Hooked on Meeting the Bar - Issue 11
Hiring decisions and where these outcomes ultimately reside are a big part of your startup’s hiring philosophy. Long before you became a founder, other hiring cultures shaped how you think about the weight of this decision and who ultimately owns it.
What’s going on?
In the early days at your startup, it’s easy to “wing it” and approach hiring more casually. But before you know it, multiple people are involved in the hiring process with various opinions about who should make the call on yes/no outcomes. As a founder, it’s critical that the hiring bar (your blueprint to ensure a consistent hiring standard) holds steady through company growth. Many companies give the hiring leader full ownership over hiring decisions. This is not wrong, per se, but it can lead to hiring bar erosion. Maintaining a consistent hiring bar across your company requires work and commitment. There are various hiring methods, all stemming from three primary schools of thought. We’ve outlined these below, based on a more in-depth publicly offered overview from our friend, John Vlastelica, at Recruiting Toolbox (linked below).
Bar Raiser: Made famous by Amazon. A specially trained interviewer participates in hiring loops, is responsible for elevating the hiring process, and holds the ultimate decision. The Bar Raiser makes decisions focused on hiring talent to elevate the business — not just to solve short-term pain. Pros: Helps build interviewing practices and techniques; you probably already have someone on your team who can be this. Cons: More decentralized, can be seen as “anti-ownership.”
Hiring Committee: First put into practice by Google. Interviewers and hiring managers interview and provide written feedback, and then a non-interviewing committee reviews this feedback and decides. Pros: Company-first hiring bar forces solid alignment. Cons: Can become a bottleneck, may be seen as removal of power, and relies on written feedback. For your startup: Generally, the founder is the committee in the early days, but credible bar holders can be added over time.
Pipeline Interviewers (aka As Appropriate circa the 1990s): Originating at Microsoft, the “AsApp” method has changed over the years, but the intention of quality control remains the goal. Both Amazon and Google borrowed pieces of this to form their methods. Trained interviewers hire for the company with a focus on specific roles (i.e., full-stack engineer). Great for hiring early-stage career talent, more focused on specific attributes. Pros: Bar is set for specific profile. Talent is interviewed for a role in the function. Less tied to a specific requisition. Cons: Less hiring manager interactions or insights and requires a lot of trust from any future managers.
Why does it matter?
When you stop to consider the drivers behind a hiring decision, you quickly start to see how your hiring bar can become eroded over time. There is extreme pressure on hiring leaders to meet deliverables. When this is the case, they aren’t in the best position or mindset to be able to apply a consistent company hiring bar, instead making whatever decision is optimal for their team. Not only does this undermine your hiring bar, but you also risk eroding trust between teams if there is perception that decisions are not made equally group to group. This poses a separate set of scaling challenges down the road, as Vijaye points out below.
What do others think?
“The most important job for a CEO is to ensure they hire the best people for their company. Delegating this responsibility too early will have profound downstream consequences, starting with culture diverging from the vision. I also believe in ‘hiring people for the company’ vs. ‘hiring for a team.’ The hiring bar should be consistently established for the company across all functions. This can be achieved at scale by having a single hiring committee comprised of the top execs of the company who are tasked with keeping that bar really, really high. If the hiring decision is made by individual hiring managers, then you end up with inconsistencies, and subsequently, nobody will trust the hiring bar. I know of some companies that spend hours interviewing internal transfer candidates. That’s because the new team doesn’t trust the hiring bar of the old team — a direct consequence of individual teams making hiring decisions.” — Vijaye Raji, Founder and CEO @ Statsig
What do we think?
Especially at a startup, it’s critical to hire great people who are rightly positioned for the long haul of your business because, let’s face it, building your startup is a long road. Setting a bar that serves the company first in the earliest days of your business can also ensure you are hiring versatile athletes who can bend and flex to fill a variety of business gaps and not just super skill-specific to fill a short-term need. And it’s not just about upholding the sacrality of your hiring bar but also about committing to building better hiring processes that align with the type of culture you are creating.
What do YOU think?
Take Action
Just like anything else, ask yourself what problem you are trying to solve before rolling out a hiring method.
The process doesn’t end with a decision on the method. Each requires buy-in, commitment, and effort to ensure success in what they are designed to do.
Since a couple of these methods have specific considerations tied to decision ownership, qualify this very transparently with incoming people managers.
Consider longer-term scaling challenges for growth inflection points to ensure your method is scalable and repeatable. Be prepared to adjust for scale, speed, and quality.
Review the process every year to see if the net outputs are great hires that stick.
Tools, Events, Insights:
How to Raise the Bar on Talent → recruitingtoolbox.com
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