtime between their final day at the last job and the start date. Always check references, and make those references referral sources and/or recruit them too.
Pipeline. For anything 6+ months out, keep potential referrals / sources informed so that they can be slotted right into the flow above. The pros have people on the bench waiting for the positions to open.
No jobs posted. No noise, all signal. Network effects compound and scale in your favor. Mostly referred candidates, which have built-in quality. The pool grows itself with a little weekly maintenance.
Now, there are a thousand little tactics embedded. Such as, always print resumes and doodle org charts. I learned them the hard way, but I’m always happy to teach a motivated learner - but they’re not for this post.
Sounds idealized? It’s not, it’s real. In 2006, I hired something like 85 Engineers with and all but a handful were through referrals. My volume has gone down since then, but my referral rate has gone up.
Why would anyone do it the first way?
Procurement & processes, that’s why. The bigger an organization gets, the more things need to standardize. People can be the most expensive part of running a business, and with size & scaled stakeholders, a bit if bean-counting to is necessary to control costs through systems - like Procurement processes. One-off requisitioning becomes hell above a certain size, and hiring experience for candidates and hiring managers degrades without something to corral things into consistency; this stuff all gets get put into systems that work more like procurement tools than a human touch. The bigger and older the company, typically the less it can run on implicit trust and the more it runs on control.
Without a good Quality Control step, what happens? Procurement controls costs to drive them down, control + downward pressure means you get what you pay for. Quality ain’t cheap, and cheap ain’t quality.
This is the generic BigCo hiring environment, where people are procured - and this is business as usual. This is what has become the default.
You’re shooting for the stars, so business as usual simply isn’t good enough for you. Don’t fall for the default.
Founder leverage
Anyone, regardless of title and level, who needs to hire can run this playbook. However, those at the helm get extra superpowers, and used well they scale well.
Quality control. Quality compounds - both negative and positive - great people attract great people, while substandard hires deteriorate team quality and performance. This is on the Founder for a while, but can scale with a program like Amazon’s Bar Raisers. Aim high, then consider building a lightweight system so that the team can hold the line.
Cultivate a referral network. A little weekly Founder activity keeps things growing and strengthens connections: sharing company updates, welcome messages for new hires publicly shared, company milestones, etc. Post them online, and share directly via emails to folks in the referral network.
DIY, make it culture, then delegate. Do it yourself first, get competent. Teach the core team, then make it part of the culture. As things grow, you’ll be able to select the right person to hand ownership over to - but can maintain the necessary involvement to ensure talent quality is ever increasing, and intervene when there are signs of degradation. This scales.
Grab unicorns. If you have the cash, when you find incredible top 1% people, hire them - either ASAP or play the long game. How do you know them? You will know. Once hired, they just jump in and find a way to improve everyone’s work. This is the best way to elevate the team’s baseline.
No referral network yet?
Don’t wait, start now. More on that later perhaps.