The recruitment process: your canary in the coal mine

When your recruiting and onboarding process stinks, it becomes the canary in the coal mine for your culture

15 min readDec 6, 2017

If the best job candidates make their next employment decisions on a company’s operating norms, behaviors and performance (i.e. culture), just one bad email can be the dead canary that has them turning away.

Companies spend thousands to monitor and improve their communications with customers, but communications and interactions with candidates don’t get the same level of focus and attention.

I’ve recently been thinking more about this lately, as I reflected back on my perspectives as a hiring manager, and a candidate. And, I was excited to consider the process with a more product-centric focus. If a company is one of many competing mightily for the best talent, as most companies claim to be doing:

Why, if our organizations claim talent as a top priority, are the processes for acquiring the best talent so shoddy?

How might a recruitment process yield better results if it was co-created and implemented by marketing and product people?

What gains could be had if the recruiting process, from the organization’s perspective, was treated with as much attention as a product’s development and management process?

What if company leaders thought of candidates as their customers? How would the recruiting process change, and what might the outcome look like?

In the past year, I have informally interviewed, or been interviewed by, 75+ people; CEO’s, CTO’s, Presidents, heads of product and engineering, recruiters, and a host of specialized titles in a variety of industries. This post first began as a bunch of questions and evolved into a set of notes, observations and then musings about the difference between how companies managed their interactions with candidates vs their customers, and a deep curiosity around why such a difference existed.

The result is this post — broken up into several parts;

Part I. The Why,

Part II. The Action Plan (to get started) and

Part III. Communications (one feature of the process with some examples).

My hope is that it’s both the start of a conversation with companies that care about making their recruitment process better, and as an introduction to my approach for how to do so. If there are suggestions or questions, I hope to hear from you in the comments or please just reach out to me directly.

(*Caveat: My thoughts apply mainly for companies that don’t have the benefit of being a logo everyone wants on their resume)

For some quick context

I’m intrigued by processes, no matter how unsexy they may be. My childhood was filled with asking Why — and this curiosity found its focus in the fields of biology, ecology, human behavior and eventually, software product management.

My professional life has been a journey of discovery; observing, researching, classifying and making conclusions about, the behavior and processes of animals in the wild — as they were. This occupied a lot of my time in remote places with humans who were sometimes under physically and mentally demanding situations. (In a few cases, these were life-or-death situations)

Source: Tiger Shark about to feed on a fledgling albatross: French Frigate Shoals. (Yep. I was there, in person, for events like this.)

I had a front row seat to the ‘edge cases’ of human behavior, and the systems and factors that enabled (or discouraged) humans to behave in certain ways.

To me, understanding the root cause of behavior and processes could unleash the power for changing the outcome, if sufficient motivation and ability existed to do so. My obsession led me into corporations and leaders’ lives, where the curiosity about why things weren’t working as well as they could was alive and well, and the desire and ability to create ways for getting better was also evident. I managed to help companies and teams realize some great wins, but I’ve also had my fair share of failures and setbacks. Both have informed the contents of this post.

Part I: The Why

The [recruiting] process as a “product” has a lot to gain from being designed for trust and loyalty. It takes a long-term mindset, and the courage and wherewithal, to consider designing a process like recruitment with a more product-centric, systemic point of view. I suggest that this may not only bring in a wider variety of expertise (marketing, design, product) for the recruitment process’s creation, but in doing so, companies may find a triple benefit:

internal talent enjoying the challenge of new responsibilities and sticking around
the new talent that is brought on board measurably improves over time and,
a feedback loop begins that makes the company ever stronger in its technology, talent and innovation.

PwC Poll: CEO’s 2017 Priorities

According to a PwC poll of US CEO’s, talent remains one of their top three priorities. This isn’t much different for smaller company CEO’s. The Catch–22, of course, is that those innovative processes, technologies and products, don’t just happen. You need the best, most diverse backgrounds and talents to bring all those to life.

So, WHY are some companies’ processes to bring aboard this talent so wonky?

Knowing why something isn’t happening is as important, if not more so, than why something is — and the reason(s) are usually not as obvious as we would have them be.

It’s no secret that the recruitment process can feel horribly disorganized, impersonal, and less than professional for many candidates. But why do employers still practice recruitment this way? Was the cost of making bad hires not incentive enough to consider a new way of doing things?

