Growing the Right Way

One of the biggest issues when growing your company is ensuring that you keep your bar for quality high. It’s easy to do for your first dozen hires because they generally come pre-vetted and from your existing networks. Once you start scaling beyond that, you need a reliable process in place for ensuring that your standards don’t slip.

Here's a process checklist to identify potential blind spots your company may have:

1. Role Definition and Clarity: Establish clear, detailed Targets that outline the Results Expected and the relevant Competencies needed for the role. Ensure all relevant stakeholders buy-in and commit to the Target. It’s your commitment (and coordination) device for high standards and getting it in writing for each role gives you a powerful foundation for the rest of your processes.

2. Sourcing Mindset: As mentioned, prioritize finding high performers focused on achieving excellent results. This involves marginally de-prioritizing factors like experience or tenure in previous roles.

3. Diversity: If you want access to high performers from a diverse population pool, you need to make it an early, consistent priority in your sourcing channels. Reach out to the high performers who represent the diversity you are hoping to include and ask them who they would recommend.

4. Data-Driven Interview Process: Implement a structured interview process based with consistent evaluation criteria. Avoid idosyncratic, unstructured conversations where you simply rely on your “gut feel” for how “impressed” you are by someone. Have someone act as the “Watcher” to call out any ratings or judgements that are not backed by (interview) data.

5. Building Rapport in Interviews: Invest in training for all new interviewers and make sure that developing and managing rapport is a key piece of that training. This is essential both for data elicitation as well as candidate experience.

6. Effective Questions: Ensure that each of your interviewers has a consistent set of initial questions that relate to the Facets of the role that they are assigned.

7. Facet-Based Evaluation: The best interview processes involve a “divide and conquer” approach, where each interviewer plays a specialized role. Evaluate candidates across multiple Facets for a comprehensive assessment.

8. Powerful References Use reference checks not just for validation but also for gaining deeper insights into the candidate's work style and achievements. References become even more important once you are outside of your immediate network. They can also be helpful for building out an onboarding process, which becomes especially important once your company grows past a certain size.

9. Consistent, Calibrated Decisions: Create a decision-making process with multiple stakeholders to ensure unbiased, comprehensive hiring decisions.. Ensure that everyone knows what the bar is for a “4” rating and call each other out when you see someone give a grade not backed by sufficient data. Incorporate structured mentorship and interview shadowing for new interviewers to learn from the experienced ones.

10. Continuous Process Calibration: Regularly review and adjust the hiring process based on feedback and performance data to ensure ongoing effectiveness and fairness. Have you made any recent mis-hires? Was either the Target, the interview execution, or the data interpretation to blame?

There are more areas to look at but these are 10 areas that, when underinvested in, tend to produce decaying talent results over time for a growing organization. By investing in these areas, you can maintain your talent bar while expanding your team.