How to make confident, informed hiring decisions
2 mins, 32 secs read time
Climbing the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity™ curve
Once you’ve understood the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity™ curve and taken the assessment to see where your team currently sits, what happens next? This is the time to start taking action. The great news is that no matter where you fall on the Hiring Maturity curve, there are changes you can make now to start improving your hiring process. This article outlines many actions you can take – remember to start small and pick just one or two focus areas as you start driving significant change in your hiring efforts.
We’ve identified four important competencies within hiring to work on as you move up the Hiring Maturity curve:
- Identifying and attracting the best talent for your organization
- Owning every moment of your hiring experience
- Making confident, informed hiring decisions
- Using data to drive operational excellence and improve over time
These four competencies represent the foundation of excellent hiring. By focusing on these specific areas, you’ll be honing in on the essential skills and behaviors that your team needs to develop to become more strategic at hiring.
This article focuses on making confident, informed hiring decisions. We’ve outlined recommendations to help your team move the needle and become more sophisticated in this particular area of hiring. Your company may not progress up the curve from Chaotic up to Strategic in a linear way, and that’s completely okay. Read through each section and take the most relevant next step based on your organization – every small step is a move toward hiring excellence and achieving your business goals that much faster.
Make confident, informed hiring decisions
What does it mean to make confident, informed hiring decisions? Why should you focus on it?
Informed decision-making is one of the core benefits of having a structured hiring process. By moving candidates through structured interview stages and collecting data throughout the process, your company will be able to get a complete picture of your candidates that is supported by tangible examples and concrete data. So when it’s time to extend an offer, you’ll have confidence that you are hiring the right person for the job – confidence that is backed by data. You’ll also be able to give the candidate a complete picture of your company and the role, ensuring they feel confident in their decision to accept that role and join your team.
When you make hiring decisions based on data, you are more likely to hire a candidate who will be able to execute on the expectations for the role. You’ll also be able to build a retrospective process – if the new hire isn’t successful, you can circle back to your hiring criteria and reevaluate what is necessary to be effective in the role. This is particularly important for evergreen roles, where continuous iteration and improvement of the criteria is imperative to long-term success.
Ready to improve your team’s ability to make more informed hiring decisions based on data? These initiatives and tips will help you get there.
Interview process consistency
- Chaotic: Plan out each part of your interview process for every role. Every candidate for the same role should go through the same steps and interviews until you make a decision on who to hire. The more consistent your process is, the more equitable it is for your candidates and the easier a final hiring decision will be.
- Inconsistent: Schedule kickoff meetings to align the hiring team on the key details of the role before you open the candidate pipeline. Build templates for jobs you are hiring for to make it easy to replicate the structure used in the past and keep roles consistent.
- Systematic: Conduct interview training for all new interviewers. Set and follow up on expectations for how soon after an interview feedback needs to be submitted. Equip your team with strategies to mitigate unconscious bias during the interview process to ensure consistency and an equitable experience for everyone interviewing.
- Strategic: Leverage DE&I tools to anonymize candidate data at key points of the hiring process. Remind or “nudge” interviewers about how to mitigate their own biases.
Collecting feedback
- Chaotic: Build a structure for collecting feedback after interviews. This can be as simple as creating a form for interviewers to submit post-interview. If you use software like Greenhouse, you can leverage the built-in scorecard functionality to easily enable the mechanism for interview feedback.
- Inconsistent: Determine specific topics and questions for each interviewer to cover in every interview for a given role. This will help ensure that you are assessing all the essential skills and qualifications before making an informed hiring decision. This guide to structured hiring is a great resource to help get you started.
- Systematic: Conduct a post-hire analysis when you close a role to continue improving and iterating on the hiring plan based on feedback from your recent search.
- Strategic:Collect data on new hire performance and compare it with feedback from their hiring process. Adjust your hiring plans to take into account how quickly new hires are onboarded and become fully functioning team members, and the breakdown of top performers. This is easiest to pilot with high-volume, entry-level roles.
Making decisions
- Chaotic: Require feedback to be submitted for 100% of interviews conducted. Without documented input, the path to informed decisions will be tricky!
- Inconsistent: Define roles in the hiring process and make sure it’s clear who the decision maker will be. While input from other interviewers is important, the hiring manager is usually the ultimate decision maker.
Systematic: Conduct interview team roundups on late-stage candidates to discuss feedback and get alignment on a hiring decision.
- Strategic: Create an offer approval process to ensure that no offer gets approved unless there is data to show the candidate has been fully evaluated on the criteria that the hiring team aligned on prior to opening the role.
Want to learn how your tech stack can drive great hiring? Explore this article detailing recruiting tools to help you climb the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity curve.
Rosa Gandler
is a Senior Operations Manager at Greenhouse. Rosa has honed her expertise in the talent acquisition space initially as a recruiter and then through direct work with hundreds of Greenhouse customers. Now, she focuses on making the Customer Success team as strategic as possible with streamlined, efficient processes.