Daniel Chait - Talent Makers: How the Best Organizations Win Through Structured and Inclusive Hiring

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 6
5. Chapter 8

Daniel Chait and Jon Stross

Copyright 2021 by Greenhouse Software Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781119785279 (Hardcover)
ISBN 9781119785293 (ePDF)
ISBN 9781119785286 (ePub)

COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY
COVER IMAGE & AUTHOR PHOTOS: GREENHOUSE SOFTWARE, INC.

This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever hired someone, or been hired.

The war for talent is over.

Talent won.

If you're the leader of an organization or a team, it's a pretty safe bet that time is precious to you. You want people to get to the point quickly. We'll do that for you right now. Here's this book in a nutshell:

• People know that hiring is important.
• They know that their system of hiring is broken.
• They don't know how to fix it.

This book is not for HR professionals, though they may benefit greatly from it. Instead, this is a book for you the leader of a team of any size. It will give you specific, actionable advice about how you can not only fix your hiring problems, but how you can turn hiring into an astonishing competitive advantage. You will improve your hiring quickly, substantially, and measurably. If you wish, you can do all of this without buying any software. The transformation will not be easy, but we will lay out for you a proven method to make it work.

There you have it. That's the book.

If you've reached a point where you have had enough with the pain and chaos of hiring and you want to get really good at it, then you've come to the right place.

We'll get much more detailed later, but let's take a quick, depressing tour of what hiring looks like in a great many organizations. We'll look at hiring from several different perspectives.

You may have spent a lot of time thinking about your brand. You may even have detailed, expensive campaigns that focus on what you want to be known for in the mind of your target audience.

Then there's Glassdoor.

It has 50 million unique monthly visitors. It only takes a few clicks to see what employees right now are saying about your brand, and what candidates are saying about the interviewing and hiring process.

Within minutes of walking out of an interview, candidates will post reviews with explicit descriptions of how they were treated. Occasionally, those observations are good; much more often they sound like this:

• I sat in an empty room for a half hour. I think they forgot about me.
• The interviewer walked in and said, Now, you're here for which job?
• I'm a woman and was being interviewed for a technical position. The interviewer sat down and goes, Maybe you'd be interested instead in the position we have in our design department?
• I have a name that's not common in America. Throughout the interview they butchered my name and couldn't even settle on one incorrect pronunciation even after I corrected them.

Anyone can view Glassdoor ratings. But we at Greenhouse benefit from an additional, eye-opening vantage point by virtue of having more than 4,000 organizations as customers. We also live and breathe hiring, so we hear a lot about hiring practices at organizations of all sizes and stripes. Here are typical situations.

We regularly hear words to the effect of Shortly before I'm supposed to interview someone, the recruiter will hand me a rsum and say, Spend an hour with this person. Tell me if she's any good.

Interviewers are often given no training or instruction on how to conduct a good interview. In addition, they may have no idea what other interviewers will ask or who they even are. As a result, candidates will have three people in a row say to them, So, tell me about your last job. Untrained, clueless interviewers will also ask irrelevant or even downright illegal questions, like Are you planning on getting pregnant?

When there is no interviewing plan, it's common for interviewers to ask one-size-fits-all questions. They may spend time during the interview brainstorming what their next question will be when the candidate stops talking instead of focusing on what the candidate is saying at the moment.

And because there is no coordination between interviewers in terms of who asks what, gaps can occur where no one asked about important aspects of the job.

If there is no discipline around writing down one's impression right after interviewing a candidate, then soon all those sessions blur together:

I thought Chantelle was good.

Was she the one in the green sweater?

No, you're thinking of what's-her-name.