I recently came across a good post on the on-boarding process for executives, and how it is often given short shrift in organizations, to the detriment of the new leader.
In my experience, staffing routinely goes off the rails much earlier than that, during the hiring process itself. A prospective team member may learn much more about you (and your organization) through experiencing your actual hiring process than what is said in the interviews themselves, or from the slick information packet put together by the folks in HR.
Following are a few areas where the language found in the position description may be discounted by the actual process candidates experience:
Speed of Hiring Process: You are in a competitive, fast-moving industry.Your business customers expect a lot from IT and therefore you expect a great deal from your leaders. You’ve filtered initial resumes to those candidates that can demonstrate decisiveness in an environment of constant change, with quick successes under their belt. Yet your hiring process for key people might average three months from start to finish. Your HR recruiter may be gracious enough to give the candidate a heads-up to expect as much. If, after four interviews the candidate pushes to get a sense of where things are at or move the process along, you may even get a little testy with them.
What you are saying here is “…we expect you to show that you are an aggressive, decisive leader, but ONLY AFTER YOU ARE ON-BOARD, and NOT during the hiring process. Until then, chill.” How is the hiring of an IT leader any different than the dozens of key decisions made within an IT organization each week? Do you have months to make those other decisions? Does the market, or your internal customers give you that luxury?
Lets break-down a few of the sub-components of this time frame, and the potential signals sent to the candidate:
Scheduling: You plan for five interviews with your candidate, to include key people throughout the organization. All well and good. Yet each of the interviews are scheduled as ‘first available time’ meetings with internal resources, with no prioritization made. Lacking prioritization, each meeting is as important as the next, and Sally is really busy and therefore only available three weeks out. Even better is the hoped-for group interview where the hunt begins for that elusive hour wherein three key people are all available. What message does this send about the actual corporate culture? Is the organization a slave to its meetings?
Consensus Building: You had hoped that the final candidate pool would interview with their future peers, to get their feedback as well, another good tactic. Yet if one of those internal resources is on vacation, the process is held up until they return. So, you are looking for leaders who take input where warranted and move forward decisively, yet you appear to need absolute, total consensus before you will make a hiring decision…
Initial Screening with HR: You may have delegated the screening process to your HR partners or others within the team, which can certainly be an effective way to narrow the field. Yet this approach requires an initial up-front investment by you or someone else who can provide deep background on what you are really looking for.
Without this time investment and knowledge transfer, its likely that the recruiter will need to fall back on the standard fare such having the entire process driven by keyword searches, and will likely filter out those with unconventional backgrounds, or may fail to even recognize valuable experience when it is screaming from the pages of the CV. Think of those instances where your business customer has wanted to discount the requirements process for a system that you will eventually need to build for them…how did that work out for you? Its hard to fault the recruiter, after all, they may be looking for call center representatives in the morning, and tasked with finding you a senior-level cloud infrastructure expert in the afternoon. Do they have the tools to get the job done?
Was your candidate forced to go through an initial phone call with a well-meaning but under-informed recruiter before getting to the ‘real’ hiring process? What message did that send to them? Perhaps the best candidates didn’t even make it through that initial screening, have you looked through the decline stack to double-check?
So, Say what you want within the interviews, talk up your fast-moving team, your positive corporate culture, your organization’s benefits and the significant expectations for the candidate once he/she is on board…your hiring process may have already spoken volumes.