007. Bringing recruiting “Back to the Future:” 3 common practices to leave in 1953
Hi I’m Jen, and this is Safe For Work – a newsletter on scaling organizations, navigating a tech career, and tales of being a startup addict. Content Warning: Today’s post is recruiting nerd inside-baseball, but curious to get feedback from all :)
Scene: It’s 1953 – you’re applying for a job* and going through the hiring process designed by that company:
You see an ad for the open position in the newspaper classifieds, so you crank out a resume on a typewriter, and drive downtown to apply at the company’s office. The company collects resumes for a while, then the chosen few are invited to interview. The hiring manager peppers you with questions like, “What’s your biggest weakness?” and “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Weeks later, over milkshakes, you hear that the son of the boss got the job that should’ve been yours.1 Welp, so much for that.
Fast forward to getting hired today in 2023. Some of the technology and details may be different, but the overall process is shockingly similar to that of 1953.
Most of us don’t realize that, when it comes to standard hiring and HR practices, we’re fish trying to see the water that we’re swimming in.
There’s a small percentage of organizations that really do get it, and treat hiring very differently. I get to partner with them as Founder/CEO of Workflow, an education and consulting company for startups. Still, too many others are stuck – they may have a vague sense of what needs to change in their recruiting/People practices, but don’t have enough clarity to break out of the pattern. And unfortunately, the “solutions” in this space are noisy. The various HR tech companies, recruiting vendors, and even investors are perpetuating the status quo and antiquated practices.
The key differentiator in effective, modernized recruiting is to no longer treat hiring as a simple pipeline and volume management problem. Instead, we need to apply a Sales, Marketing, and Product mindset to approach it as a consumer experience challenge. I could write a book about this (it’s inevitable at this point) but for now – here are 3 patterns likely keeping your hiring process stuck in 1953, and solutions for bringing it into 2023 and beyond.
(*In this case, we have to imagine you’re a able-bodied cisgender white man because anyone else might as well just go home)
First, a quick history lesson
Building meaningful solutions to notoriously hard, sticky problems requires first, a deeper understanding of the problem.
So let’s get back in the Delorean and hop into 1953-style recruiting. In the pre-Internet days, attracting talent was just a matter of being the one factory or firm advertising job openings. Competition was hyper-localized, today it’s global.
Because traditional “Human Resources” is a function that was rooted in compliance and administration, hiring in this context came down to volume management and not much more, e.g. “How do we narrow this pile of hundreds of resumes down to one?”
It was not necessary, or even conceivable to think more broadly – Who are these hundreds of candidates, and how did they find us? How about those who aren’t actively looking? How are we taking diversity and fairness into account? What are candidates’ motivations, our value propositions? How do we stay competitive for “top talent”? What about remote/hybrid/global workforces?
Decades later, most companies’ hiring processes still have not taken these questions into account. Or they do it in a way that’s surface-level and reactive to market trends, far from strategic. We just replaced newspapers and phone calls with job boards and emails. But if a marketing team today suggested direct-mail flyers for a software launch campaign, they'd be laughed out of the room – So why do we accept job boards and vague Linkedin posts as the” crème de la crème” of modern hiring strategies?
I’ve talked about the answer to that question in previous newsletters, so for now, let’s focus on what you should do instead.
1. Interviewing doesn’t rule everything around me
The Problem
When asked how they’re improving their hiring, most startup founders will reply, “We’re trying to improve our interviewing process.” While this is a valid answer, it reveals a critical misunderstanding of what recruiting strategy actually entails.
The truth is, interviewing is only a narrow slice of hiring. Most employees, especially those from larger companies, haven’t had exposure to the backend system of the recruiting process – everything mentioned above – from understanding where candidates come from, to their motivations, etc. Every part of the process has to be built from scratch at an early-stage startup, but it’s hard to know what you don’t know.
The trap is in thinking Interviewing is 80% of hiring, when it’s more like 20%. (!!)
The Solution
The first step is to re-frame your idea of hiring to encompass the full experience, not just the steps you’ve been exposed to. This means making a commitment to work on hiring beyond your current level of understanding, and bringing in experts like the Workflow team to help you with what you don’t know.
Beyond that, being great at hiring is just like being great at Product or Sales – constantly experimenting, then examining successes and failures to learn and move forward:
Talk to the hiring team, give them adequate training and structure, and remove their roadblocks.
Talk to newest hires for feedback on what worked and didn’t work from their perspective, and the concrete reasons they decided to sign the offer letter
Invest in Talent Branding to build an Attract strategy beyond just “spray and pray” job boards and Evaluating whoever comes knocking. Segue to…
2. “The consumerization of hiring”
The Problem
In 1953-style recruiting, companies did not have to offer much to guarantee hordes of applicants. That was the power of being the only game in town.
