Is Your Hiring Process Broken? Question 2 of 11
The hiring process is a vital part of every company’s survival and a very revealing part of every company’s culture. You might say that how a company begins their relationship with an employee is almost as revealing as how they end it. This is the third in a series on how to be sure that your hiring process is working in a pleasant, professional, and effective manner.
This week’s question: Do you have a simple, documented, clearly-articulated policy of professional courtesy?
If anyone in the hiring process is dismissive, disrespectful, or otherwise rude to a candidate, then you are letting them define your company’s standards of behavior. You’ll lose a lot of good candidates that way.
A lot of companies are trying to hire right now, and a lot of skilled workers are picking and choosing their next gig based on non-traditional rewards. There’s a solid body of evidence suggesting that, once your basic financial needs are surpassed to a sufficient degree, additional funding loses its motivational power. So, extra money isn’t the way to attract and retain the best workers.
What about other perks? A brilliant and well-funded team of in-house pastry chefs was one of the great things about working at LinkedIn’s headquarters a few years ago. But, unless they’re going to be implementing home delivery, that’s just not a perk that matters to me anymore. It's the same with those commuter buses that used to run all up and down the Bay Area. They’re not a perk if I’m not commuting, and I really don’t want to have to commute anymore.
I would suggest that courteous and respectful treatment is always a perk, and that the cost to implement it is always very low… so long as the people in charge have actually bought into the idea. It is certainly possible to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on generating in-house training programs, policies, action statements, and other false evidence of progress. Just look at how many companies have recently done that under the banner of diversity and inclusion. Like with D&I, the important thing here isn’t to generate a lot of evidence, it’s to generate a lot of change.
Now, so far you might be thinking you’ve got this covered. After all, everyone on your hiring team is polite – that’s part of how you chose them, right? You all spend a lot of time kidding around during interviews, right? One of things you’re looking for is "cultural fit," so it helps to try and see which candidates laugh at the same kind of jokes that your team likes.
Well, if you’re hiring for "cultural fit," then you’ve already given the wrong answer to this week’s question. Did you notice that I mentioned D&I? How diverse is your team if you all laugh at the same jokes? How inclusive is your team if you omit those who don’t “fit in” in some undefined and imprecise manner?
Corporate recruitment in Silicon Valley has long given preference to graduates of certain schools and, as a result, to the kind of people who get into those schools. Those biases continue to have a powerful but largely unconscious influence on who gets hired. For decades, this has resulted in companies - even the rare company that is somewhat diverse - being made up of largely homogenous teams. If they’re hiring for “cultural fit,” who is most likely to be asked to join a team of female, USA-born, California-trained designers in their mid-twenties? What about when the hiring is being done by a team of male, PRC-born, Beijing-trained programmers in their mid-twenties?
Homogeneity is the path to exclusion, not diversity. Evolution has taught us that homogeneity is a dead-end path, while heterogeneity offers adaptability through recombination, as promoted by both Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spock.
A simple way to get off of the dead-end path, and onto the path of open possibilities you intend to walk, is to formalize the hiring process. Interviews aren’t casual conversations. They are of vital importance to the people hoping to be hired. The people doing the hiring have to start treating them as vitally important, too.
That doesn’t mean that the setting shouldn’t be relaxed, or the conversation shouldn’t be friendly. In fact, it means just the opposite, but it's the candidate who should be experiencing that friendly and relaxed atmosphere, not you and your team.
Once you accept that it’s important to recruit people who don’t share your culture, it will become obvious that you need to be able to have productive conversations with people who don’t share the body language and cultural references we all tend to use as unconscious shortcuts towards building relationships. This means that one of the skills that is absolutely vital to hiring diversity is the ability to quickly develop a friendly relationship with people who may not share those shortcuts with you and your team. Yep, I’m suggesting that you and your team step out of your comfort zones and create a user experience that empowers the candidates to step into theirs.
So, set kindness as a professional standard in your workplace and in your hiring process. Especially if you want to build a diverse team that values kindness, professionalism, and courtesy, and sees the value in making each other comfortable.
