Continuous Hiring: Why Your Job Description is Not a Predictor of Success (Part 1)

Hiring for roles outside of your area of expertise is one of the biggest challenges founders like you will face.

This is especially true if you and your co-founders have engineering or product backgrounds and are looking to make your first commercial hires.

After all, bar a job title, how do you know what to look for, what “good” looks like and how to test for it if you don’t have any first-hand experience?

Frankenstein’s Job Description

The usual approach in these situations is to search online for relevant job descriptions, copy the parts you like from a few different companies that seem like a match, pad it out with details about your company culture and benefits, and then share this “hodge podge” job description with a recruiter or the wider world in the hope that great candidates come flooding in.

The problem with this approach is that a job description is nothing more than a list of activities you want someone to do and even if a candidate has experience with these activities, that is in no way a predictor of success in the role, team or at your company.

The other, arguably much bigger problem with starting your hiring process with a cobbled together job description is that it increases your chances of relying on one or more of the following interviewing “techniques” –

• Gut instinct – relying on your ability to “read people” is one of the most common mistakes founders make when hiring for roles outside their area of expertise. Belief in your gut instinct as an accurate predictor of success can unintentionally be reinforced if your early technical hires have worked out well. The fact that you intrinsically have a much deeper understanding of “what good looks like” for technical roles and have probably drawn candidates from a pool of trusted connections can be easy to overlook.
  
• Sponge – in an attempt to hedge against your gut instinct, another common technique is getting as many of the current team as possible to speak with a candidate after your initial chat with them has left you with a “good feeling”. Beyond a vague brief of “assessing culture fit”, team members rarely get asked to drill deeper and test specific areas of a candidate’s background (and almost always don’t get enough time or support to properly prepare). As a result, feedback tends to be of the superficial variety – “she seems nice” or “I think he’ll fit in”, resulting in you ending up with a collection of “gut instinct” feedback.
  
• Always be closing – spending too much time “selling” a candidate on joining is an easy trap founders often fall into. After all, you are a small start up with an urgent need to hire GTM experience and candidates are likely coming from more mature, better capitalised businesses than yours. The more time you spend “selling” a candidate, the less time you have to learn anything useful about them. More importantly, a poor to middling performer will absorb everything you are “selling” them and reflect it back to you in subtly different ways so they appear to be a much stronger fit than they really are (especially if you start the interview with your sales pitch). A good rule of thumb is that you should be talking 20% or less of the time and to save any “selling” for the end of the interview, and only then if you have learned enough about the candidate that you are confident you want to progress further with them.
  
• Hypothetically speaking – asking candidates too many questions about what they might do in one situation or another is also a common mistake founders make. Asking for real examples of things they have actually done is a far more effective way to assess their real experience as that allows you to drill deeper and check the veracity of their answers.

These are just a handful of the interviewing pitfalls that can arise when you don’t have first hand experience of the role you are hiring for and have nothing more to help you than a partially copied job description.

More importantly, these pitfalls can have profound or even fatal consequences for your company, especially when it comes to hiring GTM roles.

The blast radius of mis-hiring

Unlike with other roles, where a hiring mistake may become apparent in the first month or two, mis-hiring GTM roles often involves a time lag of 6 to 12 months (or more if you’re doing Enterprise sales), before poor or middling performance becomes apparent.

Whilst the damage of a mis-hire in other roles may be limited to a particular team or function, the scope or “blast radius” of mis-hiring say, your first Account Executive can be companywide.

Because of the time lag, the cost of missed Sales opportunities, mistakes, loss of productivity, and additional management overhead begin to silently accrue. Add in the hard costs of recruitment, compensation and severance and founders often realise too late that mis-hiring this one role has fatally damaged their runway and their business is no longer viable because the lack of commercial progress means they are unable to raise another round.

A blueprint for hiring

An effective way to avoid these pitfalls and minimise your chances of mis-hiring is to begin your hiring process with a blueprint.

