Operations

Hire Your Next A-Player

Run a full hiring process—from clarifying the role and building hiring materials to sourcing, screening, evaluating, and making a confident offer.

Updated October 20, 2018·11 min read·~6 weeks

You've run a full hiring process and reached a clear decision on who to hire, with confidence in how they'll perform in the role.

Why This Project Matters

Hiring seems easy… until you've done it a few times and realize just how challenging it can be.

You post the job, get hundreds of applications, spend hours sorting through them, and end up with a half-dozen maybes in a massive pile of nos. Then every candidate in the interviews starts to sound the same. If you're lucky, one or two people jump out. You make the offer, do the negotiation dance, and voilà — you've got your person.

Until three months later, when you realize they weren't your person. They're constantly waiting to be told what to do, asking questions you thought you'd already answered, and not freeing you up in the slightest.

The problem isn't the hiring process itself. Hiring will always involve the same three components: recruitment (finding great candidates), interviewing (determining mutual fit), and selection (making the call and extending an offer). But if you want hiring that actually works, you need to do those things in a way that puts your values, your desired culture, and your future team members at the center.

Do that, and you'll have a process that reliably attracts a diverse pool of exceptionally qualified candidates, minimizes time spent in interviews while letting the best candidates rise to the top, and ensures the person you select can actually take ownership and produce results.

Growing your team is probably the most expensive thing you'll ever do in your business. To make your chances even better, here's something to do right now: ballpark how much you'll want to pay this person on a monthly basis, and start putting that money aside each month. If you find yourself clawing back money from that account, you can't afford to hire yet. If you can keep it intact, you'll have a buffer in place if things slow down after they start.

Milestones