Outlining this in terms of costs is a relatively rational exercise for understanding the downside of a bad process, and a potential incentive to redesign or re-do such a process:

If you had just one bad hire, the costs could be from $50,000, (or rack up to $100 million over a time), including but not limited to;

> Time recruiting, advertising (measurable) and staff time interviewing (measurable)

> The time (measurable) you, or their manager, spent managing an employee’s repeated bad behaviors or choices (measurable),

> Lost sales (measurable), angered customers (measurable), or lost highest performers (measurable) who couldn’t understand why you kept this person around.

Those losses feel painful, and can be as high as $250,000 for one senior hire in larger companies. For resource-constrained smaller companies, $50,000 seems sufficiently scary to beg the question “Are we willing to burn $50K, plus all the other costs, to continue recruiting candidates this way?”

This argument, though, feels the same as telling people who want to lose weight, just eat more vegetables and exercise more — people already know what they need to do, and even how to do it…but they still don’t. Behavior change is HARD.

So looking to mental models, biases, neurobiology and other key principles and reasons for behavior, I’m reminded that people in companies exhibit the same difficulty in implementing [seemingly] better processes that are ‘good for them’. For example, managing a job-board/communication tool budget, buying a $500 ping pong table and having free snacks on hand could be simply easier than the planning, execution and iteration required for a high-performing recruitment and onboarding ‘product’. The latter’s very nature is a long-term strategy for company health and requires regular attention and iteration.

In psychology and product design parlance, it simply presents a lower cognitive load to buy the ping pong table and hope for the rewards. And, since the recruitment process itself may not be directly linked to product development or customer service, it doesn’t get the resources (brain power, money, people) to make it a priority.

From this then, my second working assumption surfaces: the simple supply and demand equation must be in some companies’ favor. In some regions and/or professional areas, there are so many candidates that employers just don’t need (want?) to put attention or focus on recruitment being better. They can count on having many available and qualified candidates from which to choose.

But what about those employers whose behaviors and processes vary depending on the professional they are recruiting (ahem, engineers)? Wouldn’t it behoove them to have standards, somewhere in the recruitment product’s ‘features’, that treated all candidates like they were star customers?

My own answer to this comes from the principles of ecology, whereby holism, diversity and inter-dependence are necessary for the strength and sustainability of the system. If these principles were considered in the design and development of a company’s recruitment product (process), how much stronger — and more competitive — would the company be in the long-term?

For those who share my willingness to shoot for being better, I continue below with my suggestions.

Part II: The action plan

The following is an action plan for creating, or iterating on, your recruitment process. I’ve borrowed from two places for these suggestions:

my own methods in sourcing, recruiting and developing talent, and
my frameworks and processes as a product manager

If you need a little extra hands-on support, I’m easy to reach.

First Step: Know thy customer.

Do an honest assessment and deep dive into the customer’s situation. Start with understanding the customer mindset, emotions, situational context, their journey, and outcome desired — and work backwards. Begin with a press release from a job candidate’s POV. Have a recently hired employee, the founder(s) or CEO, head of product, an engineer, a recruiter, someone in marketing, finance and design, each write a press release from a job candidate’s point of view; include direct quotes, their emotions, the situation and factors that made them start looking (or not if they are passive), and be detailed about every interaction and experience with your company. The timeline starts before they ever even talk with someone. If these get too long, cap it to a certain number of pages.
Get everyone in a room, and have a scribe at the white board. Everyone read their press release aloud. The scribe should be pulling out key bits about the customer (candidate) experience, bucketing those, and writing question marks where they need to take a deeper dive later. (This process can help you if you’ve never facilitated something like this.)
Vote, discuss and vote again. Colored circle stickies are your friend. CEO or founders vote last. Give everyone (5) stickies for their votes. Put a sticky next to those buckets that are your favorite, and let everyone vote up to twice on two buckets if they just love a certain area. Then, circle the five main buckets chosen and start asking WHY for each one. (If you don’t have five, don’t worry about it. You’re going to prune again in a bit).
This should be an active dialogue that surfaces and tests assumptions. The desired outcome is to get to 3 final buckets. So if need be, vote again, and remove two of those original five final selections. A skilled facilitator who has built trust and can create a feeling of psychological safety with those in room is critical. Your outcome desired is a focus on 3 Priority Areas for focus.
Who, what and by when. Find your “product owner”. Someone who is ideally suited to take the next steps to move these forward into deliverables, and by when. That person’s role is to start fine tuning the what and working with the right people for how. Think in sprints, and make deliverables transparent across the company. The build-measure-iterate cycle is a good one to adopt as it encourages experimentation in lieu of perfection. Forward progress is your friend.
Time block all of this. Less than a week for the first three is doable, and a suggested-but-open-for-iteration plan by the “product owner”, delivered by end of week, is reasonable.

