How To Hire Top Talents

This episode is the first in a series focused on hiring top talent for your company. Today, I’m going to share with you our lessons learned from preparing great job descriptions that attract the right candidates and help you hire the right talent to fit the job position and your company culture. In this episode, we are going to discuss where to find the right candidates, how to name your position properly, how to define the requirements for the position, what needs to be included in the job offer, and how to describe your job in a way that will attract the right candidates. Welcome to the Pragmatic Talks podcast and video series, where we discuss startups, contemporary digital product development, modern technologies, and product management.

Where to find the candidates

So let’s start with discussing where to find candidates or where candidates are coming from. There are a few types of candidates on the market. The first type of candidates are people who are actively looking for a new job. This group splits into two subtypes. First are people who are not currently working, have recently left their job, or have been laid off for various reasons. The second group are people who are already working somewhere and are looking for a change, looking for new opportunities, for new challenges for themselves, or a more attractive job or a more attractive salary. I’ve distinguished these two groups because each of them has different motivations for applying for a new job. These two groups are the most active on the market, so attracting them with your job offer can be done by posting it on various job boards you can find on the internet. I recommend you use local job boards if you are looking for people in a particular country; just find the most popular job boards in that country because, most probably, the greatest number of candidates will be there.

The next category of candidates are people who are not actively looking for a job at the moment. These are usually people who are working somewhere; they are more or less happy with how their work looks, but if you offer them a better job–for example, a better salary, better conditions, or bigger challenges–they might be interested in at least considering changing their job. It’s a bit more difficult to reach them because they are not browsing the internet searching for new job advertisements. Social media advertisements, especially on LinkedIn or Facebook, might be a good choice for reaching out to these people. Still, if they are not actively looking for a new job, that will simply let them know you are looking for someone and that your company is looking for someone like them. That also has value since when you reach out to them directly, you won’t be a complete stranger.

Aside from ads, to reach these candidates you need to use another method called direct search. For direct search, you have two options. The first option is to build your own recruitment department. You need to have so-called recruiters who will reach out to these people, usually through messages on LinkedIn or emails. The second option for direct recruiting is to hire external recruiters. This could be a recruitment agency, a freelancer, or a company like ours that will handle the entire recruiting process–including paperwork, hiring, and managing such employees in a build-operate-transfer model. Another way of attracting passive candidates is using your network. You can spread the news that you are recruiting through your personal network and ask other people to recommend you to prospective candidates. Therefore, direct search and networking are the main options for attracting people who are not actively looking for a job. To be honest, most people on the market are not actively looking for a job nowadays. But regardless of whether you are targeting candidates actively looking for a new job or trying to direct search for more passive candidates, you need to craft your job offer.

How to name your position properly

When you start working on your job description, it’s important to begin with a proper name for the position. Naming the position in the right way means that if you are looking for, let’s say, a project manager because you are working on some project, do not name the job position “product manager” or “product owner.” Conversely, if you are working on a product, you most probably need a product manager. If you are using Scrum for that, you may call it a “product owner” or, more accurately, a “product manager who will play the product owner role in the team.” People get used to certain labels, and when they see something like a job title, their brains are anchored to those labels. If someone has long experience as a product manager and you call the position a project manager, they will simply ignore your job offer. On the other hand, providing too broad a name for your job may attract many candidates, and you could spend a lot of time processing them without making any hires.

So the job name needs to be specific and needs to reflect the real job that the person will perform in the future. You must define who you are looking for. It’s very important to think this over and go step-by-step through all the aspects of the job position you want to fill. Think about what the person will need to do. Don’t be surprised if you find that your current company structure and role naming don’t match your real needs. Needs change with time, and the structure should follow. You also need to consider the market itself–how roles like the one you are looking for are named in other companies. Review other job offers and see how they match with your requirements.

Another thing that you need to consider is the seniority level of the position you are looking for in your organization. A good example might be hiring a person who will be building your new, let’s say, marketing department. Let’s say you don’t have anyone on your team right now, and this person will need to build such a department from scratch. Should you call such a job position “CMO” (Chief Marketing Officer)? Well, maybe not. Or maybe, if you have big ambitions and you want to build a very big marketing department and grow your marketing team quickly in the next couple of months, then okay, that would be a good name for this role. But in most cases, you will also probably need a marketing manager for that.

After defining the requirements, you may need to come back to the job name and tune it so it will fit the requirements, as this is an ongoing process of crafting your job description.

How to define the requirements for the position

When defining requirements, recruiters tend to make their biggest mistakes. Recruiters tend to put all of the requirements that they can think of into the requirements list in the job description. This often results in ridiculous lists with 10 or 15 “must-have” requirements and another 10 or 15 “nice-to-have” requirements. For such a position, only people who are crazy enough will apply, and those are not necessarily the people you might be looking for. What is more important is that a lot of brilliant but less confident people will simply give up and not apply or proceed with your direct search when they see such a long list of job requirements.

