From Chaos to Cohesion: Managing a Decentralized Hiring System

Ever wondered why some businesses have a high turnover rate while others seem to keep their staff forever? The secret may lie in how they manage their hiring process. Join us, Max and Mike, as we dissect the art of decentralizing your hiring mechanism, emphasizing the critical need for understanding the role you’re recruiting for and the importance of having an interviewer who has been there and done that. We'll guide you through this intricate process, spotlighting the potential pitfalls of having too many decision-makers if not handled aptly. 

Are you ready to empower your teams and increase productivity? Gain insights into the importance of comprehending each role, its expectations, and the necessity of establishing a core component of the hiring decision before decentralizing the process. We'll enlighten you on how to maintain consistency in your hiring process, emphasizing the need to lay down the groundwork before shifting to a decentralized system. So get ready to revolutionize your hiring process, increase your retention rates, and build a seamless, cohesive unit that works in sync.

We love to hear your hiring experience, whether you're a hiring manager with 100s of hires, about to make your first hire, or an applicant that has a story to tell. Share your stories with Max & Mike at hiringexperiencepod@gmail.com

This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not to be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

This is the Hiring Experience the podcast that helps you break down the art and science of hiring. Hosted by Max and Mike friends, founders and creators of rapid hiring, on a mission to bring an end to the resume, bringing you tactical advice to help you attract, select and retain the best talent. This podcast and the matters discussed herein are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as advice for a particular company or person. This podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional or legal advice.

Mike: 0:37

Welcome back to the hiring experience. Today we want to talk about decentralizing your hiring process and doing it with purpose, and I wanted to just kick that off with what decentralizing means. We hear it all over the place. We hear it in the news, we see it in headlines, we see it in flashy industries, in tech, in AI, in crypto. It's just been a hot topic, hot word, and you may not think of hiring as that flashy thing that aligns with AI and this and that right now. But we can apply this concept and tell you what it means in regards to hiring and in your company and something that you can actually apply so effectively.

Mike: 1:21

A centralized process is when you have your whole team collaborating in one location, in one realm, where that's the team responsible to in regards to your hiring process, to do everything hiring related, from your postings, your candidate reviews to sometimes even your hiring, and then essentially dropping those hires into teams regionally. And when we talk about decentralizing, we talk about allocating that responsibility throughout your team members in the different branches of your different business lines and different regions and whatnot. And I know that there's some hybrid mixes of centralized, decentralized process. There's some that are completely central and I think that there's a line between where we can start talking about, of how to give that responsibility to the people that ultimately are your decision makers and have to be on the front lines working with the team members that they're allocated from some of these centralized processes.

Max: 2:22

I think where we start with this is that they're at the surface level. We get pushback for decentralized hiring, for people that are worried about the elements of inconsistency, or the people that they're decentralizing to giving it to their managers, their frontline supervisors, et cetera, that they don't have the time to run a proper process or that they don't have the resources to do this and that if I am to give everyone the authority to hire, they will be spending too much and we won't actually be any more effective at this. And while the consistency thing is a valid point, sometimes the timing with the right tools there's not a whole lot of need for an additional amount of time. Most of the hiring processes review and screening of the initial stages of applicants, which, with the right tools, should not take more than a few minutes a day and on through it from there to do interviews and reference checks et cetera the value of an interviewer is obviously paramount. So making time for those things and having somebody in the room that is actively supervising that role or has done that role in the past can be invaluable to the questions that get asked. And those are all points of why we want to make sure that when you are decentralizing, that you are focused on getting that information down to the front lines and having everyone on the same page. Though, In terms of what it is, you're looking for the skills that you want the job to be done.

Max: 4:05

Something that we've talked about a lot in the past and we continue to talk about with everyone is that understanding the role that you are hiring and what it means to do that job.

Max: 4:14

If that has been established well within your company, then decentralizing becomes even easier because the inconsistencies start to go away because you have all established what it means, whereas if you have nothing beyond a job title of what you're hiring for, or a department and a location, etc. Then your inconsistencies come in from the fact that we don't know what that job is. So if we can take care of those components, then the decentralized component of hiring really starts to flourish and you will start to see increased productivity, increased hiring rates. People feel empowered to build their own team. They get to truly be in charge of their own team and not just a figurehead that I'm in charge of these people, that someone from another department just gives to me and that really can create a cohesive unit that works well together, versus a unit that has no input on to whether or not that person joins a team.

Mike: 5:20

Yeah, and I think, going back a little bit on one of your points there. So you talked about how sometimes some of the specific parts of the process get pushed to somebody else due to time constraints. So effectively, this is decentralized by accident as opposed to on purpose. So when you're doing this, we need to make sure that you're ultimately what's bringing people into your team and what's bringing building the people that ultimately represent your business and your company. This is a very important part of your organization.

Mike: 5:57

So who is responsible for certain things can't be accidental, right, it can't be my plate's now too full and I need to offload some of these duties. These are the duties I'm going to offload and therefore somebody else is responsible for it down the line. So that's not what we mean by decentralization. That's not how that works. If that's the case, then we need to be very intentional in structuring who is going to be responsible for certain parts of things. It needs to be done in that capacity, or else you do end up with kind of this too many cooks in the kitchen type issue.

Max: 6:36

There needs to be an order to the decentralized aspect there's a so-called chain of hiring command or something like that to belong that. You understand that I am responsible for hiring this group of people, that is the group of people that you are responsible for, and that there's a final authority and everything else. But the inputs of everyone can be considered because, like Mike said, otherwise, it's decentralized by accident that we've kind of just spread it around to whoever's got time to do it, and that will obviously result in all of those inconsistencies that I mentioned earlier.

Mike: 7:15

Yeah, at that point, if you're going to do something like that, you're better off staying in the centralized format.

Max: 7:21

Yeah, and we understand that the centralized realm made a lot of sense at a time prior to technology, where you needed to collect all this information, you needed to process it with some sort of analog process or some very rudimentary technology that allowed you to have somebody focused on it. Because without that focus, in a very manual process, the components get lost and the applicants will get lost and the process stalls to a halt, whereas nowadays, with modern technology, where everyone can be on the platform, you can have everyone you need to be involved in your hiring process involved on the platform. They can see the applicants, they can understand them, they can get the data and the insights that they need right away. There's none of this. I'm going to email you. I've looked at 50 applicants here. I'm going to email you the 10 I think are good and this convoluted back and forth. That is just completely unnecessary with modern tools.

Max: 8:22

This Element that we need to keep doing it the way we were doing it just doesn't make sense anymore and is not a Valid reason for centralization. But it is probably one of the ones we run into the most, I think, if anything we wanted, if we want to touch base and on and have people take away from this is that what I mentioned earlier is that understanding Every role that you're hiring for and what it means to hire for each of those roles, what you're looking for, the skills, the Licensing that they may require, the credentials or even the experience that you're looking for, the energy level that's required to do this job. We want to start there and then, once you have established that with your team, you're able to then decentralize the decision-making process as a core component has been decided on that. This is what we're looking for Now. Someone else can be involved in making that process happen, but if you haven't done that, then the benefits of decentralized hiring won't be realized, because you're hiring with your gut and you can't translate that to other people.

Mike: 9:29

Yeah, you're opening the door for more In consistencies in that capacity for sure.

Speaker 1: 9:35

Thank you for listening to the hiring experience. We hope you enjoyed this episode and learn.