Transforming the Hiring Process: From Chaos to Clarity

Ever felt overwhelmed by the hiring process? The frustration of sifting through countless resumes, the pressure of conducting effective interviews, the struggle of balancing your existing responsibilities - we've all been there. But what if there was a way to streamline the process? Max and Mike are here to show you how. This episode offers a deep dive into the inefficiencies plaguing hiring interviews and provides practical tips and strategies to overcome them. Save precious time, conduct successful interviews, and get back to doing what you do best.

But wait, there's more! Max and Mike also unpack the importance of detailed job descriptions. They believe that a well-crafted job description can be the game-changer in your hiring process. Breaking down tasks to their minutest details can offer a clearer understanding of the skills required for a role, helping you identify the right candidate more effectively. Plus, learn how being authentic and transparent about your organization can attract the best talent. So, whether you're a business owner, a manager, or an HR professional, this episode is your ultimate guide to smart, efficient hiring. Tune in now, and let's transform the way you hire!

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

-: 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.

Max: 0:36

Because, like this week, talking to employers in regards to a lot of the positions that they're looking to fill, a lot of them come down to the fact that they still don't have a lot of time to do this. They're stuck on evaluating basic criteria For roles that say don't have some proxy or some credential that they can evaluate on. They're really just leaning on bringing everyone in for interviews.

Mike: 1:14

Even the fact that you've conducted a lot of these now and you talked to a lot of these employers. What is their biggest time sink?

Max: 1:26

People don't not having time is one thing, but usually they're based around spending time in the wrong spot From talking to all of these hiring managers is that they're continually having to stop whatever else they're doing and focus on hiring and review Not in a bad way, but that it's not something that, if you're only hiring occasionally, that you have in some regular schedule that you do If you're a part of day-to-day operations of a business or you're in your office, etc.

Max: 2:08

Or taking time away from all these regular things that you're supposed to be doing anyways, and so you have a full-time job of work to do every day. Some businesses we talk to are continually hiring, but some that are hiring safe every other month, they now have an additional hours of things to add to their full-time job. Some don't have time for interviews. Some don't have time to even review candidates because they are trying to save time on interviews. So they're therefore trying to be super thorough about their initial application review and their resume review and therefore they want to have dedicated time for it. They don't want to just browse through for a few minutes because they feel like they're worried that they might miss somebody, which is a genuine thing and therefore they don't actually get to it because they say, oh, I need this much time to do it and so therefore, I don't.

Mike: 3:17

Yeah, it's a block that just keeps getting moved over and over, right.

Max: 3:22

It's something that when you talk to people, when some people, when you talk to them, it's like kind of a loose analogy, for it is like when people work out or don't have time to work out, just like, oh, I don't have two hours to go to the gym or two hours to do this thing, and so instead of doing something for 15 minutes, they just don't do it at all. Right, and I understand the mentality of it. And that's also because of the way a lot of these companies are doing their assessments and their evaluations of candidates that there isn't a good alternative to super thorough, super in-depth for them until they obviously come to us, but before that moment they're spending all this time dedicated to that review and then even then they're moving into just doing a ton of interviews. They talk to dozens of people, hundreds of people that have done tens of interviews for each job, like dozens and dozens. And I can understand the notion that you wanna be thorough, but the time consuming nature of that is just insanity. So 30 minutes for every interview, five, 10 minutes on either side of every interview, so you're the most doing six, seven a day, maybe more, but so you could take a whole week of interviewing just to fill one role and at the expense of you doing your job on top of that, is something that most businesses can't afford, and I understand that if you're looking for your next COO role at some large Fortune 500 company, because that person is now responsible for the operations of a business and 10,000 person people's other lives I completely understand the notion of being extremely thorough, but, on the other hand of that, for a lot of these entry level positions, mid-level positions, the people that will do the best job sometimes will surprise you, and so, therefore, it's about getting the requisite information, making a decision, interviewing them for confirmation, like we've talked about, you're not interviewing for discovery.

Max: 5:39

You're interviewing to verify that they are able to do this role, or that they are capable to do this role, and therefore you then move into letting them try to do the role, and if you can do that, you will save a ton of time. You may have initial more turnover here and there, but at the same time, what you end up with is that opportunity for greatness that you wouldn't have discovered otherwise, because you're looking to avoid a mistake, or you're looking to avoid failure, or you're looking to avoid looking bad in front of everyone else in terms of I hired this person and they turned out to be shit because at the role anyways. Because that happens. Some people just aren't fit for a lot of roles and then they're not worried about that person, they're worried about themselves and the like.

Max: 6:34

So then you end up with what people talk about is hiring potatoes, because you're looking to make sure that there's no sharp edge, no spikiness, no, nothing. There's no risk at all in hiring this person. They're not gonna be fantastic at the job, they're not gonna be terrible at it, they're just gonna be there. I understand why you wanna do that, but one, searching for that can take forever. And two, you're again limiting the potential of what could come through the door.

Mike: 7:10

Right.

Mike: 7:11

So when we're doing that type of thing for hiring a role, how do we get away from like?

Mike: 7:18

Obviously we know, but let's talk a little bit about what types of things we need to do to be more successful in our interviews in the first place.

