A practical guide for the old-school hiring survivors 🩼
Uff. 😢
What you’ve seen is the sad reality of recruitment as we know it today. Recruiters and founders often ignore the current market situation, economic cycles, supply and demand, and fail to respond to competition or technological advancements. It’s fascinating to observe the rapid evolution of technology, with new OpenAI advancements, while recruiters still resort to posting ads on billboards or job boards and sending mass impersonal emails.
However, this is not necessarily the case for everyone. I’d like to know your opinion, but still, from what I observe in the market, the quality of recruitment is poor for the majority.
Today, I would like to share with you a surprisingly simple solution on how to start with future recruitment. And it’s not rocket science. On the contrary, because the bar isn’t set too high, it’s genuinely easy to do things at least a little better. All it takes is knowing how to do it and adhering to certain principles. And then these tips can help you gain an unfairly large share of our excellent talent pool that Central and Eastern Europe offers.
Let’s take a look at how to build the whole process on the right foundations and what tactics could help you.
Pyramid of basic 'Future Hiring' needs
Here is the pyramid of basic future hiring needs. The concept is (of course) inspired by psychologist Abraham Maslow’s 1943 theory. According to this framework, the future of hiring relies on three fundamental pillars.
- At the base is the foundational block #1 Strategy and Plan 🧡. Without this level, we’ll be stuck in the vicious circle of old-school hiring. We’ll discuss specific tactics for practically implementing such a strategy in the article below.
- The second level is long-term #2 Employer Brand Building 💙
- Third is the “nice to have” #3 Identification & Attraction of the Right Talent 💜 and the need to enhance candidate experience. While it’s a nice-to-have, having it guarantees a significant impact on our recruitment.
“I need that person to start Yesterday.”
— Every hiring manager ever
It’s highly unlikely that you, in a recruiting role, haven’t encountered such a demand. You may also be familiar with “Yesterday was too late.” Yet, preventing such requests is remarkably simple.
#1 Foundation — Strategy & Plan 🧡
Preventing such demands is simple; all you need is a strategy and a plan that underpins all recruitment activities. Before I dive into the specifics, it’s crucial to reflect on what makes sense for me, what kind of company I want to build, the roles I genuinely need, my expectations from each role, and how these roles are linked to my business goals. If I grasp this correctly at this level, I often find that hiring may not be the cure-all.
🟠 Tactics: Organizational structure — backward design
One exercise that can help is designing the organizational structure. This makes it easier to navigate discussions about a clear hiring plan. Task each functional leader with designing how their department will look in 12 months (or another time frame). It’s crucial to do this backward and have these leaders design it so that individual roles within the department are linked to achieving strategic goals (such as OKRs). This helps achieve clarity and transparency, while also providing an overview of the gaps that need filling.
🟠 Tactics: Hiring plan for prioritizations
The actual hiring plan might look something like this. The hiring plan helps prioritize open positions, especially if you have a dozen open positions, which is quite common. This template I use is great for aligning with leaders on the importance of all open roles. It’s essential because, as the sole recruiter in an organization, it’s unrealistic for me to hire for 16 roles in a month. This template clarifies which role is the organization’s current top priority. Importantly, it visualizes how each open role is linked to a business goal, providing visibility across the organization. The last column is crucial here as it's connected to the business goals.
🟠 Tactics: Final check
This is my final checklist before I actually go and open any role defined in my hiring plan.
“What happens if we fail to fill this specific role?”
- ☑️ What gaps do we have in our current organizational design?
- ☑️ What happens if we fail to fill this specific role?
- ☑️ Will we collaborate with an external agency or hire an internal recruiter?
- ☑️ Do we have enough resources?
- ☑️ For each role we are seeking: Before opening the position, set goals for the role in the upcoming period and assess its impact on the business.
- ☑️ Create their 30–60–90 plan.
When we incorporate this checklist of questions, such as my favorite, “What happens if we fail to fill this specific role?” we often realize that nothing significant will happen, and some roles may not be necessary. It’s better to realize this before going through significant layoffs and letting go of excess workforce that we hired opportunistically.
We often hire Joe as an opportunistic role. We hire Joe because he’s looking for a job, and he seems great. He studied at Oxford and had an internship at Google. What an A player! But in three months, neither of us is satisfied because we didn’t communicate our expectations properly. We did not have a role for Joe.
Another excellent tip that is very effective is defining a 30–60–90 plan before opening a specific role. In practice, if I’m hiring my first salesperson, I create a plan for what should happen in the first 30 days, the first 60 days, and the first 90 days and define what success looks like in my eyes and align on the expectations with the hire as well.
