Building the Team
Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.
In my last two posts, I talked about the process we use at H.Bloom to run a recruiting campaign: defining the role, targeting the right profile of candidates, building a list of potential candidates and presenting them with a persuasive pitch. This process is meant to yield viable candidates for a position.
But what happens then? Once you have interested candidates, how do you figure out which one is the right one for your team? The answer depends on two things: The person’s fit for the role. And the person’s fit for the team.
The process we use to go from a list of interested candidates to the right person for the job has evolved strikingly since we started the company, and it continues to change as we strive to increase our success rate with new hires. Here’s the evaluation process we use:
E-mail interaction. Because we typically start our interview process based on a recruiting campaign conducted by e-mail, the correspondence itself allows for basic analysis of the candidate. Is the candidate interested in the role? Is he or she responsive to our e-mails? Does the candidate take the time to proofread a response? If so, this person is a viable candidate and ready for the next step.
Phone screen. Before setting up a first interview, we ask for a brief phone screen. This allows us to assess: Is the candidate enthusiastic? Is the candidate articulate? It also gives us the chance to determine why the candidate is interested in the position.
In-person interviews. We have multiple people, three to five, meet with a candidate for in-person interviews. They generally last 30 to 60 minutes, and we try to form two different assessments. First, is the candidate a culture fit? One of our values is, “Care deeply about our colleagues.” This assessment has been relatively easy for us to make, because we work hard to hire people who are genuinely good folks. During the interview process, we have a candidate meet with multiple employees to get a broad sense of the candidate’s ability to fit in with the existing team. Second, we ask detailed questions about the candidate’s background, work experience and skill sets to determine if the person is a good fit for the role.
Case study for short-list of candidates. When we started H.Bloom, we would hire a candidate based exclusively on e-mail interactions, a phone screen and in-person interviews. After a couple of early mistakes, however, where we hired folks who did not end up being good fits for their positions, we realized that we needed to make a change. It became obvious to us that the qualifications of multiple candidates can be indistinguishable in 30- to 60-minute sessions.
Candidates who make our short-list are given case studies that approximate the actual job. We provide an assignment, with all of the necessary background information, and then set up a time for the candidate to come back into the office and present the case to a handful of us who will make the hiring decision. This in-depth evaluation allows us to separate the great candidates from the merely good. Here are some examples (next week, I will go into detail on one of the case studies we have done):
For a finance candidate: Under a nondisclosure agreement, we gave the candidate historical financial information about the company and the specific levers for our growth. We then assigned him the task of developing a 12-month revenue model.
For a floral buyer: We gave the candidate floral recipes — the individual stems that make up a single arrangement — for our markets for the coming week. She then walked us through the sources that she would use to procure the necessary flowers from around the world, and at what prices she could buy them.
For a direct marketing manager: We provided the candidate with monthly customer goals for the next year and an annual marketing budget. The task was to present a detailed marketing plan, noting the number of customers acquired each month by each marketing channel and listing all of the corresponding costs.
On-the-job cultural assessment. Once we introduced the case study, we thought we had perfected the interview process. We had moved from a generic interviewing regimen to one that closely approximated the actual role, and it allowed us to determine the candidate’s ability to execute the specific tasks of a position. What it did not do, however, was to analyze the person’s comfort in the role and at the company. We learned that the hard way.
Last year, we had two participants in our SEED program — a training program designed to prepare participants to open and manage an H.Bloom branch — leave the company before the end of the training program. Worse, both of these folks were potential all-stars, clearly equipped to handle the tasks associated with the role. But what we didn’t find out until they had already joined H.Bloom was that there was not a good fit between the position and the candidates’ career desires.
For one person, the allure of entrepreneurship was not enough to overcome the daily stress of a job that ultimately proved to be too emotionally taxing. For the other, the realities of a start-up – the frenetic pace, the semi-formed or nonexistent infrastructure – were quite different from the environment she had experienced with her previous employer, a hedge fund. In other words, there was a chasm between the image of entrepreneurship that these candidates had cultivated during the interview process and the reality they found in the actual job.
This turnover was particularly frustrating to me — because these folks were highly qualified individuals who had the skills to be great in their positions and because we could have identified the misalignment between our company and their desires if we had taken one more step during the interview process.
Now, before candidates receive a formal job offer, they are invited to spend real time – often a full day – on the job. This gives us the chance to see how we feel about future team members in our work environment. For the candidates, it provides a comparison point between the job they envisioned and the reality of working at the company every day.
While we’ve just started employing this last step in our interview process, we believe it will enable us to ensure that we are hiring the right candidate for the job, and for our team.
Has your hiring process evolved? What have you learned?
Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.