In this activity, you are investigating customers’ needs and context — you’re in customer discovery mode.

The outcome: a rudimentary requirements checklist for your recruitment ‘product’ process.

Here are some items to discuss as you do the exercise above:

{mis}Alignment of branding or tone. How are different people using language in this document? Why? How did the newest hire write their release compared to the oldest hire (i.e. employee #2)? What does this signal to you?
Which messages and language is aligned best with what your brand stands for and under which messaging will a certain candidate will be attracted [and others weeded out]?
Regardless of who wrote the press release, what specific experiences or quotes surfaced as most important to the fictional candidates in them? Why? Where was there the most cross-over? Why?
Prioritization: Which are the two or three experiences you should focus your effort on first? Why?
Consider quantifying things like reach, impact, your confidence in impact/reach, and the effort estimation to deploy.

This starts to address which ‘features’, i.e. recruitment experiences, job descriptions, special events, brand messaging and language, or engagement tools worth considering that are most aligned with your business’s values and goals and the desired candidates you aim to attract.

There are usually a few big buckets, or features, that surface from this exercise and point to areas deserving your attention. Where does communication and messaging appear and did it get prioritized as a “feature” or bucket for consideration and redevelopment?

In the following part of this post, I list one main bucket — Communications — and share a few real examples to get you thinking about the effects of these on candidates you want on your team.

Part III: Feature-focus: communications

Emails

There are many ways the smell of a bad recruitment process (product) starts to emanate, but direct email communications are one of the easiest to spot.

Emails are likely your company’s first digital interaction with a candidate. If you thought of this candidate as a potential customer (they very well could be, in fact), how might you interact with them? How might your thinking change what you do next?

There are so many ways to get this right. Yet still, even at the highest C-levels, this valuable interaction feels squandered and like it is not a strategic or critical part of the recruitment process.

Here’s an email I received from the CTO of fast-growing digital health startup in the San Francisco area:

A spray campaign.

I’m not an engineer. I don’t take kindly to mass emails. Nor do I care about “access to over 100M users”.

#RecruitmentEmailFail

This short note tells a powerful story about the norms and culture, especially if the CTO puts their stamp of approval on sending such an email.

Unfortunately, it’s not my sole example of this kind of recruitment practice.

Real life conversations

I spoke with a startup recruiter, who also happened to be a Founder of an active company building scheduling software (this alone is a problem), and our conversation was about a product role in a health and wellness content company that had 100 million visitors/month. He mentioned that the company was considering moving away from an ads-based business model to something more sustainable and needed someone who could lead that effort. I asked him what the success metrics were, given their pivot, for the company, the product and/or the product leader in the first 90 days under that new mandate.

He had no idea, and replied he had no way of knowing.

#DeadCanary

Regardless of the title, the first person to have a live conversation with a talented job candidate will be under as much assessment as the candidate herself. Being an expert in the candidate’s functional area isn’t necessary, but being able to articulate and discuss the company’s business, its model, how it defines success, why the role is critical, and at that time, unveils a suite of information to the candidate about the company’s norms and performance expectations of every employee — very early in the recruitment process.

Questions for your team:

How is every person involved in the recruiting process educated on these points?
Are there frequent opportunities for employees to test their understanding with others in your company, and with external stakeholders?

Follow Through

A familiar behavior to many candidates is the interruption in communication with a company member that happens after a first interaction, or worse, after several interviews.

