In this article, you'll learn what structured hiring is, what the benefits are for your startup, and what are common strategies that you can implement at your organization to achieve a structured hiring process and more importantly, improve the candidate experience and success you have with talent acquisition.

What is "Structured Hiring"?

Structured hiring is a standardized, repeatable hiring process that encompasses when a job seeker applies for a job all the way to when they are onboarded at their start date. This includes process related to the following areas (but not limited to): writing job descriptions, reviewing job applications, passive sourcing and outreach, phone screens, candidate disposition, technical screens, final interview panels, team debriefs, offer process, and onboarding. This allows each candidate to have a consistent experience no matter where they are in the hiring funnel and allows your company to effectively vet the right talent before extending an offer.

Have you ever been tapped to interview a candidate with no understanding of the candidate's resume or even what job they applied to and were asked to "figure out if this person is good or not"? This is the classic example of what structured hiring is not.

Why is it important?

There is an incredible amount of benefits to implementing and following a structured hiring process:

1. Reduce hiring bias - Creating clear guidelines for your team to qualify and vet talent will ultimately reduce the amount of hiring bias into the process and introduce candidates into the pipeline that you may have otherwise not had a chance to meet. When there is no clear structure in place, it allows team members to use "gut" feel (and thus, their own internal bias) to determine the fate of a candidate's success, even though their reasoning may not be relevant at all for the opportunity.

2. Improve hiring quality  - Identifying and aligning with the hiring team on the ideal candidate profile and interview success criteria will drastically improve the chances of hiring an all-star candidate for your team. Not only will this benefit your company's performance, but it will also reduce the cost of bringing on a bad hire. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that the cost of a bad hire can be at least 30 percent of the hire's first-year compensation. In addition to this cost, you have other non-monetary costs, like a detriment to team morale.

3. Deliver a consistent candidate experience - If you have too much variation in your hiring process, you have a greater chance of a candidate falling through the cracks, resulting in a poor experience. Think about how many steps you have in your recruiting process from beginning to end - that's plenty of opportunities to miss the mark. Everyone has been subject to a recruiter "ghosting" you, but ultimately, this boils down to the tooling and process put in place, not the specific individual you interacted with.

4. Improve employee retention - According to research done by Glassdoor, organizations with a strong onboarding process improved new hire retention by 82%. Not only does this yield a happy and productive employee, but it also reduces your company's overall cost of hiring someone in the first place.

5. Increase brand equity - Many companies index on the candidate experience for those who got an offer, but what about the experience for the 99% of candidates who didn't? Even if a candidate doesn't successfully get recruited by your startup doesn't mean they'll have a negative image about how they were treated by your hiring team. Ensuring that each candidate is communicated with in a timely and transparent fashion will improve your brand equity. TalentNow found that 84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company as an employer is important when making a decision on where to apply for a job.

Who is responsible for it?

It is typically defined and implemented by an internal talent/HR team, but in the absence of this team, it may depend on the CEO and/or founder to operationalize it and drive adoption across their team. Structured hiring takes the whole organization, especially the leadership team, to participate and support it in order to be successful, just like any other new, wide-scale process at a company.

What strategies should I implement?

Now that you know what the concept means and why it's crucial for startups, we'll jump into some strategies you can implement at your own organization.

Before you implement anything, you must realize that structured hiring is a team sport, and the coach of that team is usually the CEO or someone on the executive leadership team. No matter how talented your team is individually, if there isn't a coach pulling everyone together and advocating for success, then things will naturally fall apart. Specifically, we've worked with teams where the internal recruiting team is (obviously) a strong proponent of the hiring process, but other team members, even hiring managers, shrug off submitting scorecards or attending debrief meetings because it's simply not a top priority to them. Structured hiring must be supported from the top in order for the process to be successful.

Here are some tactical processes to consider implementing at your organization:

• Identify and share business goals related to the role - It's important for the hiring team to understand what you are trying to achieve by hiring this person. Is it increasing the amount of contracts you close per quarter? Is it to reduce the average deployment time for each release? Is it shipping a feature-set on your product roadmap one quarter sooner? Be as detailed as possible and broadcast this with the team before the interviews happen. This will allow others to understand what the ideal outcome is and interview accordingly.

• Discuss compensation early - This in itself is a huge win to both improve candidate experience through transparency but also save your team a ton of time down the road. The number one reason why a candidate would decline a job offer is because the pay is below market rate. If you are in a state that requires it, post your compensation range on your job postings. Even if you already do, make sure to ask for a candidate's compensation expectations in the initial phone screen, so you can prompt the conversation and set expectations on the range before you and the candidate get too invested into the process.

• Assign focus areas for panel interviewers - Explicitly define focus areas that each interviewer should dig into and identify what a strong candidate should look like in regard to that focus area. For example, your focus areas may be: (1) Communication, (2) Leadership, and (3) People Management. Perhaps with focus area #1, you're looking for a candidate who has past experience keeping their whole team in the loop of program-wide changes. Each focus area should also be assigned to each interviewer on the panel, along with the success criteria for each focus area, so your interviewer knows what to look out for. Make sure to pair each focus area well with the skill sets of the panel interviewers (i.e. you probably don't want someone interviewing on leadership experience if they have no experience themselves). Also, ask each interviewer to take notes and save them in your ATS. If you don't have an ATS, throw it in a private Google Doc. This process will not only improve the effectiveness of identifying the right candidate from multiple angles, but it will also reduce candidate exhaustion for interviewers asking the same questions each interview (i.e. "Tell me about your background...").

• Follow a candidate disposition process - Like mentioned previously, 99% of the candidates who apply or have expressed interest in the role will not get the offer. That's as expected, but make sure to communicate next steps clearly to your candidates in a timely manner (usually within 2-4 business days). This includes candidates that have applied for a job posting but weren't qualified for the role; even an automated email relaying this feedback and encouraging them to apply to other roles can be a positive experience. I would encourage personalized emails to candidates who have been deeper in the hiring funnel (past the hiring manager screen stage) and especially for those finalists who didn't quite get the offer. Just because they're not the best fit now doesn't mean there won't be a role that opens up in the future that's a better match.

Conclusion

Structured hiring is the key foundation to reducing hiring bias, improving hiring quality, delivering an amazing candidate experience, improving employee retention, and increasing brand equity in your startup.

If you're interested in learning more or potentially implementing structured hiring at your company, send us a message!