Our hiring was broken. Discover how reversing the interview order improved our hiring success and reduced declined offers.

Everybody talks about how important hiring decisions are, and how high the costs of bad hiring decisions are. It matches my experience as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company rapidly approaching 30 employees.

The bad news: Hiring decisions can’t be improved by a simple recipe, a fancy AI algorithm, or experience alone.

The good news: A few tweaks in your recruiting process might make a big difference and reduce The Grind of finding the right people for your company.

This article intends to share my experience of our recent recruiting spree, during which we interviewed countless candidates to take our company from 20 to 30 employees within a few months.

External Factors

Let’s look at some external factors in the recruiting world first. Believe it or not, the pandemic has made my life easier in recruiting, despite the often-cited shortage of qualified personnel. Here is why:

• Online interviews have become completely normal — not just for intro calls, but also for extensive technical interviews. We have recruited several people completely remotely and only met them physically on their first day at work.
• With the possibility of online interviews, the pace of the recruiting process has accelerated significantly. Gone are the days when an employer could set an application deadline for an open position, and only after this deadline contact suitable candidates! Nowadays, both employers and candidates expect the first feedback within 24 hours.
• Today’s employment market has become a two-sided market, where candidates terminate the recruiting process just as often as employers. As a candidate, it is no longer an honor to be invited for an interview, and no longer can an employer expect candidates to research their company in depth before the first interview. More often than not candidates value culture and workplace atmosphere more than product and company.

Our Old Recruiting Process

Like most companies, we used to do recruiting the old-fashioned way: After inserting a job posting on our company website, LinkedIn, and selected job platforms, applying candidates were screened by the team leaders. If the skills and experience in the CV looked like a match, the candidate would be invited for an interview, which was predominantly about skills, experience, and team fit. More often than not, those interviews were held on-site in our office, and the amount of time we put into these technical interviews was significant.

Once the technical interviews were over, a decision was made by the team on whether the skills and team fit matched our requirements or not. If it matched, I talked to the candidate about the start date and package.

Enter the wall. On many occasions, we lost candidates during this last step — either because the package wasn’t what they expected, or because they weren’t so sure if they wanted to work in a small organization of 20–30 people.

So we decided to rethink our recruiting process.

Our New Recruiting Process

Step 1: Intro Call — Attitude and Passion Screening

We reversed the interview steps and now start with an attitude and passion screening, which I conduct personally for all candidates after a positive CV screening. This first intro call is always held remotely and lasts around 30–45 minutes. Its main purpose is to align expectations between the candidate and our company, and the following topics are covered:

• What gets the candidate out of bed, both professionally and personally?
• What should we know about the candidate that’s not contained in the CV?
• Why does the candidate want to work for a small organization of 20–30 people? Does the candidate know the difference between small and large organizations?
• What salary does the candidate expect? We have benefited from job platforms such as SwissDevJobs, where a salary range can be entered for every job posting.
• When can the candidate start working for us? If applicable, does the candidate have to relocate?

Besides getting to know the candidate, the candidate should get to know our company. I pitch our company during this first call — what makes it attractive to work for us, and what key issues will the successful candidate have to address? I think it is essential that candidates hear the company pitch and the key issues first-hand from a founder. This part of the interview is typically the point when I get a feeling of whether a candidate has the right attitude to thrive in the turbulent world of a growing organization.

The intro call is always concluded by asking the candidate how much time he/she needs to give feedback if he/she wants to continue in the process or not. Typically candidates are comfortable with giving feedback within 2–3 days. Sometimes candidates give feedback immediately during the call, and sometimes I end the process when the candidate is an obvious mismatch. I always end the process in a good way, being open and transparent about why the candidate is a mismatch. It doesn’t help to waste time for both sides, and you never know if and where you will meet again.

2. Receiving The Candidate’s Feedback

I am a very structured guy, and sticking to deadlines is important in our daily work. This is why I insist on candidates giving feedback within the deadlines they chose themselves. If the candidate misses the deadline for feedback, I assume the interest in working for our company is somewhere between zero and low, and this is enough for me to end the process.

Interestingly enough, candidates missing to reply within the deadline are typically those candidates who also took a long time to respond to confirm the suggested meeting times for the first call.

3. Technical Interview

Once both sides are interested in continuing the process, a technical interview is scheduled. The technical interview is led by the person who would also be the candidate’s superior, and each team leader can decide freely on the length, format, and team involvement for the technical interview.

4. Administrative Interview

If both sides are still interested in continuing the process after the technical interview, I am holding one last call with the candidate to settle the administrative issues for us to make an offer: package, start date, information about insurance, staff regulations, and expense regulations.

Interestingly enough, I often get cultural questions even during the administrative interview. This is especially true for candidates who applied through a job platform that features a transparent company profile. We see transparent company profiles more and more, and it greatly helps both candidates and employers to align expectations right from the beginning.

As a last step, I am repeating the deadline game: How much time does the candidate need to accept the offer?

Since we used our new recruiting process, the share of declined offers as well as the efforts required to fill an open position have decreased significantly.

The Founder’s Role in Recruiting

The more an organization grows, the more tasks a founder can hand over to the team. The freed-up time should be invested in culture building, and I am convinced that recruiting and culture building go hand-in-hand. The feedbacks from candidates during the recruiting process provide a learning cycle for culture development: the attitude and passion screening at the beginning of the recruiting process filters out people who don’t fit our culture, and the acceptance or decline of offers at the end of the recruiting process provides valuable inputs for culture development.

As the founder of a growing organization, you don’t want to give such a valuable culture development tool out of your hands.