Tech Agility Forum: Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait on Talent as Your Competitive Advantage
We had a fabulous conversation in May with Daniel Chait, author of Talent Makers and CEO at Greenhouse Software. The gems Daniel shared with us are included here.
On Hiring In This Particular Moment:
Hiring levels are 3-4x higher than they were pre-pandemic – making it an absolute requirement if you’re going to beat out the competition for the best talent that you get out of chaos and OWN the end-to-end hiring experience
Make hiring everyone’s job, not just your People Team. Engage leaders across the organization in scouting and courting potential candidates. Even CEOs can be recruiters - Daniel recently turned a sales conversation into a recruiting conversation for a top SDR.
Retain your current talent. “If you aren’t giving your employees a great reason to be at your company every day, they will go somewhere else.”
Three Ways to Bring Agility To Your Organization Through Hiring:
1. Know Where You Are
Chaos is perhaps one of the greatest drags on speed when it comes to hiring. Greenhouse developed the Hiring Maturity Curve to help organizations identify where they are currently and how to mature their hiring system. (take the assessment)
2. Break The Mold
Question the “typical” profile that everyone is trying to hire for, look beyond the schools or backgrounds that your competitors are hiring. This gets easier to do when you really identify the real success metrics on the role. Turn over every rock.
3. Put Structure In Place
Create a hiring plan with specific criteria for each role.
Use the criteria to write an interview plan.
Create an interview kit to support your leaders through the interview process.
Hold a kickoff meeting to align stakeholders and decision-makers before hiring.
Conduct retro meetings on your most recent hires- identify what worked, what didn’t and continue to iterate and improve.
Other Gems:
Seek to hire the candidate that will be great at the job, not great at getting the job
Increase the quantity of diverse candidates you receive through employee referrals. Use Information Architecture to prompt your team in new ways. “We’re looking for female engineers, who have you worked with in the past that you’d recommend? OR “It’s Pride month, who was the best LGBTQ manager you’ve worked with?”
Overcome the status quo by helping your leaders see the challenges that could be overcome by bringing structure to the hiring process
Harvard Business School isn’t training the leaders of tomorrow in hiring. Which means you need to do it.
We'd love to have you on a future Forum, and we're happy to take suggestions for the real issues you want to be discussing. Reach out if you have one!