Hiring, smarter & better
In the summer of 2020, a few months into my new role, my manager said, “you get to hire someone!”
Great news! We need more people.
So here’s how that went:
93 days average time-to-hire even though I had 500 applicants within three days of posting the role and we were supposed to be scaling fast
Sink-or-swim — I had to figure hiring out as I progressed through each step, at the expense of candidates
Senior was our level default not because we needed the craft level but because we needed negotiators who could hold their own
“We only hire (visual design) rock stars” was the ethos even though the ratio of skills needed in the role were about 80/20 in favor of UX over visual and the work was not, well, Lollapalooza-level exciting
No internal awareness across hiring managers similar open roles across design
~90% of applicants appeared to be white, and ~75% men (we couldn’t truly track; this is what I was able to notice)
Every “yes” = way more work which affected who I brought into the process
Our XF partners’ interview skills did not meet the bar, which discouraged candidates
By the time I sent out an offer I was so worn out I would have happily hired my cat
What I did
No one had ill intent; these issues show up policy-heavy processes.
I could set aside more time for me to review applicants, but that had limited potential impact and required even more effort to patch up an unwieldy process.
I don’t really do quick fixes or band-aids. Nine times out of ten doing that pushes problems and complexity downstream.
I needed to make meaningful and safe improvements, starting small and building trust in my ideas over time.
Below is a summary of what I accomplished over the course of two years. It’s too much for paragraphs so I’ve summarized here. I used each change and its impact to guide what I pitch doing next.
Our average time-to-hire went from 93 to 65 days.
How I did it
Wait, we can use design methods to improve more than just digital products?!?!?
I saw where we were and what seemed like both a reasonable and ambitious place to get to. Getting from one to the other needed a flexible plan — which is what a strategy is, the plan for how to get from one place to the next, better one.
Starting small, I joined the Talent Guild which gave me a way to understand the landscape, design the improvements you see above, and the authority to make them official with leadership. The Guild also gave me a way to officially partner with our Talent Lead. Without her input and feedback, none of this would have worked out.
If you look across the top row of that table you scanned, you’ll see the order I addressed and changed things in: diversity of candidates and eventual new hires, shifting the hiring philosophy to something more strategic, getting the career ladder to a place where it’d be useful for more than one week a year (reviews), and shifting the burden of the process from one person to a shared effort across the manager cohort and other team members who needed the skills in hiring.
Conclusion
I came to believe that the career ladder is actually the key to many more things than I originally thought.
In the interview process specifically, a well-developed ladder with an up-to-date list of specific skills the practice and business need can help you
write job descriptions that reflect what a person will actually be doing all day
give people who hire a shared way of seeing the process
assess applications and conduct interviews with an eye toward specific skills and the level we need to see them practiced, instead of looking for “unicorns” which still do not exist
provide partners with the language and common definitions for good questions, and coach them with material that helps them assess answers well
at the end of the hiring process, make a decision based on whether or not a candidate can do the job, not impress us in an interview
