How To Raise The Talent Bar In Your Organization

In a growing startup, it is natural for founders to get further from the individual hiring decisions over time. As that happens, if the right processes are not in place, the company risks seeing the quality of its hires deteriorating. We all know that people are the lifeblood of an organization, yet it can be tempting to cut corners when hiring. Don't leave it to chance. A small investment in the hiring process can save countless hours of stress and tremendous amounts of wasted money.

Implement a Hiring Methodology

There are several ways to add process to keep hiring standards high. First you must define what raising the bar means to your organization. One idea of raising the bar is to only hire people who will be in the top 50% of your organization in productivity. Another idea is to only hire a candidate if they are better at something than anyone else in the organization. Some organizations try to identify candidates who have high potential but don't yet have much experience. These are all reasonable ways of defining your bar. The important thing is to define it. Rally your team around the process and the hiring results you are looking for.

Use a Role Scorecard

Put a process in place that gives interviewers a chance to think about the objective criteria for success in the job. This allows them to step away from easy crutches that decrease hiring success and increase unpredictability.

Implement Structured Interviews

Each position that is hired should have a defined set of interviews that have a defined set of questions and a defined set of evaluation criteria. This will help your organization focus on job performance and talent instead of on superficial characteristics that lead to poor hiring decisions.

Pay Close Attention to How Candidates Are Evaluated

This is an easy place to make errors. Ask the interviewers not to discuss the candidate with each other until the interviews and evaluations have been completed. The best information is going to come from people forming independent opinions, not from comparing and copying each other. Likewise, have the interviewers score the candidates’ attributes before making a recommendation to hire or not hire. Research shows that once a recommendation is made other scores are less objective and become polluted by the recommendation.

These are a few of the processes that can be put in place by any organization. The easiest way to implement a methodology to raise the bar is to implement an Intelligent Talent Selection tool.

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