In which I make hiring better
In the summer of 2020, a few months into my new role, my manager said, “you get to hire someone!”
I thought, this is great news! We need some more people in this team.
Within three days of my role being posted, I had over 500 applications to review.
That is not a typo.
I noticed a few things this first time:
Average time-to-hire was 90ish days — and one of our hiring managers had an open role for 9 months (see number 10)
It was very sink-or-swim — I had to figure it out along the way, at the expense of candidates
Levels for hiring roles defaulted to senior designers not because we needed the design skill level but because we needed negotiators who could hold their own
None of the managers knew about each other’s roles or shared candidates, even locally
I was told to look for “rockstars” who are “visual designers first” even though the products they’d work on had issues that were about 80% UX, 20% UI — and we have a design system
All portfolios look exactly the same once you get to the 250th one
Every person I said “yes” to = another hour of prep, interview and closeout time on my calendar the following week, the fatigue from which impacted who I brought into the process
About 90% of applicants appeared to be white, and about 75% of those identified as men (we didn’t specifically track; this is what I was able to notice)
Our hiring team partners did not know how to interview or assess candidates, and as a result, they did not show up well to the interviews or the decision-making session
By the time I sent out an offer I was so worn out I would have happily hired my cat
I thought, this is just way too depleting alongside all the other things I’m being asked to do. I need to figure out how to make this better.
What I did
I knew none of these issues existed on purpose, more from inertia found in policy-heavy processes. I’ve been subjected to a lot of these that I had no control over before and let go of trying to improve, but this time I thought, no, this is important.
Changes like these can’t be quick fixes or band-aids — they need to be improvements people feel safe making from building trust with me over time. I start small, using each change I make and the impact of it to guide what I choose to do next.
Below is a summary of what I accomplished over the course of two years.
A number worth sharing: our average time-to-hire went from 93 days to 65 days.
How I did it
It turns out I have a method I use all the time.
Maybe the best word is strategic. I see where we are today and where we could be, then I create and implement a flexible plan — which is what a strategy actually is, the plan for how to get from one place to the next, better one.
Starting small, I joined the Talent Guild, our way of working on practice-wide stuff, which gave me a way to understand the landscape, make all the improvements you see above and the authority to make them official with leadership. It also gave me a way to officially partner with one of my favorite people I got to work with, our Talent Lead. Without her input and feedback, none of this would have worked out.
If you look across the top row of that table up there, you’ll see the order I addressed and changed things in: diversity of candidates and eventual new hires, shifting the hiring philosophy to something more strategic, getting the career ladder to a place where it’d be useful in more than one moment per year (reviews), and shifting the burden of the process from one person to a shared effort across the manager cohort and other team members to balance it out.
Conclusion
I came to believe that the career ladder is actually the key to many more things than I originally thought. In the interview process specifically, a well-developed ladder with an up-to-date list of specific skills the practice and business need can help you
write job descriptions that reflect what someone in this role will actually be doing all day
give the people who do the hiring a shared way of seeing the process
assess applications and conduct interviews with an eye toward specific skills and the level we need to see them practiced, instead of looking for “unicorns” which still do not exist
provide partners with the language and common definitions for good questions, and coach them with material that helps them assess answers well
at the end of the hiring process, make a decision based on whether or not a candidate can do the job, not impress us in an interview
