Hooked on the Ripple Effect of Leadership Interview Experiences - Issue 29

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." - Peter Drucker

How you interview leaders profoundly impacts your culture. As a founder, maybe you never realized it, but the actions and behaviors you adopt during your leadership hiring journey bleed into every corner of your business. And the ripple effect of a negative experience is detrimental.  

What’s going on?
Do you have “experience debt” at your startup? If you haven’t been intentional about the interviewing experience you create for leadership candidates, chances are you do. Everyone knows a bad candidate experience can ruin chances of attracting great talent, ultimately leading to a negative talent brand. But most founders don't consider how these same bad experiences become the experience bar you set for your team. Bad candidate experience breeds bad cultural experiences most prominently at the leadership level. Communication delays, lack of transparency, disorganized interviews, repetitive conversations, jumping through hoop after hoop, and little-to-no feedback — if any of these practices sound familiar from your recent interview processes, it's highly likely that these same practices are manifesting in the culture you are shaping.

Why does it matter?
A common misconception among entrepreneurs is that candidate experience begins and ends with the interview process. However, the experience you provide to any candidate is just the first step in their journey as an employee at your startup. If your startup life is chaotic and you justify this as a "genuine experience," you're setting yourself up for an unmanageable environment. The experience you create as a founder resonates through everyone you hire. If it feels turbulent at the outset, brace yourself for a rocky journey. Like a disease, these tolerated or accepted behaviors will gradually infiltrate every aspect of your startup, becoming the new norm. Anyone you hire will either adapt to the culture they encounter or they will opt-out.

What do others think?

“The single most important decision a leader makes is who to hire. Culture comes from the top of the organization on down, so hiring someone for a leadership position has a tremendous impact on how the culture of any team will evolve. One of the most important questions I ask a candidate during an interview for a leadership role is, “What are the values you lead by?” There’s no right answer to this question. However, I learn a lot about a candidate based on how they answer. I tend to find that the best leaders have given this question some thought and are clear about the principles they stand for.” - Justin Schuster, VP of Marketing at Spotnana

What do we think?
You can save your startup from this specific kind of culture debt that is the consequence of creating haphazard interviewing experiences for leadership candidates. Craft an intentional candidate journey end-to-end, starting with the first interaction leaders have with your talent brand. Consider how your startup values align with every step of that journey. If you preach transparency, ensure you deliver that promise through every candidate interaction. By doing so, incoming leaders will clearly recognize and embrace this value, shaping their hiring decisions and actions accordingly. Great candidate experiences will automatically reinforce the right behaviors internally, ensuring your team is building a healthy and sustainable culture.

What do YOU think?

Take Action

• Start with first principles. Define your interviewing and hiring philosophy. This is the foundation necessary to create an interview experience that mirrors the culture and is the platform from which new leadership hires operate.

• Fresh eyes. Audit your interview processes by asking every new leadership hire what it was like and how their interviewing experience has set the tone for how they lead. If their interview experience doesn’t map to your philosophy, fix it.  

• Post mortem. If you’ve hired leaders who are not performing well, are breaking glass, undermining leadership, or otherwise not getting the right things done constructively, we guarantee you can directly trace this discord back to the hiring process. Run full forensics on that leader’s interview process and leverage these learnings to fix what’s broken. 

Thanks for reading Hooked! We’ll be back in your inbox on Sunday, August 20.

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