The secrets to building your recruitment structure

Hiring one toxic team member can wipe out the benefits of a dozen great hires. So when you’re ready to expand your team, it’s important to invest in developing structured processes to uncover talent.

Here’s how.

Growing a startup requires the mastery of many skills, but the art of conducting job interviews to uncover talent might be the toughest.

Balancing the tasks of asking quality questions, trusting your gut and evaluating the quality of a candidate’s answers is enough to trip up even the most talented founders.

“Interviewing is a hard skill to master. If you look at the data, it suggests that as humans, we are overconfident in our ability to assess talent through interviews,” says Chief People Officer at Culture Amp and HR expert, Justin Angsuwat.

One of the most important things that startups can do to combat this is to create a robust structure around their hiring processes. Over his years working with global tech giants like Google, Angsuwat has seen first-hand the importance of putting systems in place discover the best talent.

“At companies like Google, that structure is very well built out. The systems and science were there, and we had hiring committees and very detailed processes,” he says.

“But for startups and scale-ups, that structure is rarely there. There’s a really big opportunity to get at least some structure into place to unlock better hiring.”

Taking a conscious and intentional approach to hiring from early on can pay dividends for years to come. It can also protect a fast-growing business from bringing the wrong person on board early.

Knowing what you’re looking for

There are two key elements to a successful hiring process, Angsuwat says: knowing what you’re looking for in a candidate and knowing when you’ve found it.

“When it comes to knowing what you’re looking for, we often fail at this stage in hiring,” he says.

“We either have a long list of criteria for stuff that isn’t super important, we over-anchor on extroverted attributes or domain expertise as the most important thing to look for, or we don’t even know what ‘good’ looks like.”

Picturing the ideal candidate can be especially tricky for scale-up founders if they have never recruited or worked with staff in executive positions before.

If this is the case, it pays to ask around within your network to hear from other founders about what they value in a particular role.

“If you’re hiring for a general counsel for the first time and you haven’t really spent a lot of time around general counsels, go talk with other founders you trust and ask them what they value in [that role] and what makes a good one,” Angsuwat says.

“I think pretty quickly you’ll start to learn what you value as a founder.”

Knowing when you’ve found it

Once you’ve got a clear picture of what you’re looking for, it’s time to build some structure around your interview process to help you uncover the best talent.

It pays to keep selection criteria simple, Angsuwat says.

“The key to ‘knowing when you have found it’ is having fewer criteria and then creating structure and repetition [to test it].”

It’s also important to keep the interview approach consistent so you can clearly evaluate potential employees.

“If you ask five different candidates five different questions, it’s hard to compare their ability to solve the problem.”

Narrowing your selection criteria down to just three to five areas can make it easier to identify the best candidate.

“Then write down what a good answer looks like,” Angsuwat says.

Often, this is less about the content of an answer and more about how a candidate structures their thoughts, asks clarifying questions, or offers a range of proposed solutions to an interview question.

Scale the startup summit

Fast-growing Victorian businesses will soon be building their own hiring blueprints with the help of mentors from unicorn companies through LaunchVic’s Basecamp program.

This founder education program will help the state’s early-stage companies learn how to attract top-quality executive talent and how to train and retain the right people to help with their scale-up journeys.

Expressions of interest are open until 1pm February 24.

BASECAMP