In many companies, hiring is seen as a unidirectional workflow where the functional department drafts the requirements to Talent team for them to scout for talent and connect them to the respective hiring team that often decides unilaterally on the go/no-go of a candidature. This unidirectional workflow is nothing but the legacy waterfall model that assumes the set things and assumptions are all correct and offers little to no scope for collaboration between functions to inspect and adapt to changing circumstances both within the organization and outside.
Lo behold, the Agile Hiring Framework, that you can embrace to usher in agility in your business of working across groups in hiring talent. While I share my experience in tech-hiring, you can take the essence of it and apply it for non-tech hiring needs as well. That said, I'm particularly interested in reducing the waste and improving the operational efficiency for better certainty in onboarding tech talent.
Core Principles of Agile Hiring Framework
- Empathy: Understand the needs of your team and constraints of your stakeholder's team.
- Collaboration: Foster open communication and teamwork among all stakeholders for better learning experience.
- Transparency: Be transparent about the hiring process, expectations, and decision-making.
- Continuous Improvement: Continuously evaluate and refine the hiring process to optimize outcomes.
Steps in Agile Hiring Framework
1. Awareness: Understand the hiring team's requirements. Collaborate withing the functional division/team to come up with the needs and wants in terms of soft & hard skills and expertise. The outcome of this step should be a Job Description (JD) has nothing more than and nothing less of your needs and wants.
2. Reflection: Understanding the hiring team's, talent team's and organization's challenges like (timeline, capacity, compensation, etc.) to reduce friction and dilly-dallying. Collaborate across departments/division to mark your constraints, like hire within 2 months, compensation range for the role, location preference, experience range in number, etc.
3. Open-expression: Define and publish, at least internally, your hiring process/phases with qualifying metrics for each stage. The defined metrics is often a missed thing leaving gaping hole in standardization and alignment of qualitative needs, making things subjective instead of being objective.
4. Measured Execution: Look out for talent that can change the status quo for better, as a bottom line. Keep scoring each candidate quantitatively against each of the metric, to segment the ones who crossed the bottom-line.
5. Continuous Learning: What if scores of candidates thus far haven't crossed your defined bottom-line? Well this gives you the opportunity to reflect on your mission against reality to help you decide on the next steps. If it is not about pursuing further on the same methods, it would typically mean you going about modifying metrics in step 3 based on outcomes from step 4 above.
My Experience Putting This Framework To Practice
If that has kicked your adrenaline, let me walk you through my experience in ushering this change. For the past decade, as first step to improve hiring, I stopped template or stale JDs from being published without forethought. I took proactive steps to modify the JD for the open roles in a manner that it reflects the on-ground realities in terms of requirements and challenges that this role is expected to face. It also presents an opportunity to showcase the benefits and promises the role has to offer as honest advertisement to attract right minded folks.
Once I am aware of my team's requirements, it is time for me to work with various stakeholders involved in the game of hiring to reflect on what we see as current constraints based on past experience. I have worked with both the Talent and Upper management to get buy-ins and alignment on the financial and operational fronts. In places where we didn't have ATS (Applicant Tracking System), this presented an opportunity to invest and leverage tech for better productivity of all stakeholders involved. In startups, coming to agreements on compensation and benefits is another challenge and marking it down explicitly helps on what works and what doesn't for us.
I then have worked with the Talent group to define and agree upon the number of stages and what is expected from each stage in hiring. The real big step in hiring is scaling out execution. If for every published role, there are hundreds or thousands of applications, how do we scale it out objectively? It is not uncommon to witness to this day on how the engineering team including its leaders squander hours, days and months of their supposedly valuable time in endless meetings with potential talent group on one hand only to claim later that they are too busy to focus on business problems on the other hand. All hard-work without a sense of direction and traction is haste. And the proverbial statement is haste makes waste. Instead taking a pause and reflecting on the situation would have done so much good.
So here is what I have done to solve scale out challenges. I introduced take home assignment for the candidates. This async model is fairly scalable with a lot of flexibility for team. And also this brings in other good qualities like auditability, traceability and quantitative calibration of metrics setting the ground for focused funneling in hiring. There are hardly 20% of companies that has online/offline assessments initially to segment talent. And then only the top 5% ensure that the rest of the hiring process is aligned to requirements.
Let me give you two use-cases where I had put this offline assessment to see fruitful results - one in hiring software engineers/architects and the other in hiring data engineers/architects.
Use-Case 1: Hiring Software Engineers/Architects
Take home coding assignment with clearly and explicitly stated objectives to let the candidate know the expectations of the company from the word go. While there are about 20% companies that do have code assignments, check out how I strive to be on the top 1% to greatly improve the potential talent's onboarding experience (Oh yeah, in my world, onboarding starts even before the offer letter is served!) by reading the sections hint (for quick help), Note (to set right directions) and "What we look for in your solution" section (to set right expectations).
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Use-Case 2: Hiring DBAs / BI / Data Architects
Take home assignment that largely reflects the overarching problem in the company to help the potential talent know what they are signing up for. And for us on the hiring side to know we are indeed getting the right talent with right mindset.
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When we have weekly status discussion on hiring, we have data to look into and make our inferences. In both these use-cases, it eased my life in having critical conversations with my stakeholders on what can and cannot be compromised in technical hiring in the good interest of the business and that there is no point in hurried hiring of a candidate only to see him/her leave sooner. It also gave opportunities for us to sit together and have a look on every other constraints that can be tweaked from time to time to reach our mission goals.
What were the outcomes of this framework?
- Win-win for both the talent and the company by striving to remove friction and surprises in the processes.
- Drastic reduction in drop-off rate in incumbent's joining the company.
- Faster adaptability to changing business dynamics.
- Improved trust between department functions - engineering and talent acquisition, by virtue of open collaboration, transparent accountability and data driven decision making.
- Better work-life balance for my teams by reducing wastages in hiring overheads and improving focused time at work.
Business Agility in any endeavour is not about running endlessly without rest and sense of direction. It is about running smart with a sense of direction and having the wisdom to know when to slow down, rest and introspect. Agile is more about collaboration than commands to set a level playing field for one and all players involved in the game, to move faster and farther together as one team. This post is a manifestation of how that is put to practice in the game of hiring. I have done similar things for every other role in software development including QA, BA, etc.
What are you waiting for? You can think of scaling out hiring and adapt fast to changing dynamics by adjusting your metrics and/or constraints using this Agile Hiring Framework. Bookmark this post, share it with your stakeholders, discuss and adopt it to see improvements in your very own workplace and do care to share your success story thanking me 😉.