Interviewing and Hiring, the Easy Way

I am writing a series of blog posts about lessons learned in my career, including my time at CoverMyMeds as the company grew from 30 people to 800 and was eventually acquired by McKesson in 2017. This post covers what I’ve learned about high-quality hiring and how to consistently and efficiently achieve great results.

Like all of us, I am also living a different life with COVID-19 this year, but throughout these posts I am assuming we’ll return to face-to-face interaction and social gatherings before too long.

The opinions expressed here are, of course, solely my own and do not represent any employers, past or present.

In my previous post, Recruiting, the Hard Way, I posted about how recruiting is hard and that there are no real shortcuts to building an exceptional recruiting practice. Hiring is hard too, but you can create an effective and efficient process for your candidates and staff. This post will not cover table stakes like interviewing well, being organized, or responding quickly to applicants. But rather, it will focus on non-obvious lessons learned through years of experience in interviewing, hiring, building teams, and learning from mistakes.

Here are my favorite lessons on how to select the best people to add to fast-growing, high-performing teams.

Lesson #1: A bad hire is very painful and expensive

It wastes your team’s time and money, sets you back by months in hiring the right candidate, impacts your team’s performance and morale, disrupts the failed candidate’s life, and creates animosity. Avoid a bad hire at all reasonable cost by having a smart and effective vetting process. This is not the place to take shortcuts!

Also, don’t ignore red flags or warning signs with an otherwise promising candidate. No matter how good your interview process is, and even with great referrals, you are only seeing a small, curated sample and you need to take each data point seriously. For example, our team flew in an out-of-town candidate for a difficult-to-fill position, who came highly recommended and had a great initial phone interview. We met for dinner the night before the team interview and, within seconds of sitting down, he was rude to the server. Even though this was not part of the formal process, we all had the same thought, envisioning some future horrific moment when a customer or partner received the same treatment. The insight we gained in a few short seconds led us to pass on him despite all of the other positive attributes.

A quick Google search shows a broad range of the cost of a bad hire anywhere from 30% of annual salary up to as much as $240K. Even using the lower estimates, it is well worth the risk of passing on a few potentially good, but risky hires, to avoid a bad one.

Lesson #2: Maybe means no

If you have gotten through the interview process and are still not sure about a candidate, don’t labor over the decision. Move on. If you or your recruiting team did a good job with resume review and earlier interviews, your late-stage candidates will all have appealing qualities so you will more often than not be conflicted. Several times we decided to sleep on a “maybe” decision and only once did I wake up the next day thinking “yes.” And that turned out to be one of the worst hiring mistakes I ever made! Conversely, when we have passed on “maybes” and eventually met the “hell yes!” candidate, it became obvious that the earlier decision was the right one.

Lesson #3: Hire only A players

Healthy, high-achieving organizations have smart, confident, driven leaders who are not afraid to have even smarter people around or under them who drive success. B players bring down the organization in two ways. One is that A players dislike teammates who make it harder for them to succeed and they resent leaders who let substandard performance persist. Two is that B players tend to lack the confidence to hire A players so they hire other B players, propagating mediocracy as the organization grows.

Another version of this lesson was a rule we developed for making final hiring decisions — we sought to add people that made the team better, not just in aggregate, but on average.

Lesson #4: Include your team in the interview process and hiring decisions

This provides many benefits. It provides broader perspective to the hiring manager, leads to better decisions, and creates team buy-in, which maintains morale. Of course, this means that the hiring manager sometimes has to manage disparate opinions but that process leads to the best decisions. At CoverMyMeds we took a senior candidate that I and a few other developers loved all the way through the process. We were ready to hire him but a few key senior people strongly objected because they thought that his opinion of himself far exceeded his talent. As one developer put it, “he’s ready to lead… but I’m not ready to follow.” I wasn’t happy but I acquiesced. Over the next several years the candidate bounced from one organization to another, alienating teammates and employers, essentially following the path our team had feared, but not with us. I’m glad I listened.

Also, make the interview process easy on your team and use their time wisely. Use a short rubric (with no more than 10 criteria) to solicit feedback to make sure everyone knows what you are looking for and can be prepared to provide consistent and concise feedback.

Here is one that we’ve used for our software developer code day (final stage) interviews:

Software Developer Code Day Rubric

Here is another one that we’ve used to evaluate personality traits of account manager candidates:

Account Manager Personality Traits Rubric

Lesson #5: Understand the person that you are considering hiring

Qualifications and talent are critical, but if you don’t have the right person, it doesn’t matter. Of course it starts with the interview process. I have found this three-step framework to be most effective.

1. Initial screening interview to confirm qualifications and identify the highest-potential candidates. Look for people who are smart, passionate, and curious and pass on people who are negative, dispassionate, or smug.
2. Second interview focusing on skills and qualifications. For software developers, live coding. For others Q&A.
3. Third interview focusing on learning how the candidate works and what it is like to work with them. Typically an all-day project (for developers, writing a web application). Among other things, this step reveals a lot about a candidate’s character and judgement that would be difficult to pick up conversationally. We once had a candidate decline to spend another hour to improve his application’s user interface because he wanted to go see the new Star Wars movie that afternoon. Enjoy the movie — and wherever you work next that is not here.

Personality assessments, such as DISC or Personalysis, are a great way to understand the person you are considering hiring but like any other powerful tool it has to be skillfully applied at the appropriate times. The danger lies in painting with too broad a brush and ruling people out strictly based on their profile. While it is important to understand the target or “ideal” profile, one size does not fit all. In my experience, personality assessments are best for:

• Interpreting what you are seeing and hearing in the interview in the context of the human that is the candidate
• Identifying areas of concern to explore with further questions in the interviews and reference checks
• Understanding what the candidate will need from his or her manager or peers to be successful — and deciding if that will work

Lesson #6: Love your best candidates in the door

Even if a candidate accepts an offer, assume you are still recruiting until they actually start. There is a danger zone when a candidate gives notice in their current job where the company tries to lure them back. Or just experiences doubts and second thoughts. Keep in touch with the candidate and nurture the excitement of their new job. At CoverMyMeds we sent customized gift baskets, with company swag and other goodies, to new hires right after they accepted the offer to express our excitement about them joining our team. This helped to reassure candidates, and just as importantly their families, that they made the right choice. Nothing says “welcome to the family” quite like chocolate covered pretzels.

Lesson #7: Don’t be afraid to change your mind

It is never too late to act if the candidate has not accepted your offer and you gain new insights, especially during negotiations. A couple of times I’ve discovered that a candidate was difficult to work with during salary and title negotiations and avoided a potential hiring mistake by gently backing away and withdrawing the offer. I am certain in each case that we dodged a bullet.

A Word on “Cultural Fit”

In the past I would have written how important it was to ensure “cultural fit.” But I now believe that it’s all too easy, even unintentionally, to use that as a proxy for exclusionary hiring. Better to not let that happen at all and just focus on the other factors above while seeking to become more culturally diverse. That’s a subject for another blog post.

Next time I’ll talk about lessons learned in building a great culture and how to “Make the Right Way the Easy Way.”