How to set up a systematic hiring process

Having a systematic hiring process is one key component of building high-performance teams. Here’s the six-part process.

1055 words • 6 min read

If you want to build a successful startup, you need a high-caliber team. And one of the ways that you can make that happen is by setting up a structured, systematic hiring process from day one.

Here’s why it’s helpful:

• It sets the same standard of excellence across the whole team. If you’re not running a consistent, structured process, you’re not going to be applying the same level of rigor in evaluating everyone you hire.

• It forces clarity about what you’re actually looking for. Is everyone involved in the hiring process on the same page about what you care about and evaluate for? Having a system in place minimizes the potential for miscommunication and misunderstanding.

• You’ll save a lot of time and money in the long-term. There’s no perfect hiring process, but, if you’re doing it right, having something structured in place will reduce the number of mis-hires you make.

At Pilot, we hired with the same rigor a unicorn company would use, long before our valuation reached $1B. Here’s the six-part process we used (and still use) to grow our team to 400+ employees:

1. Job description

This sounds obvious, but most people don’t spend enough time on this stage of the process. Before you start interviewing candidates, you need to get really crisp on the role: what is this person actually going to do? What are the requirements? Why do we need this role now? How will it fit into the rest of the team? What comp and title are we contemplating?

Make sure you think not only about why you want to hire for the role, but why the candidate should be excited about the opportunity. Why does this job matter? As an early-stage startup, you won’t be able to compete with the cash salaries of the Googles of the world, so you’ll need to find alternative ways to attract candidates. This usually means appealing to their desire for ownership, impact, and growth.

Resist the urge to copy-and-paste an existing job listing. Instead, ask yourself: is credential XYZ or skill ABC actually a requirement for this role? If not, don’t include it—you’re just deterring otherwise-great candidates from applying.

2. Interview panel

At a smaller startup, the interview panel might just consist of you and your cofounders. Regardless of the size of the panel, clearly enumerate the areas/topics that each interviewer is going to focus on in their interview.

If you’ve done a good job with the job description, this should be fairly straightforward. For example, when we were hiring a content marketer, we had three requirements: can they produce high-quality content, are they metrics-oriented, and can they work efficiently/with urgency? And so each one of our interviewers focused on one of those topics.

If your interviewers’ topics overlap too much (or you’re not rigorous in specifying who’s going to cover what), you’re not going to get a full picture of the candidate, and you won’t have high conviction when it comes time to make a decision. (Not to mention that it’s a pretty blah experience for the candidate to be asked about the same topics three different times!)

3. Submit scorecards

After the conclusion of each person’s interview, the interviewer promptly jots down notes about the interview: where did the candidate really “spike”? What are the concerns we had or areas we’d want to probe on more?

Finally, the interviewer should record their recommendation—one of: Strong Yes, Yes, No, or Strong No—along with a brief rationale why. This should be done in advance of the debrief to avoid groupthink/people inappropriately deferring to the opinion of someone “more senior” in the room.

4. Internal debrief

During the internal debrief, the interview panel gets together with the hiring manager & recruiter to give their assessment of the candidate. The hiring manager or recruiter first frames up the conversation with a reminder about the role and what we’re looking for, and then we proceed through the panel in the order that folks talked to the candidates.

Lackluster reactions/weak “yes” should be considered a “no”—in general you want to see enthusiasm and conviction about candidates before you hire them.

You probably shouldn’t hire anyone where the panel is not unanimously a yes.

Exceptions, of course, exist: for example, if a candidate got 5 “strong yes” and 1 “no”, we might look into whether there was a misalignment of expectations on the part of one of the interviewers.

If you find that the interview panel consistently does not reach conviction on candidates (said another way, if you get a lot of lackluster “shrug, yes, I guess? I wouldn’t veto this hire”), ask yourself: do I have the job description and interview loop right? Does this panel actually understand what good looks like?

5. Reference check

Your interview process is never going to be perfect, and there’s only so much signal you’ll get from spending a few hours with a candidate. Reference checks help round that out, and are a great way to get a fuller picture of a candidate. (They’re also a good way to get tips for making the candidate more successful in their new role.)

No one is perfect, so when you’re doing a reference check (especially with the candidate’s previous manager), ask probing questions that will help you understand where this candidate might need support, or where they have opportunities to grow. If you haven’t heard about an opportunity for future growth or improvement, you haven’t dug deep enough.

I generally keep the questions fairly simple:

• What are this person’s strengths?

• Where do you think they need the most support/have the biggest opportunity to grow?

• Would you hire/work with them again?

6. Offer (or not)

Whether you end up making an offer or not, get back to the candidate in a timely manner with your decision. I can’t emphasize how important (and differentiated) a really good candidate experience is—and a negative candidate experience absolutely impacts your reputation as an employer.

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It’ll probably seem overly process-driven and over-engineered to put in this level of rigor in the early days, but it’s one key component of ensuring that you have a high-performing team. Do it early, and you’ll reap the rewards of better hires, less time wasted, and a scalable process for growing your team quickly when the time comes.