A pattern that has been used successfully in job descriptions for over 15 years is to limit your number of requirements to a maximum of three. Think about three must-have requirements that the person in this position needs to meet to actually perform well. When thinking about those three must-haves, first try to eliminate those that the person could learn pretty fast–even in two to three months. Leave only those skills or traits that are difficult to learn. The vast majority of people have pretty low self-esteem and are not confident enough to apply for a job position where they see many requirements. If they see 10 must-have requirements and fit six or seven of them (which is great), they will still consider themselves a poor fit or view the position as too demanding for them. Aside from must-have requirements, there is the possibility to add some nice-to-have requirements, but here as well, it is recommended to limit it to three or four. When building your requirements list, especially when putting in some must-have requirements, remember that it needs to be a real must-have and something that the person could not learn in a couple of weeks or months when starting and being onboarded to your company.

What needs to be included in the job offer

Job descriptions are not only bullet points with requirements. You should add a real description of the job that candidates will perform when they join the company. In this description of job duties, you will have a chance to let candidates know what other skills might be required or what they will need to learn. That way, you will not scare them off, but you will also eliminate candidates who won’t be able or willing to catch up with learning new skills. Doing this helps find the right candidates, especially those who are pretty coachable and eager to learn new things. This is beneficial because the job and the requirements built right now will almost surely change in the future.

When searching for a new job, candidates naturally follow a pattern: check the name first, then search for bullet points with requirements. If those two fit, they search for a salary range, read the long description (including the introduction), and look for other benefits. Sometimes people filter by salary range first and then move to the next steps. This is the natural way of doing it. Popular job portals often list thousands of job offers, making it impossible for each candidate to read the whole job description.

Another aspect of your job offer is a salary range. It has become a standard in the IT industry for companies to provide the salary range. A common mistake companies make is providing a salary range that is too wide. The maximum is sometimes even twice the lower limit, which tells the candidate nothing. To improve this, you should return to defining the seniority level of the job position. You can publish and recruit for more than one position at a time (e.g., searching for junior, regular, and senior developers in the same technology) and distinguish these positions through requirements and salary levels. The ultimate goal is to attract the most suited candidates at a reasonable cost.

Aside from salary, you should also name some other perks and benefits which are currently standard on the market. In some countries, especially those without or with limited public healthcare, things like private insurance are worth even more than just money to candidates. You should list all the perks you can offer in the job description. This includes things like medical care packages or sports packages, but also things that are more specific to your particular company. Think about the atmosphere, learning possibilities, the way you support them, and what is important in your company culture. For example, at Pragmatic Coders, one reason people like to work here is that many former employees moved to other companies and now hold leadership positions (CTO, CEO, Head of IT, Team Leads), showing that working at Pragmatic Coders had a significant impact on their career development.

That was all about preparing a job description. This was the first episode of a series on recruitment. In the next episode, we are going to share how to design and perform your recruitment process in a way that will allow you to pick and hire the best-fitting candidates for your company.

How to streamline the recruitment process

Welcome to the next Pragmatic Talks episode in the series about hiring top talent for your business. In the first part of the series, we covered the topic of how to craft an exceptional and well-converting job offer. Today, we’re going to focus on the recruiting process itself. I’m going to share with you our lessons learned from processing tens of thousands of candidates and hiring hundreds of them in the past 10 years at Pragmatic Coders.

Based on the previous episode, you have already crafted your job offer, posted it on the right job portals, and started your active recruitment, also known as candidate sourcing. You already see the inflow of candidates who are attracted by your job offer, and now you need to process them. It might sound obvious that you need to interview these candidates, maybe ask them to perform some recruitment tasks and activities, leading you to think, “What could possibly go wrong?”

First, you need to design a process that will allow you to choose only those candidates that will perform well in your context and company. You need candidates who will be able to do the job, and you need to eliminate those candidates who will not match your criteria and who may become an unnecessary cost later on. You probably cannot eliminate all recruitment mistakes, but you can limit them to a minimum thanks to a well-designed recruitment process. Secondly, a very important yet often forgotten aspect of the recruitment process is its scalability and efficiency. It is not hard to implement a really good recruitment process that will eliminate most potential recruitment mistakes, but it would only work for a very limited number of candidates because of the cost and time needed to perform it. Before we start, remember that at the end of the day, your goal is not to eliminate all candidates but to hire the right ones.

We developed and optimized a process many times in the past 10 years at Pragmatic Coders, managing to avoid many potential mishires while keeping the process fast, efficient, and comfortable for both candidates and recruiters. Our recruitment process consists of a few stages:

• CV selection
• Phone screen call and an optional technical task
• Technical check
• Culture check
• Offering and feedback

The cv selection stage

The goal of the first stage, CV selection, is to eliminate candidates whose experience does not match the current job we are looking for. For example, a candidate with only two years of experience is not sufficient for a senior developer role leading a team. However, candidates rejected here are not necessarily forgotten forever; we move them to one of our candidate pools that we may use in the future when other job opportunities are available. The right filtering and assigning of candidates to proper job pools or labeling them correctly provide a lot of long-term benefits.

