Talent Acquisition Process: Attracting, identifying, and hiring the right talent for your company
Building a strong company culture starts with the leadership team. It is your responsibility to set and communicate clear expectations. It is your responsibility to align the team to your mission and vision. It is your responsibility to lead by example and espouse your core values, and it’s your responsibility to keep your team accountable to them. And it’s your responsibility to attract and hire the right talent for your company.
Your staff are your most important asset (along with the money to pay them!). The right staff can accelerate your growth and propel you to success. The wrong staff can literally kill a company. It’s on you to determine who is right for the role - even one wrong hire, if not addressed quickly, can be a detriment to your company. My general word of advice: hire A+ players who can do the jobs you need now and who can get you to where you need to be.
This all being said, it’s incredibly important to have a clear talent acquisition process that enables you to attract top candidates, identify the right candidates for the right role, and effectively build your team.
Talent Acquisition Process
A talent acquisition process ensures that key stakeholders are aligned on the roles you need to fill, the skills and experience needed for those roles, and the hiring process to fill those roles. The talent acquisition process can be broken into 5 stages:
Job creation
Job evangelization
Screening and review
Offer or rejection
Negotiation, acceptance, and onboarding
The talent acquisition process may vary from company to company or from role to role. This the the Talent Acquisition Process (with templates) I use. Similarly, there will be variances based on the size of the company or team, the seniority of the role, or the role itself. If you don’t have access to the full folder, simply request access here, and I will add you to my (free!) Entrepreneurs group. It will then unlock access to the folders.
Talent Acquisition Stages Explained
Job Creation: Job creation encompasses everything from requesting headcount to identifying the hiring team to writing a job description. I typically have (hopeful!) hiring managers complete a job requisition form that identifies the roles and responsibilities of a new hire, the team structure, budget, the hiring committee, the hiring process, and who is responsible for what part of the hiring process. As part of this, a full job description is created and final sign-off is obtained before posting.
Job Evangelism: Get your job out there! Try to create a large top of funnel. Don’t limit yourself to only your existing network, though referrals can be pretty awesome!
Screening and review: Make sure to have a clear screening and review process. I like to share what the screening process is in the first interview (and I’ve even seen some companies post their hiring process in their job description!). I also like to make sure we’re aligned on compensation and benefits early on in the process.
The hiring committee should be prepped on the types of questions that should and should not ask and how they should be assessing the candidate. I usually have a form that I have each interviewer fill out immediately after the interview while their opinion is still fresh in their mind.
For many roles, I may ask them to do a small project. If it’s a project that’s directly related to our business or use case, I will limit the project scope and offer payment for services rendered. If it’s a project that not directly related to our business or use case, I will still limit the project scope, but I will not offer payment for services rendered. For example, let’s say I am hiring a product manager for my energy analytics company. If I am okay paying him for his project, I may ask, “Name three features we could build into our existing dashboard and articulate why you suggested these features. How would you prioritize feature development?” I could gather much of the same information by asking “imagine you are creating a scheduling app. What core features would you build into your MVP and why? Now name two additional features and explain how you would prioritize them in the product roadmap.” Based on their responses and how they explain their rationale, you can glean a lot about how they think, communicate, and work.
In addition to asking functional questions, it’s important to gather a good understanding of whether or not they espouse your core values and if they will thrive in your work environment. Are there any red flags? Is there anything particularly awesome about them?
Also remember, it’s just as much on the interviewer to ask the right questions and build rapport with the candidates, as it is on the candidates to provide winning answers!
Offer or rejection: If it’s a no, get there quickly, and let the candidate know. If it’s a maybe, keep the candidate informed, but don’t string them along. If it’s a yes, then, by golly!, share the great news and start your negotiations. When sending out rejection emails, I think it’s best to use a legally-approved template. I know it can seem a bit unempathetic, but you may find yourself in hot water if you accidentally promise a candidate a future role or unintentionally say something they can later use in court.
Negotiation, acceptance, and onboarding. Hopefully, you’ve already established that you’re aligned on compensation in your earlier conversations. yAnytime negotiation is involved, I think back to one of my favorite books, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. I highly recommend quickly reading it and it may help you get your candidates over the line! Finally, if they’ve accepted your offer, it’s time to hand over the process to the onboarding team (who, if you’re in a small startup, might be you, too!).
Project management tools for tracking your recruitment
I like to use a project management tool like Asana to manage all my teams’ projects. I’ll dive more deeply into how I use these tools in a future article, but specific to talent acquisition, I find using these tools makes it a lot easier to keep track of all the roles I’m currently hiring as well as all where I am with all the different candidates.
Many 3rd party job boards have built-in application trackers. You may decide to post to many job boards and route all applicants to submit via one site to make applicant tracking easier. Some project management tools like Asana also allow you to create or link a form that creates a separate task card for each applicant. I prefer the latter because you can easily give the right team members access to the candidate boards without having to add and revoke access to multiple platforms. It also gives you more flexibility with what information you collect, the different steps of your application funnel, and the automated actions you can take. Whatever you choose, I believe it’s good practice to <> - it standardizes the application process, makes applicant tracking easier, and weeds out candidates who don’t read the full job posting/ don’t follow instructions.
The way I use Asana, I’ll create one team called “HR_Talent Acquisition”. I’ll create one project board for all my open roles, and then I’ll create separate project boards for each role I am trying to fill. If I’m hiring multiple people to fill the same role, I’ll only use one project board. You could choose to just create one project board for each department or one project board for all candidates and filter by role, but I prefer separate project boards to allow for variances in the interviewing process and in who should have board edit/ view access.
Talent Acquistion_Open Roles project:
Create a project board with the following stages: Open, Live, Screening, Offer, Filled.
Create a New Role task template. The task template should have custom fields for Team Department, Priority, and other tags you may want to include. The subtasks should include the relevant steps for each of the stages. Remember to include links and instructions in each of the subtasks.
Check off the subtasks as they are completed.
Move the card across stages.
Team_Title project:
Create a new project board with stages for each step of the process, e.g. Prospect, Intro Call, Second Call, Project, Panel, Debrief, References, Offer, On Hold, Decline
Name the project board: Team_Title
In the overview, include links to any relevant documentation, e.g. job requisition form, job description, applicant submission form, open roles asana card
Create a card for each candidate (you can do this automatically if you use the form feature on Asana), and move the card across stages.
FYI: As of this writing, Asana Premium enables form customization and task creation from form submissions, but you need Asana Business to send out automated emails. A cheaper hack would be to stick to Premium and download the project board as a csv and use that to send out your templated emails.
Whatever process you use, communicate it to the team, and stick to it!
💡TLDR: A clear talent acquisition process enables you to attract top candidates, identify the right candidates for the right role, and effectively build your team.
📖 Exercise: Start to craft your own talent acquisition process. Who should be involved in that process? What channels will you use to reach new candidates? In addition to their functional ability, what non-functional attributes are you looking for in the right candidates?
📎 Download: Talent Acquisition Process + Templates. If you don’t have access to the full folder, simply request access here.
🚀 Group Access: Request access to my Entrepreneurs Group to receive more helpful content, special offers, and free access to my Founder Toolkit (including my Google Drive template!).