--
Thanks for reading. I hope you’re enjoying this discussion. If not, please leave me some feedback. If so, please do the same, and come on back next time for a discussion of why a list of key words won’t serve your hiring committee as well as a deep understanding of the hard and soft skills you’re hoping to add to your team.
This week’s question: Do you have a simple, documented, clearly-articulated policy of professional courtesy?
If anyone in the hiring process is dismissive, disrespectful, or otherwise rude to a candidate, then you are letting them define your company’s standards of behavior. You’ll lose a lot of good candidates that way.
A lot of companies are trying to hire right now, and a lot of skilled workers are picking and choosing their next gig based on non-traditional rewards. There’s a solid body of evidence suggesting that, once your basic financial needs are surpassed to a sufficient degree, additional funding loses its motivational power. So, extra money isn’t the way to attract and retain the best workers.
What about other perks? A brilliant and well-funded team of in-house pastry chefs was one of the great things about working at LinkedIn’s headquarters a few years ago. But, unless they’re going to be implementing home delivery, that’s just not a perk that matters to me anymore. It's the same with those commuter buses that used to run all up and down the Bay Area. They’re not a perk if I’m not commuting, and I really don’t want to have to commute anymore.
I would suggest that courteous and respectful treatment is always a perk, and that the cost to implement it is always very low… so long as the people in charge have actually bought into the idea. It is certainly possible to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on generating in-house training programs, policies, action statements, and other false evidence of progress. Just look at how many companies have recently done that under the banner of diversity and inclusion. Like with D&I, the important thing here isn’t to generate a lot of evidence, it’s to generate a lot of change.
Now, so far you might be thinking you’ve got this covered. After all, everyone on your hiring team is polite – that’s part of how you chose them, right? You all spend a lot of time kidding around during interviews, right? One of things you’re looking for is "cultural fit," so it helps to try and see which candidates laugh at the same kind of jokes that your team likes.
Well, if you’re hiring for "cultural fit," then you’ve already given the wrong answer to this week’s question. Did you notice that I mentioned D&I? How diverse is your team if you all laugh at the same jokes? How inclusive is your team if you omit those who don’t “fit in” in some undefined and imprecise manner?
Corporate recruitment in Silicon Valley has long given preference to graduates of certain schools and, as a result, to the kind of people who get into those schools. Those biases continue to have a powerful but largely unconscious influence on who gets hired. For decades, this has resulted in companies - even the rare company that is somewhat diverse - being made up of largely homogenous teams. If they’re hiring for “cultural fit,” who is most likely to be asked to join a team of female, USA-born, California-trained designers in their mid-twenties? What about when the hiring is being done by a team of male, PRC-born, Beijing-trained programmers in their mid-twenties?
Homogeneity is the path to exclusion, not diversity. Evolution has taught us that homogeneity is a dead-end path, while heterogeneity offers adaptability through recombination, as promoted by both Mr. Darwin and Mr. Spock.
A simple way to get off of the dead-end path, and onto the path of open possibilities you intend to walk, is to formalize the hiring process. Interviews aren’t casual conversations. They are of vital importance to the people hoping to be hired. The people doing the hiring have to start treating them as vitally important, too.
That doesn’t mean that the setting shouldn’t be relaxed, or the conversation shouldn’t be friendly. In fact, it means just the opposite, but it's the candidate who should be experiencing that friendly and relaxed atmosphere, not you and your team.
Once you accept that it’s important to recruit people who don’t share your culture, it will become obvious that you need to be able to have productive conversations with people who don’t share the body language and cultural references we all tend to use as unconscious shortcuts towards building relationships. This means that one of the skills that is absolutely vital to hiring diversity is the ability to quickly develop a friendly relationship with people who may not share those shortcuts with you and your team. Yep, I’m suggesting that you and your team step out of your comfort zones and create a user experience that empowers the candidates to step into theirs.
So, set kindness as a professional standard in your workplace and in your hiring process. Especially if you want to build a diverse team that values kindness, professionalism, and courtesy, and sees the value in making each other comfortable.
--
Thanks for reading. I hope you’re enjoying this discussion. If not, please leave me some feedback. If so, please do the same, and come on back next time for a discussion of why a list of key words won’t serve your hiring committee as well as a deep understanding of the hard and soft skills you’re hoping to add to your team.
Comments