Develop Your Hiring System Like a Product to Eliminate Bias and Boost Retention

At Medium, Dan Pupius and his team built a tremendously successful rubric for hiring using the principles of product development. Here's how they did it.

APPLYING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT TO HIRING

When creating a hiring system from scratch, you're actually building two products at the same time: 1) the process itself and 2) the resulting team. Viewed through this lens, every interaction with a candidate must have purpose, yield data you can learn from, and fit into a bigger vision for what you want to accomplish, says Pupius.

Here's what it takes to build truly great products, and how each tenet can apply to hiring:

Strong intention. If you're a founder, your team will be the product of what you prioritize and reward — and you reward things with your time and attention. Invest the time it takes to build your team as an amazing product (most successful entrepreneurs recommend spending 50% of your time on recruiting).
Clear and compelling vision. Product development begs the question: What do you want the world to look like? How do you want it to be different from what currently exists? For hiring, ask: What do you want your team to look like? What do you want it to be able to achieve?
Development principles. You want to have values, beliefs and guidelines that shape how you achieve your vision. For hiring, you should, similarly, have values that will help you make good decisions while eliminating bias.
Tactics you can test. Product development requires clear, day-to-day actions that execute against your vision, guided by your principles. They're your best guesses for what will yield good results; they're measurable and can be iterated on. In hiring, your tactics are how you conduct interactions with candidates. They should be testable and changeable.
Measurement that's meaningful. You want to set quantitative goals that will indicate progress toward your vision, and make this data visible to inform your next decisions. In hiring, you want to set metrics and measure whether you're building the team you want.
Organized iteration. The best products have strong feedback loops between users and developers that drive smart changes that have positive impact. Similarly, you want to update your hiring process in intentional sprints based on feedback.
Designated decision-making. Product development often utilizes the RACI framework to assign one person to be responsible for decision making, one person who is accountable, those who contribute and those who are informed. Similarly, in hiring, you need one person who is ultimately responsible for the final decision on a candidate.
User-centricity. Just like your goal for any product would be product-market fit, you want your hiring process to fit all candidates — even if they don't get hired. They are your end users, and the best system will be the one that optimizes their experience.
Automation potential. Once you have product-market fit, your next step is to automate as much as possible. Similarly, once you have a hiring system that produces good results, you want to create the checklists, structures and protocols that will make it repeatable and scalable as you enter rapid growth.

If you apply all of the above to building your hiring system, you'll end up with a stress-tested playbook that you can run again and again. Importantly, you want to document the system you devise somewhere central and shareable. Consider it a living document that can be changed over time as you learn more.

VISION

A lot of founders start with weak vision for team-building — which kicks off a weak process. They think it's enough to say they want to build a "world-class team" or "I want us to make all the lists of companies with the best culture." But none of this is good enough. Nebulous vision leads to bad strategy.

You need a comprehensive definition of the type of person who will succeed at your company specifically. What is unique to your company and your mission? What unique qualities in people will building that type of company require? Ask yourself, will this vision repel people who aren't a good fit? If yes, that means it's not an empty statement.

Most importantly, vision needs to consider your team as a whole — a single, coherent product.

Just like it doesn't work to build a product as a collection of features, you don't want to build a team that's just a collection of individuals, no matter how exceptional they each are.

Every person on your team has their own attributes and abilities that have to work together — and therefore must be strategically assembled.

To create Range's vision for talent, the founding team took a hike together. They listed the traits and qualities that were already on the team, calling out their own and each other's particular strengths and weaknesses. This allowed them to identify what type of people they'd need to complement their shortcomings and extend their capabilities.

Their resulting vision was not a statement, but a list of traits, values and skills that new recruits should have to succeed at Range, buttress the existing team, and maintain balance as more people joined. Now, each recruiting process starts with everyone involved reviewing this list so they're reminded that they're responsible for building a well-rounded, smooth-operating whole.

PRINCIPLES

After documenting your vision, think about what rules will get you there. What are the guidelines you want applied to every single candidate? Write down what you believe a standard recruiting/interview process might look like, then ask yourself:

Where might biases get introduced?
Where might bad decisions get made?
Where might people on the hiring loop have blind spots?
Where and how might you fail to unearth qualities that would be awesome for your company to have?

Use your answers to these questions to create and enforce a set of principles that will help you find the people your vision describes. Below, Pupius shares what he and his team at Medium observed while hiring — and the principles they relied on to run a high-quality process.

1. All judgments must be tied to observable evidence.

Recruiting is always emotional. But you need to remove as much of that as you can. Within 30 seconds, the average interviewer has already formed a positive or negative impression of a candidate. To prevent this, focus interviews on the list of attributes and skills you've developed as your vision. Then only take observable behavior that either demonstrates them or doesn't into account.

2. Agree on the data you won't be looking at.

A lot of startups borrow Google's emphasis on pedigree. Don't fall into this trap, says Pupius. Instead, hone in on the parts of a person's background that will actually help them do great work at your company. Ask yourself: What attributes aren't actually good predictors for this?

3. Provide candidates with several success modes.

To field a well-rounded team, you shouldn't offer just one way for candidates to succeed at your process. If you run identical interviews for everyone, you're going to miss out on incredibly talented people who were just not given the right opportunity to shine.

4. Keep team composition top of mind.

Every role you hire for can go in several directions. It could go three ways: 1) a relatively autonomous senior engineer, 2) someone with potential to become your chief architect, or 3) a natural leader who could eventually take over the engineering team.

5. The hiring manager is the decision-making authority.

Seeking consensus on candidates will deadlock and inevitably ruin your hiring process. Create a principle that designates one person in your process as responsible for making the final decision based on all the evidence presented.

TACTICS

The way you set up your recruiting and interview process depends on your own vision and principles. This can vary widely from company to company. For earlier or smaller startups, Pupius recommends just three phases to start:

Assess
Validate
Sell

Create a chart that lists all the attributes and skills you're looking for down one side. Going across the top, have grades: low, medium, high and did not observe (DNO), along with a comment field for notes on the specific evidence that led to that grade.

Assess

A coffee or casual meeting for the hiring manager and prospective candidate to get acquainted.
Gauge the person's fit for the company.
Discuss compensation expectations.

Validate

1:1 interviews with people who will work or interact with the role being hired for.
Collaboration time with team members to gauge problem solving.
Skill evaluation (this is where multiple choices are presented to the candidate).

Sell

The team gets a chance to pitch the candidate on why the work is interesting.
You invite the candidate to join the team for recreation to get to know each other as whole humans.

MEASUREMENT

Remember, the "end user" for the hiring process you're building is the candidate. So, while retention may be your top-line metric — the more immediate measurement to track is candidate experience.

Pupius recommends instrumenting your hiring funnel as soon as possible. Important things to track:

How many candidates are coming into your funnel?
Where are they dropping out before accepting or declining an offer? What reasons do they give?
How fast are people moving through? What has held them up?
What's your close rate? When people decline, why?

ITERATION

The final rubric Medium published was the result of a lot of iteration based on measurement.

To get the most out of iteration, Pupius recommends batching feedback and approaching it in sprints. To be systematic at Medium, they'd run quarterly retrospectives on the feedback gathered from all candidates.

Ultimately, this is what you should be maximizing for early on: learning per unit time. Startups have a window of opportunity to perfect their hiring process before they hit the prime time of rapid growth. If you want a winning product — build your team like one.