Recruiting Guidelines

Outcome Goals

Building an organization that follows horizontal practices means making sure that folks we bring on will help us grow that practice. We need folks who are “game,” have short toes, seek self-knowledge and actualization, and have unstoppable desire to communicate.

We’re looking for folks who will thrive in an all-remote start-up environment: at the pace we work and with the ambiguities we’re dealing with, and who will roll up their sleeves when they see a thing that needs doing.

We are a diverse team and we want to become more diverse as we grow. The way we can do this is by becoming an employer of choice, and by making extraordinary efforts to reach diverse pools of talent.

Finally, we want folks who are really excellent at what they do.

Please make time in your schedule to complete your recruiting related tasks in a timely fashion, whether that is resume review or post-interview bottom-lines. Recruiting is going to take up a chunk of your day — please don’t let it be an afterthought.

Process Goals

Folks who would thrive on our team should be able to get enough information about us to know that they’d love it here. Please try to give as much useful information as we can about the job and about our culture (without disclosing confidential information without an NDA).
We’ve all experienced the unnecessary frustration of responding to a posting and never hearing back from anyone. We want to let everyone know that we respect their time and effort, even if they are not the right fit for the job or our company. Therefore, everyone should receive timely communications. We use automations to help us do this.

Please review the Guidelines for Communications during Recruiting

Recruiting Process

1. Draft Role and Job Descriptions

Roles __ describe the area of responsibility and the competencies required to manage them. They are written to the Handbook (“Roles & Competencies”).

Job Descriptions are the more detailed descriptions used to advertise open positions. These should include (in addition to the Role description):

Specific tasks and responsibilities, as applicable
Description of the day-to-day activities
Who will mentor / collaborate with the person in the role
Compensation range must be included in the job posting. Range should be tight (i.e. no greater than 10% low-to-high, OR it should provide clear criteria on what determines whether the candidate is offered the high range or the low range (e.g. Senior role at the high end requiring 5 years or experience vs junior role at low end requiring 2).
Boilerplate “our culture” text

2. Prepare to interview

We want to make sure we’re asking the same question to everyone and evaluating interviews consistently. To that end:

Draft structured interview questions. These should be reflective of the hiring criteria that you’ve developed for the position and include evaluative criteria (i.e. what constitutes a good answer to the question vs bad answers to the question).
Draft a decision score sheet

Convene your interview committee. Make sure that your committee understands the job requirements and you’re all on the same page about how to score.

3. Post Job

Submit job posting for approval on the marketing website repo.

4. Promote far and wide!

Post on LinkedIn, and ask your contacts to repost to expand reach.
Post in venues where candidates under-represented in our industry may see the posting
Post to the job boards of HBCUs via Handshake, if applicable. Please note: recent alumni have access to these boards, not just college students.

5. Interviews

Follow the interview sequence specified in the posting and use the interview tools that have been developed (questions & scoresheet) to counteract our natural tendency to respond to agreeableness.
If in a follow-up interview, you want to be free to discuss confidential information (e.g. development roadmap), please make sure that the automated email that goes out when you change the stage includes a link to our unilateral NDA and a link to the Handbook.

Bottom-line hiring recommendations!

We use a 4-point system for the hiring recommendation to avoid ambiguity. Interviewers are required to choose between a hire or no hire recommendation, which makes each interviewer’s position clear as we go in to the committee discussion.

The candidate evaluation is specific to the candidate and NOT a rank-order of preference against other candidates for the job.

Since you’ll be rating after each interaction, it’s understood that your rating may change as the candidate goes through the interview process.

The ratings:

Strong Hire: This person is superstar and a great fit for this position and possibly other positions. If this person is not hired now, they should be cultivated for future openings. Hire them at the earliest opportunity.
Hire: Meets the needs of the position, but not a clear home-run. If this person is not hired today, we would happily evaluate them again for another position later.
No Hire: Does not meet the needs of this position.
Strong No Hire: Not a fit for us for any position current or future — never consider for any position (needless say, this is a strong statement and indicates there is a serious red flag).

