Hiring the right talent, at the right time with the right resources is key to any companies success. If you are not able to get your hiring plans on track and ensure that you are always hiring great people, it’s going to get very challenging for you both internally and externally. I still feel hiring is still a lot of art than science and it needs a lot of focus and priority to get it right. While each company has it’s own hiring strategy on the kind of talent it wants to pursue, it always helps to follow a lean hiring process which can move fast and be responsive to a candidate. If you really like someone, you should be able to seal the deal pretty quickly, rather than linger on due to process and productivity issues in your hiring team.

One way to keep focus and priority on hiring is to make it transparent to all the stakeholders and participants. Most interviewers hate it when all they are told to just conduct an interview when a candidate arrives as if their job is just to do a round of intreview and then spit out the feedback. If you end up creating silos among your interviewers and decision makers, you will hardly make any good progress in hiring because each interviewer feels his job was just to do the interview and provide feedback. An interview should not just be an evaluation for a candidate, it should be an experience and if the interviewer treats it as a monotonous task, the candidate is not going to be excited about it. The best way is to open up the hiring details and progress to everyone and ensure that everyone who is part of hiring team is involved in the complete process and gets a complete update on where things stand. If we are not making progress on a key hire for a team A, and it’s imperative we add capacity to Team A this quarter as we have over arching goals to achieve in this year, you need more partners to help you reach the goal then just executors who will do a task assigned to them. Hiring fails badly when it gets task oriented, so it’s best to align each interviewer as a partner in your hiring process.

A quick way to setup a simple workflow for hiring would be to use JIRA, if you are already using it in your company for an engineering project. JIRA is very powerful and you can quickly setup any custom workflow with required permissions in minutes and boom you are ready to go without buying any new fancy software. Setting up a kanban board in JIRA is a quick hack to get your hiring process transparent and ensure real time tracking of progress made on any position.

What do you do

• Setup a Kanban board for recruiting. A sample reference screenshot is shown above.
• Create columns as per your companies hiring process, each stage in the interview process would typically be a column on the board and you could have some additional columns to see specific status such as “Resumes Rejected”, “Offer Dropouts” as this are some areas you want to focus on if they have big count. If so, it requires a strategic intervention to get things right.
• You could create swimlanes for each position or a group of positions. This will help you see progress by each position or group. For e.g. in the screenshot above, we are tracking two separate positions.
• Define filters on top as per your requirements. These could be By location, By date, By state, By date range etc.
• Setup an email such that any resume that comes in the company is sent to a JIRA project and depending on how you have structured your swimlanes it will autmatically land in the INBOX column for that psition.
• Have a meeting among the hiring team members, and set the rules of the game. Every body checks and assigns the tasks as per workflow, and updates the feedback on the JIRA task assigned to them.

How does it help

• If any particular particiapting function or person is bottleneck in the current pipeline, it would instantly show up on the board.
• If you are seeing too many offer dropouts, you know something is wrong.
• If you are seeing too many resumes getting rejected, it means your sourcing is not right and your team is spending valuable time on rejecting resumes.
• If your scheduling or initial screening is blocking the progress, you can now ask difficult questions to your talent partners.
• Having the whole activity being updated in real time helps everyone in the team and you don’t end up doing useless meetings on tracking status. Also, each task has an assignee at any moment of time and people know what is coming along their way next.
• With everybody’s comments on the task, its easy to reach a decision.
• People come up with ideas in order to solve bottlenecks in the pipeline because now they may feel part of the process rather than being a hop in the process as was happening previously.

If you are not using JIRA, you could also use Asana to setup a quick hiring workflow for your team as per – [Recruiting and applicant tracking] (https://asana.com/guide/explore/workflow/customize)

Ensuring a lean and transparent process using some productive tools can go a long way in helping you hire the right talent. If you are not being productive in hiring, you will end up wasting more time of your key engineers on interviewing more people than deliver products because there is a high chance that the candidate you liked has been shortlisted by some more companies and if you are not tracking and moving fast, you will lose a great potential hire whom your team really wanted on board.