#2 Authentic Employer Brand Building 💙
On the pyramid of basic needs, we move on to another crucial second pillar, which is the Authentic Building of the Employer Brand. If, as a survivor of old-school hiring, you hide your best talent, you won’t have a chance to attract the next one. The top law applies here — top people want to work with top people on the other side. Probably, very few would have someone in their team who wants to be the smartest person in the room. Instead, we are attracted to people who inspire and push us forward. Building an authentic brand doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s essential to realize it’s a long-term investment.
🔵 Tactics: Set yourself a goal: Become Beyoncé
I often give examples from Productboard, and here’s a tactic and how we approached it at Productboard. The goal was clear: “Become Beyoncé for technical candidates in the Czech market.” In practice, we wanted to create a love brand from Productboard that would be attractive to all relevant candidates in the market. It was crucial that this priority came from the founder and went throughout the company. It’s challenging to enforce it solely through the HR department. At the same time, the engineering team was involved in brainstorming and came up with this creative concept. By being part of such a goal, it was easier to motivate them to recruit, recommend, search for inspirational people, organize meetups, attend conferences, or write articles.
And how did we gradually become Beyoncé 💃🏼? There were no limits here. It was important that ideas came from all of us, not just HR. Meetups, sending our people to conferences, podcasts, and articles worked well for us. Changing the mindset was crucial. We struggled with it at the beginning too, but it paid off. The mindset change is not about someone hiring me at a conference, but rather about raising the bar for myself so that the entire ecosystem can rise higher.
#3 Identification and Attraction of the Right Talent 💜
You probably realize by now that posting a job ad is not the end of our work when searching for top talent. In some cases, it might be better not to start there at all. This especially applies to emerging startups or smaller local companies that aren’t well-known, making it very unrealistic to find a top candidate through posting an ad. It would be a great coincidence if the best TOP candidate, an A player, happened to come across your ad with fifteen generic bullet points and decided to respond to it, only to go through 8 rounds of interviews and an assessment center. This experienced TOP candidate, A player, is likely sitting in the company cafeteria, is exceptionally compensated, and his current employer won’t easily let him go.
So now, let’s think. Have you ever heard from your founder or hiring manager to hire some average-quality people?
“Please get me one ‘meh’ candidate!”
— No-one ever
Of course, all job requirements sound quite similar to us. We all want:
💥 A players
💥 Top performers
💥 The best people on the market
However, an A player at McKinsey may not be an A player in the context of a scrappy startup. The key here is choosing the “right candidate” words and, most importantly, identifying what TOP talent means in the context of your company. An A player, a top performer at McKinsey, may not be an A player for a scrappy startup with four people.
I have a few tactics for you on how to identify and attract the right talent to your company. Once we identify such talent, we come up with creative solutions on how to reach out to them and attract them to us.
🟣 Tactics: Sourcing jams
One of the tactics is to involve the entire team in identifying the right talent and engaging the entire team in sourcing. My favorite method is organizing evening party sourcing events. We play great music, teach everyone in the company how to use Boolean search and sourcing tools — like Gem or Amazing Hiring. Then the whole company competes to come up with the most creative message for the candidate. And what can even happen is that your programmers leave these sessions so excited that they involve their wives in it at 2 am in the morning. I can’t guarantee it to you. But it happened to me.
The guide for organizing sourcing party at your company can be found here.
🟣 Tactics: Getting creative with Notion
In today’s times, candidates respond very positively to the Loom videos that I record and personalized Notion pages. Instead of sending a link to the job description, I send a home-made Notion page that introduces the internal culture, internal rituals, love notes for the candidate, interesting projects we’ll be working on, team goals the candidate would contribute to, our values, and feedback from customers.
🟣 Tactics: Getting personalized with Loom
🟣 Tactics: Bring wives into the hiring process
Another example is my favorite, which beautifully reflects how important it is for a candidate to build a relationship with someone from the company. When we were hiring senior candidate VP Sales from Seattle, he had offers from a then-unknown startup Productboard with 70 people at that time in America. Our CEO took his wife on a plane, they flew from SF to Seattle, and invited this candidate and his family to dinner. After a few years, the candidate told me that this was so powerful, and no one from Facebook or Google would have done it for him. At the same time, it made an impression on his wife, who had a significant influence on such a life decision, illustrating how significant and impactful it is to build a connection and a personal relationship during the hiring process by caring about the candidate and their life outside of work.
Now, I would like to conclude this article with a wish. I sincerely hope that you try at least one tactic and help elevate and push the ecosystem forward to advance towards the future of recruitment. The system will move upward, improving the quality of recruiting services. Now you know that it’s not rocket science. I would greatly appreciate it if you tried at least one tactic.