Your bottom-line hiring recommendation should be accompanied by a short justification that make the case for why your assessment is what it is, citing specific statements / moments from your interactions. Please also include:

Notes on assumptions you are making that will need to be vetted through subsequent interviews or reference checks
Questions in your mind that were not sufficiently resolved by the interview that merit further exploration

Provide bottom-line and justification within 24 hours after each interview. Please submit via Rock Pigeon.

6. Reference & Background Checks

Please take at least two references prior to making an offer. References should be taken by someone who did NOT interview the candidate, if possible.

The purpose of the reference-taking is to fill in gaps in your knowledge about the candidate, and so the questions should be specific to the candidate and geared to either answer things that you didn’t quite get a sense of through the interviews, or to get a third-party take on some important capability. Issues you may think about:

Are there any assumptions you’re making about how well this person would work out based on where they’ve worked or who they’ve worked with in the past? How can we vet those assumptions through the reference check?
Are there any key skills or capabilities that you want to get a third-party validation on?
Are there issues of fact that you want verified (e.g. candidate claims that x project was her idea and her legwork — we’d want someone to validate that, if it makes a difference in the bottom line).

Reference checks should be conducted based on a list of questions sourced from the hiring committee (please limit ad-hoc deviations to what’s necessary to get robust answers to the questions). Please read this nice short backgrounder on reference checks.

Document what gaps in knowledge the committee wants to fill.
Document what assertions made by the candidate need an independent confirmation
Always include getting insight into the candidate’s fitness as a manager-of-one

Draft good questions

DO: Ask questions that encourage them to tell you what they most appreciate about the candidate, and do it early.
DO: Ask questions that encourage them to recount experiences. Get the referee to tell you the STORY that illustrates whatever point you’re looking for. How they tell the story will convey how they felt about it, and you’ll be able to probe where more details are needed.
DO: Ask HOW questions, not CAN questions. e.g. “How does she go about creating stakeholder alignment?” not “Can she create stakeholder alignment”
DON’T: Does the question inevitably result a yes or no answer? E.g. “We’re looking for someone to do X. Would CANDIDATE would be good at doing X?” No reference is ever going to say no, so that’s not a good question.
DON’T: Does the question emphasize the subjective opinion of the referee? E.g. “Do you think….” Everything the referee tells you is their subjective opinion, but if you emphasize it, people will tend to err on the side of being as positive as possible and write it off: “well, it’s MY opinion. Other people thought she failed on that project, but I thought she was a wonderful person.”

Reference checks should be recorded and transcribed, and transcriptions sent to everyone on the hiring committee

Excepting interns, unless we have good reason to believe no background check is necessary (e.g. recent & verified managerial civil servants have already gone through more extensive background checks than what we can access, and some employment agencies run backgrounds on their candidates), we’ll run a background check at the time the offer is accepted.

7. Making the Offer

Negotiating Compensation (TLDR: Don’t.)

Please note it is illegal to ask a candidate their salary history. Do not do it.

If you are using the standard workflow. the candidate will have received a prompt to provide their desired compensation when you moved the candidacy from the first to the second interview. If a candidate’s desired compensation is above the published range, that person is not a fit for the role as scoped (if we’ve done our homework on compensation).

Compensation recommendation should be an internal discussion based on the criteria specified in the posting itself. If we publish a range, but make offers outside the range or deviating from the criteria, we’re not actually being transparent! Do not make verbal offers

Offer Letter Package

All offers are approved and signed by the CEO. The offer letter package includes

Letter
Proprietary Information and Competitive Activities Agreement (PICAA)
Job Description

Start dates may not be within 2 weeks of the offer

Keep in mind that benefits start the calendar month following the start date. Discuss with the candidate when they need health benefits to kick in. If they need it as soon as they start, you should make the start date the last day of the month (e.g. March 31st rather than April 1).

You may wish to send a copy of the health benefit summary form (see the Justworks GitHub for the link).

New User Setup

Please submit a new user setup form in GitHub, so they have the account access and everything else they’ll need for their first day.

Your Onboarding Responsibilities

Once you’ve got an accepted offer, solicit someone to be their onboarding sponsor. You may want to ask someone who is not on your immediate team, so that the new person has an opportunity to broaden their circle as soon as possible. It may also be more comfortable to ask “newbie” questions to someone who is not their immediate team member.

You should remain engaged until your new hire has completed their probationary period. Please be prepared to participate in their onboarding 360s.