When selecting candidates based on their CV, we should look for keywords mentioned in the job description. Limiting the number of mandatory requirements in the job offer (as mentioned in the previous episode) should also be reflected in the CV reviewing process. If we have many candidates, we can score them based on other, unmentioned skills we are looking for. However, the CV should not be the only way of learning about a candidate’s skills. An exception might be when hiring for roles related to crafting great documents (e.g., marketing or recruitment jobs). Conversely, an unreadable CV from a UX designer may not be a good sign.

The phone screen call stage

If we have selected candidates based on their CV, the easiest way to confirm someone is the right person to process further is to perform a quick phone call and ask a few questions. As a recruiter, check what information you are missing from the CV, which is a good starting point for a phone call. Secondly, if you have more “nice-to-have” requirements than those included in the job offer, you should ask if the candidate has experience or knowledge in the areas you are interested in. A phone screen call is also a good moment to assess the candidates’ motivation: why they are changing jobs and what they are looking for. Lastly, talk about the candidate’s salary expectations. This saves time later and can help set the proper requirements for further steps, allowing you to decide what seniority level the bar should be set at for the next stages, provided you have that flexibility. The goal of the screen call is to learn more, clarify things not included in the CV, and eliminate candidates who are not the right fit. It is recommended to define clear criteria that will eliminate more candidates rather than fewer at this stage. Phone screening is more effective than CV screening in making the right choices and is still way cheaper than the next stages.

The technical check stage

If the candidate passed the phone screen, they should be invited to the next stage, usually a technical interview. There are some exceptions, especially when hiring for junior roles, where we tend to send a recruitment task before the technical interview. This assesses basic technical skills and checks the candidate’s motivation and commitment. A vast majority of junior candidates eliminate themselves by not sending the task back at all. “Technical skills” or “technical check” means basic skills for doing a particular job, not just programming roles. For example, a junior content writer might be assigned the task of preparing an SEO-friendly article. A junior HR person might be asked to craft a job offer, and a junior UX designer might perform basic UX research for a fake product.

If we are not recruiting for a junior role, we usually skip the technical task and go directly to the interview. The goal of the technical interview is to check if the candidate has the proper technical skills to do the job. How you design this stage strongly depends on the job you are recruiting for. It is recommended not to focus on theoretical knowledge, but rather to ask candidates about their experience and search for similarities between what they have been doing in the past and what you are looking for. You can also ask more case study and specific problem-solving questions based on the challenges you are facing or foreseeing in the project. At this stage, you are eliminating candidates whose skills are not good enough.

The culture check stage

Candidates who passed the technical check should now be invited for a culture check. The culture check is probably the most important stage of the process. From our experience, any mistakes here have always led to big trouble in the future. Based on data from the book Hiring for Attitude by Mark McMurphy, only 11% of reasons for mishires are related to the lack of technical skills, while the other 89% of reasons are connected to culture fit, coachability, and motivation. This highlights why checking for culture fit is so important. If someone does not pass the culture check, they will not be hired, no matter how technically great they are. We have always regretted making exceptions in the past. It is important to be serious when it comes to your company culture, always.

Standardizing the process for scalability

The results of every recruitment stage–from CV selection and the phone screen to the technical and culture check–should be properly noted. To make your process scalable, first of all, you need to make it repeatable and standardized. A good practice is to formulate a question set for each role, which could be 20 to 30 questions with examples of positive and negative answers for each job and seniority level. Only about three to six of these questions should be mandatory for all recruiters to ask, with the rest being optional. It is also good to create a recruitment manual, ideally one universal manual for all job positions, which is possible only if your recruitment process is standardized across the entire company or department. This allows you to quickly train and assign more recruiters if you need to speed up or hire more talent. At each stage, recruiters should assign a score to each candidate and write down feedback for them, aside from internal notes. That way, you will be able to compare all the candidates and select the best of them based on less biased metrics. Implementing such a process should allow you to minimize the risk of mishires while keeping your recruitment process costs at a reasonable level.

Offering and feedback

Now, the only thing left is to make an offer to the right candidates. After performing all stages well and answering all the candidate’s questions about the job, team, company, and culture, preparing the right job offer should be a formality. There might be rare situations where a candidate rejects it. Most often, after such a thorough process, they reject it because they see they are not the best fit, which is great because it saves a lot of time and money for both them and for you.

Regarding rejected candidates, especially for those who went further than the phone screen call, you should always send them feedback. This will not only improve your employer branding on the market but will also give you a huge chance that the most coachable candidates will come back to you after some time, having learned what they were missing before. Those kinds of employees are usually the best ones.

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