Book Review: High-Velocity Hiring
High-Velocity Hiring
Scott Wintrip
Three-Sentence Summary
The book provides a structured recruiting process. In contrast to the traditional post-and-wait strategy, the book advocates changing the mindset to make hiring an active practice and the employment schedule predictable. It includes short-term actions from crafting Hire-Right job posts to qualifiable interview scoreboards; and long-term strategies from generating candidate gravity to maintaining talent inventory.
Who Is This Book For?
Anyone who is facing the problem of the current hiring strategy:
Long lead time to fill a position
No transparent, standardized, traceable measurement system for the candidate evaluation
Low and passive candidates in-flows
Major Concepts
Short-term Actions
#1 Change the Mindset
Release the job posts and give control entirely to the unknown world is what most companies do. Sharks like Google or BMW will catch the fish before you see them. Looking at the job market, there may be far more open positions in your industry than the available talents. However, the right mindset to see the problem is not to focus on this one-against-the-world competition. Instead, focus on the small number your company wants to fill. 99.9% chance that it is far fewer than the offers from the market.
That shift in thinking puts the skills shortage in a manageable perspective. Rather than being a pervasive problem, the skills shortage is merely a challenge that a better process can solve.
#2 Create Hire-Right Profiles
A Hire-Right profile helps not only for candidates to understand the position but also can make access easier and consistently good. The four-quadrant table will help to list out essential points for the right candidate:
| Positive | Negative | |
|---|---|---|
| Required | Dealmakers: essential and necessary traits required by the position; those traits can be summarized by successful employees in house | Dealbreakers: single vote rejection; a candidate with any of such traits will be rejected immediately |
| Desired | Boosts: desirable or nice-to-have traits; the more, the higher possibility of being an exceptional hire | Blocks: having these traits tends to lead to disappointing employment |
Additional helpful tips for composing a job description:
Using online resources to provide the base: https://resources.workable.com/job-descriptions/
Using LinkedIn profiles and focusing on what people list about their job experience and skills.
Creating profiles of employees who have the same position and perform well in the organization.
Once you have the profiles clearly stating the Dealmakers and Dealbreakers, there are a few points on how and when to use them.
Never change Hire-Right Profiles during interviews, especially when missing one dealmaker or having a dealbreaker. Interviews are stressful for both the candidate and the interviewer. Making improvised decisions under pressure is not rational in most cases.
Use Hire-Right Profiles as a checklist & quantifiable scoreboard.
Update the Hire-Right Profiles after every hire when necessary to increase their accuracy.
Being specific in the description will help in the evaluation during an interview.
Long-term Actions
#1 Generate a Continuous Flow of Quality Candidates with Candidate Gravity
The main takeaway from this section is that every organization needs to maximize almost all talent streams for a consistent and strong candidate gravity, as each talent stream can only bring a specific group of candidates. For example, you might not find enough good mechanical engineers if the job posts are in StackOverflow. The Referral stream is the most “potent” for small organizations. Don’t leave any of the funnels unchecked to maintain a continuous inlet.
Candidate Gravity depends on eight different streams. Improve one at a time.
But improve one after another because you won’t have the time to master them all at once, and you need to measure. Don’t forget to measure. Constant feedback is the only way to verify the work. A rate of how many percentages of good candidates are from one stream is a good indicator of the stream's performance.
#2 Create and Maintain Talent Inventory
Among all the steps, the Talent Inventory is significant to help an organization hire fast. A talent Inventory is a pool of people ready to be hired. The essential things are their up-to-date contacts and a description of their profile.
Hiring is a very time-consuming process. You might spend hundreds of hours screening candidates, writing emails asking for missing documents, organizing interview time slots, and back-and-forth calls negotiating contracts. And still, the candidate is one point below the threshold or withdraws at the last minute. Don’t let all time spent be wasted. Whoever has reached the final step is a potential fit if no dealbreakers are identified. Ask them to join your talent inventory. Here is an example from the book that I found helpful in conveying the idea to the candidate.
"Kevin, I look ahead. I look for top talent who could maybe join us now, in the near future, or in the distant future, who want to have options when that time comes. Based on what I heard, I think you could be one of those people whom I could be an option for you in the future. How about we spend a couple of minutes seeing if that makes sense for both of us?" To me, that's a bit of an intelligence test for that candidate. If a candidate passes me up on that, they're probably not top talent. Talented people like options.
One point to remember, please check your local laws on keeping candidates’ personal data for a long period. Maybe you will need to ask explicitly for permission before inserting the resumes and contact info into your inventory.
#3 Integrate the process into your weekly operations
Nothing can compete with consistency. No matter how smooth the structure is and how much money is put into the ads, nothing will work if the hiring team can’t carve out enough weekly time for recruitment activities.
Related Readings/Resources
Why emphasize the quantifiable scoreboard? As research shows, a simple algorithm like a scoreboard will beat intuitive evaluation by a great margin in a job interview, see Think fast & slow and Noise.