Just as you wouldn’t set about building a house without a blueprint, you shouldn’t set about hiring without one either, but as we have seen, your Job Description is not a blueprint – it is a list of activities.

A hiring scorecard on the other hand, is a much more comprehensive and structured way to start your hiring process as it is designed around two key principles –

• Hiring is the process of gathering candidate data
• The biggest predictor of success in a role is past and present behaviour

People are inherently complicated and it’s hard to see them for who they really are, so you need a structured way for every interviewer to gather relevant data about them.

Most hiring approaches focus on testing what a candidate can do, which is why starting with a job description is such common practice.

Whilst candidates definitely need to have their experience tested during the hiring process, it is how they do things that is actually the bigger determinant of whether they’ll be successful in the role and at your company.

Or to put it another way, even if they have experience with all the required activities, people whose behaviour doesn’t fit the role, team or company, ultimately fail.

Scorecard structure

A hiring scorecard is designed for internal use by each interviewer and is made up of three parts.

Part 1: Mission

This first part of the scorecard describes why this role exists in your company.

This “core purpose” should be concise, written in plain language, avoiding buzzwords, acronyms or industry terms so that anyone inside the company can understand it.

Here’s an example of the mission for an Account Executive –

“Create & close opportunities in an assigned sales territory containing companies with up to 500 to employees”

Part 2: Outcomes

The next part of the scorecard lists what a top performer needs to achieve in the role.

A “top performer” does not necessarily mean a long tenured, highly paid person, but rather it is someone who has the relevant skills and experience for the role but also demonstrates the behaviours you believe are required to be successful.

Ultimately, you are looking to hire someone in the top 10% of applicants that you believe has a 90% or better chance of achieving the outcomes listed in this part of the scorecard.

For that reason the outcomes in your hiring scorecard should not be impossible, but should be a stretch to achieve.

Try to limit the number of outcomes to a maximum of 3 or 4, rank them by importance and make sure they are either measurable (e.g. a specific target or KPI), or observable (something you can see has or has not been delivered within a specific timeframe).

Here’s an example of some outcomes for a top performing Account Executive –

• “Close $800k in new revenue in the first three quarters of the financial year
• “Generate at least 40% of their qualified pipeline every quarter”

 Part 3: Competencies

Arguably the hardest, yet most important part of the hiring scorecard is defining how you want someone to achieve the mission and outcomes of the role.

For example, there are many Account Executives who can consistently hit or exceed their target, but if they are not interested in collaborating with others, avoid working transparently, or regularly cut corners to get deals done, they may not fit your company’s culture and end up dragging down everyone else’s productivity or even cause you to lose customers in the future.

The competencies section of the hiring scorecard therefore defines two things – the skills and behaviours you require for the job.

Somewhere in the range of 7 to 9 competencies works well. Any more and it becomes difficult to test each one effectively without adding a lot of additional interviews and time to the hiring process.

These competencies act as a checklist for individual interviewers who should be assigned a maximum of 2 or 3 specific ones to focus on in their interview.

Here’s some example competencies for a top performing Account Executive –

Going slow to go fast

More than 50% of hiring decisions are a mistake with the average cost of that mistake being 15x their base salary.*

For that reason, taking some time upfront to think through why a role exists at your company, what it needs to achieve, how you want a successful candidate to achieve it and documenting it all in a hiring scorecard, not only minimises the considerable financial risks of mis-hiring, it will ultimately save you time and effort and speed up your hiring process because a scorecard is a very effective tool for screening out unsuitable candidates much earlier in the hiring process.

In the next article in this series, we will take a deeper dive into how to use a hiring scorecard as part of a structured interview process for an Account Executive together with behavioural interviewing techniques to test the competencies (you can download the example scorecard we will be using here).

In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about hiring scorecards, you might like to read “Who” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, or feel free to DM or email me at rav@crane.vc if you have any questions.

*Source: Peter Drucker