| I once fell into the position of having to hire for a fast-growing new team at a large corporation. We didn't have a manager yet, so our department's VP trusted me to make hiring decisions. I made the first 20-ish hires, then helped out with 20 more. When we eventually got a director and other managers who were peers to me, I held the informal distinction of being able to make good hiring calls. Many of my hires rose quickly in the company, earned strong performance reviews, and even won awards at the company. Eventually, I become a middle manager and had to teach managers I supervised how to hire in a similar fashion. Relying on me to make a final call wasn't scalable. And that's when trouble began. A few bad hires leaked in. For the first time, our group experienced attrition. So I set about to try to systemize my recruiting process such that it was repeatable by others. That's when I had to codify our team "culture", which was something I used to help with my hiring decisions. There were times when I made a call to hire a candidate who seemed too junior for a role, because I felt there was a strong "culture fit." Of course, what I realized was, I was simply assessing for typical soft skills, as well as personality traits such as tenacity, initiative, quick study, etc. In other words, there was no magic. I didn't have some special gift for hiring. It was just a simple unspoken template in my head. And it wasn't exactly "culture" either, as much as it was a set of personality traits that every company looks for. I suppose what I came up with was basically a "structured culture fit screening assessment", to borrow the article's parlance. If you don't have something like this, I'd highly encourage that you look into it. Not only can it help minimize bias, but it can also give you a repeatable process for all of your company's hiring managers. |