Mike: 7:27

So I'm very much under the impression, or under the thought, that we should be seeing at least at minimum like a 25, at the very minimum, a 25% conversion rate on your interviews. So essentially, for every four interviews you should make a hire and you should only be doing four interviews to make a hire at the worst, and I would hope to see that closer to the 50% mark quite honestly, because what that shows and what that means is that you have a complete information package before deciding to interview somebody. But in doing that, you know, there's also a level of comfort that you need to be able to have with understanding that the information you have is relevant. So how do people that are listening determine what the relevant information is to them so that they can be more confident in interviewing the right people to start with and really reduce that time burden by interviewing too many people that wouldn't have made it past that initial information gathering.

Max: 8:34

Where we usually start with that is around the ideal of the best person you've ever seen do this role, and working backwards from what they were doing, how it was getting done and the like, and so it's never as simple as we'd want it to be of like. All right, here's five criteria. That's how we evaluate this position, but at the same time, we want to identify all of the skills that are needed for the role and what that actually means like do they need to be good at communication? Do they need to be good at communicating with internal people, external people, pliers, customers, etc. And breaking that down to as granular as possible. So you have 10 specific tasks that are high level that this job is to do. They are going to talk to these suppliers to coordinate the following things. They're going to talk to customers to help them do a specific thing.

Max: 9:37

Not just they're here to help customers.

Max: 9:39

If you're a sales rep, it's like I'm here to help them evaluate all of their options that we provide so they can understand the details of what they do.

Max: 9:50

And so, once you've broken out those tasks into as much detail as possible, you can start to work backwards from okay, what is the skill required to do these tasks effectively, and if you do each task, you will start to see a group of skills at the end. That's the starting place for this, and it is time consuming for at the beginning, but as you do it more and more, you obviously get better at it, and it's also that you start to see a lot of overlap between a lot of overlap between things and that understand that, like these are the things we need them to do, these are the skills required to do that, and those skills can be hard skills, capabilities, soft skills in terms and the like, and so once you have that list, then you can start to do assessments on all right, I need them to be good at communication. What does that mean in this? But you need it to be more specific than that in this set, in this context. So then you need specific questions and information to understand whether they are good.

Mike: 10:55

Yeah, like putting a bullet point on your job. Application of, like you know, verbal communication.

Max: 11:01

Excellent verbal communication. Every job description has that. Every job description has like somebody with good work ethic, like who's hiring for shitty work ethic, like who's doing it If everyone can say it. It's kind of the old saying it's like if everyone can say it, there's no point in saying it anyways, and so but most job descriptions are just that. Whereas you get good, communication with customers is even more specific, and because the more specific you are, the more detailed you are, the better the applicants will understand what the role is in the first place.

Mike: 11:36

Yeah, that's, I think, a good lead into Just making sure.

Mike: 11:40

So one thing that I find, especially in doing this for clients, is Also being able to portray a true picture of what it means to work at your organization as well.

Mike: 11:53

Right, I got a full picture of the job, understanding from the candidate perspective as well, so not just like Exactly what the role is, which is very important. So what max went through is understanding everything that there is to understand about the role from both the company and the candidate. There's also some things that we should be able to convey about the company that that candidate can understand and you know, like Whatever specifics that you really want somebody to know, but what it means to work there and not just like great positive work environment, like that's not a specific to your company. Again, going back to the bullet points on what max just said, like nobody's advertising, a shitty work environment, right. So, just there, there are things that make your company stand out, that make your company different, that you do differently than your competition and Figure out what those actually are, without bullshitting yourself first of all, and then convey them to other people.

Max: 12:48

Right?

Max: 12:49

No, and that's that's a valid point that we always want to get across is that the you want people to know what it is they're getting into, and I get that's.

Max: 12:57

The summation of all of this is you want to know everything you can about the candidate before they start and they want to know everything about the job before they start, because most people are still judging jobs off of job titles, like we've talked about in the past, and Really that doesn't Lead you into any amount of detail of what the role is, and we've seen it, we hear it from Applicants.

Max: 13:22

We talk to employers, they, they know us why people leave right away.

Max: 13:26

They get two, three, four days in and they're like oh, this isn't what I want to do, so it's the job they applied for, but what the job they applied for and the job that they're doing are not always the same thing in their mind, and a lot of that comes down to presentation of the information and, as a part of the application process itself, can start to mitigate a lot of that, because you can Make sure that part of the application is just they understand what it is you are asking of them, or the thing you are looking for them to do.

Max: 14:02

But that also circles back to, like we talked about a moment ago, is that you need, as the employer, then, to understand what it is you are asking them to do, because a lot of employers don't entirely know, sometimes, every aspect of our job and like how, which we understand, like you're not doing the job anymore. But if you understand in more details, like I said, have those 10 Primary tasks of a role or five, whatever it is, then you understand what they're you're asking them to do and then you can confirm that they Understand what they're they're going to need to do when they get the job.

-: 14:40

Thank you for listening to the hiring experience. We hope you enjoyed this episode and learned something new about the art and science of hiring. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast player. This helps others discover the show. Share with a friend, colleague or anyone going through the hiring experience right now. Share your hiring experience with us at hiringexperiencepod at gmailcom.