Knowing what’s wrong isn’t the same as knowing how to fix it. The right approach will depend on your business and begins with you thinking critically about how good your hiring processes really are. You might not like the answers.

You need to ask yourself if you’re taking hiring seriously enough – because if you aren’t your business is going to suffer. You wouldn’t take a half-baked approach to develop software, or building a product roadmap, and you shouldn’t for creating a hiring plan, either.

Thankfully, there’s some low-hanging fruit you can implement now to smooth out the candidate experience and get high-value talent onboarded faster.

Sell the vision

Treat candidates like clients and sell.  The majority of candidates want to know where they’re going and what part they can play.  

Tech talent particularly likes engaging with senior team members to understand the scope and detail of the work – so let them do that before you start testing their capability. And if the reason you’re hiring them is to drive towards future goals, ask questions about how they’d tackle them. Bin irrelevant, scenario-based questions about things they’ve done in the past.

Train interviewers

Your current employees are tech specialists, not talent specialists. But if you’re putting your potential next hires in front of them, they need to be both.

If you’ve never listened to how well your team performs in interviews or challenged them on their technique, now’s the time to start. Make sure they’re selling the business and not putting potential candidates off. You should also set up exit polls to get feedback from candidates on how they found the process (whether you liked them or not). Take the same data-driven approach to iterate your hiring process as you would to any other form of user testing.

Prepare thoroughly

Don’t skim CVs as you make a cuppa on the way to the interview. Build a proper framework. And make sure you’re asking questions you really want to know the answer to – not just the ones you always ask.

Most importantly, check you’re getting the balance right between testing competency and encouraging engagement with the role. Spend too long on one instead of the other, and you’ll end up with a candidate who’s perfectly capable of doing the job, but doesn’t want it.

Get in sync with talent partners

Talent partners are often candidates’ first point of contact with your business. First impressions count, so make sure partners are set up to give a good one.

That starts with you. Share as much information and context on the role as you can at the outset. Then keep sharing. Don’t treat it as a ‘one and done’ relationship. Work closely with them, share feedback, give clear guidelines on what good and bad looks like, and communicate clearly and often. If you’re running daily scrums with every other team, run them with your talent team, too.

Give rapid feedback

Business Transformation moves fast. So should you. Want to know more about staffing your projects, and getting them delivered faster than ever? Start hiring.