In product parlance, this is akin to sending someone a notification with some juicy content, and then never closing the loop. The customer taps on the notification (to buy the new gadget at 75% off, or see that photo they were tagged in from last night’s happy hour), and it just hangs…. spinning wheel, or just nothing at all. Products built with pattern recognition/machine learning under the hood can’t even operate this way. Closing the loop — getting a person’s feedback — is critical to the product’s success.

When it comes to talking with and closing the loop with millions of customers, companies use a suite of tools in order to maintain communications with them; call centers, Intercom, Salesforce, Twitter, Twilio, Yelp, SurveyMonkey, and the list goes on. Then they’ll link those activities to their business’s and product’s KPI’s.

And, yet, maintaining regular communications with job candidates sounds more like this:

Source: Youtube Crickets sound

A SaaS startup CEO, who was a former VP of SAP, reached out after finding me through a mutual connection. He spent five and half hours of his and his senior team’s time interviewing me for a product role at his well-funded, revenue-generating, company. For me, it was eight hours, over two days’ commitment. After each set of interviews, I sent a thank you note, detailing some highlights from the interviews, reiterating my enthusiasm for the product and team, and inquired about next steps in the process.

#Crickets

I never received any replies, of any sort, after our time together, except for a LI invite from the lead engineer.

This also, unfortunately, was not an isolated incident. Email and phone silence was more the norm than the exception, and occurred just as often after one-time calls as multi-day visits.

Professionalism across all communication channels

This attribute is an aggregate of many others. Because everyone defines the parts of what make up professionalism differently, there is a wide variance of defined behaviors for what is “normal” or acceptable. I posit once again, that the customer/candidate perspective is what matters, and if you’re trying to attract a certain kind of candidate, then find, define and actively behave in a way that is in concert with your ideal. Then close the loop and measure to see if you are doing so.

In a separate B2C genome-focused-product, revenue-generating startup, I was offered a product head role, and then asked for references. Although the sequence felt backwards, I gladly offered one (a former engineer team member) in an email to the President, as I waited for responses from my other references.
His reply was:

On the one hand, you might congratulate his aggressive and bold behavior for seeking highly sought after talent. But my alarm bells went off, and I saw this as a signal of unprofessional behavior.

After talking with the engineer about his conversation with the President, any reservations I had were confirmed. During their conversation, I learned little time had been spent on my qualifications or the role I was applying for, and most of the President’s time was spent interviewing my friend.

I weeded myself out and walked away.

In the spirit of ‘questions are the best answers’, I’ll close with some questions you can use to start more closely defining your requirements in your new recruitment process/product. Not all are critical, but they will encourage more strategic thinking and action steps that get your entire team

Who creates the messaging, how often is it revised, and where does that person get feedback to ensure alignment with the recruitment “product’s” goals?
What messaging tools do you use to talk with candidates? Why?
How do those tools help the company elegantly (and cost-effectively?) solve some of the problems identified by the press release your team wrote?
How frequently do you talk with candidates, and why? Who monitors the results from these and owns the metrics that are reported?
How might you involve candidates in that process?
What process is in place for educating recruiters (and anyone who interacts with candidates)and evaluating them on their EQ? Or, their knowledge of the business, the model, the role’s expectations for success, what is driving the need for that role?
What kinds of messages and language is expected? Why, and who monitors for aberrations and how often? What are the results of any learnings?

It wasn’t until after Dr Atul Guwande almost fatally wounded a man in surgery that he decided to investigate and implement a method that would save more patients from death in surgery. When he wrote The Checklist Manifesto, he wasn’t the inventor of that process, per se. He repackaged an extremely successful process that had been deployed over 70 years ago beginning with the B17 bomber in WWII. He saw another profession, heavily specialized (and ego-centric), where human lives were on the line, and he decided medicine (and other industries) needed something similar.

Unless you’re hiring clinicians involved in direct patient care, your recruitment process is not likely one that results in a life or death decision. But for many companies, the costs of just a few bad hires could spell the pain and long-term suffering of the company. A new way of thinking and executing is necessary and I wonder if companies might consider following in Dr Guwande’s footsteps. How might they borrow the mindset and expertise of other professionals; product, marketing or even customer support team members, in order to compete more successfully, over the long-term, for the ambitious and talented candidates they crave?

Thank you to colleagues and friends Tanya Elkins, Navya Gupta, and Christina Petersen for their thoughtful feedback in the creation of this piece.