Then came the Internet. Nowadays, job applicants (especially the most qualified ones) do far more research before even deciding to submit an application. This shift in recruiting behavior parallels the trends already seen in Sales & Marketing with “consumerization of enterprise” – a fancy phrase which means companies had to adapt to reach consumers who have far more choice and information than they used to: Enterprise sales reps’ strategy of “taking a client to a fancy dinner and closing the deal over drinks,” had to adapt to focus more on marketing, data, and education. Candidates are the new empowered customer, and it’s our job to win them over.
The Solution
This is a point that I’m constantly drilling into startups via my writing, courses, and consulting work: Traditional hiring systems are designed to advance candidates who are most available and *willing to put up with the process,* as opposed to those with the most options.
The most qualified candidates – the ones you’d want to hire – are incentivized to critically examine each company’s Talent Branding, which includes careers pages, as well as corporate social media profiles, blogs, and Glassdoor reviews. From there, they try to get a sense of the inside from the outside: What is the company’s mission? Who are the founders and what kind of values do they hold? Their level of experience? What type of people already work there? What differentiates the product from their competitors? How about commitment and demonstration toward meaningful DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion)?
If they can’t find answers, they will close the tab on your careers page and move on, in favor of the 20 tabs of other similarly-sized startups.
This is the work of Talent Branding, and interestingly, 5-10 years ago, it was very trendy! Seemingly every industry analyst had been proclaiming it as “the future of hiring,” and there were very active panels, meetups, and widespread discourse – I participated in more than a few. While a small number of companies may have cracked it, most attempts were ill-conceived, and Talent Branding roles started to disappear as fast as they came up.
Even with this false start, I have seen Talent Branding work amazingly well – I’ve done it myself. It just has to be authentic and unique, not performative or derivative. See one of my past examples here, and let’s talk creating a version for you and your startup 🤝
3. Hiring: Whose responsibility is it anyway?
The problem
1953: As an employer, you controlled the timeline. You could collect resumes for as long as you wanted, interview on your leisurely schedule (in between rounds of golf), and candidates would still show up at the office with a fresh-pressed suit. And if you wanted to take a couple of weeks to decide, who cares? People were just grateful to have a job.
2023: Took 2 weeks to call back an in demand-candidate? Don’t be surprised when they tell you that they’ve already signed a competitor’s offer.
1953: The hiring process just didn’t involve that many people – the hiring manager was the one to impress, lucky for you, all it takes is to be related to one of his country club buddies or have gone to his alma mater.
2023: Today’s hiring is far more collaborative – a group-coordinated effort across many levels (manager, potential direct reports, founders/execs), as well as functions, e.g. interviews for a typical Customer Support role at a startup entails meeting with Sales and Product team members. Lots more opportunities for the ball to drop.
The solution
Modern recruiting takes far more active coordination than it used to – “glue work” doesn’t happen on its own, and needs direct investment and focus. In addition to what’s been prescribed above (e.g. Commit to taking People work seriously! Get help from the experts!) – The key is to focus on quality first, then quantity.
This is a challenge especially for tech startups operating in the ethos of scale, scale, scale – do everything big and fast, and eventually you’ll figure it out. This may have been effective for building technical products and growth machines, but it’s a poor fit for People work.
People care deeply about their careers – and the most qualified candidates especially so. To apply a modern Product mindset means being able to design around *their* experience:
Establish basic SLAs and ownership. Document processes and hold the hiring team accountable to speed and quality.
Use the right metrics. I see too many startups trying to apply Big Tech Co’s hiring metrics prematurely to early-stage recruiting (another post for another day – If you can’t wait, slide into my DMs)
Designate distinct and responsibilities roles for the hiring team (Recruiter, Hiring Manager, and Interviewers) and make sure they are equipped with the tools to be successful, whether that’s training, tooling, mentorship, etc.
Conclusion
The unifying theme of the above trends, of course, is the inversion of power. Many HR “best practices” originate from a time when the power was firmly concentrated in employers.
Then came 2 monumental changes: 1) The shift to high-skilled knowledge work, which led to fierce competition for “top talent” 2) The Internet – It merged all markets and granted individuals access to unprecedented levels of information and choice. These are the differences between 1953 and now – and to me, being in this new employee-centric world is much more exciting and rewarding. (I would have hated having to work in Recruiting in 1953, also I would’ve been stuck at home, bored, because I’m a woman.)
This is the state of recruiting today: Most of your competitors are stuck in the past, potentially giving you an unfair advantage. The first step is to recognize the opportunity to evolve and begin the work, and you’ll be surprised by how easy it is to capture an unfair share of great talent and build great teams. Join me in bringing recruiting back to the future 🚀⌛
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Jennifer Kim is the CEO/Founder of Workflow, an education and consulting company that trains the next generation of startup leaders on all things Recruiting, People Ops, and DEI. Through its flagship program, the HireEd Accelerator, Jen and her team have taught hundreds of startup leaders to make hiring a competitive advantage. Previously, Jen was Head of People at Lever and was Advisor to dozens of top startups. She is also a Venture Partner at Symphonic Capital, and is known for her hot takes on tech industry and culture as @jenistyping.
Appendix / Past Discussions
“it’s time to go” by Taylor Swift