The Hiring Plan Document
I love Hiring Managers.
I love them so much that when they tell me they want to hire a role and that we can find someone within a month, I smile. If I know them well enough, then I’ll laugh.
It’s all out of love, I promise.
Hiring Managers should be passionate about the roles they want joining their teams. Otherwise, candidates won’t pick up on that enthusiasm and probably won’t be too motivated to join. So, they’re excited about the end of the process (when someone new joins), but the entire process? Not so much. Hiring is time-consuming and mistakes are costly.
Hiring is even more time-consuming and hiring mistakes even more costly when you haven’t decided upon some key details.
Whether you’re backfilling a role, or hiring an additional person, a few things need to be clear. Whether someone drops into your lap, or you’re on the look-out for ages, you’ll need a plan to help your chances for a successful hire.
In my Unofficial Interviewer’s Handbook, I reference our “Hiring Plan Doc” several times. I’d like dig into more detail about what the document looks like and why we begin hiring process the same way.
I’ll break down each section one by one and explain why they make it into the doc the next round, and where we’ve made changes, too.
1. Start with the basics: the minimum amount of information needed to get this process started. For us it looks like Job Title, Hiring Manager, Hiring Team, Compensation range, and any other details (for example, some positions need to be located/work in a specific timezone).
2. Goals and Expectations. This is the meat of your hiring process, and it’s something you can use well after your hire. It will help you write an internal job description, and help organize onboarding plans and materials for this hire.
- Why are we hiring this role? It might seem repetitive? It’s not. Ask yourselves again and again why. Challenge the reasons given to make sure everyone truly understands the purpose of this role.
- What goals needs to be achieved a year from now for you to determine the hire is successful? A long view of what you want this person to accomplish. A year isn’t a ton of time, but it’s long enough to make progress on some serious projects. What are those projects/accomplishments?
- How will this role enable the team to meet its goals? Be sure to align this role’s objectives to company goals / initiatives. They should match up well. How will their work and influence impact the team?
- How will success be measured (how will we know the above goals have been achieved?) Time to get specific. You’ll want your hiring team to know this data because good candidates will ask or have opinions themselves that you can discuss with them.
- Based on what you said they need to accomplish in a year, what do they need to accomplish in the first 90 days? (30/60/90 day goals) This is the first draft of your onboarding plan. I like to include this type of information in a job post, too. Folks like to know how you’ll support them in their first couple of months. Even if you don’t have much of an onboarding process, there will be things you’ll want this person to learn and acclimate to as soon as possible. List them here.
- What do they own? This section will help you write a job description for this person. In this document, it should at least include all of the major responsibilities of this role. Minor responsibilities can be added to the job description later.
- What have they learned / mastered in their previous experience? This is what you’re going to ask for in your job post, and what your hiring team will test for in their interviews. The list should relate to the job you want them to perform here. If you find yourself with a long list, remove anything irrelevant or “extra.” If it’s truly a bonus skill or experience, then you can note it as such in your job description (it shouldn’t be marked as “required”).
3. The Hiring Process. Map out what’s going to happen as soon as someone applies for the role. Take your hiring team through step by step so they get an idea of what to expect, and what the candidate should expect. They can even remind the candidate what’s up next in the process at the end of their interviews because they’ll have this as a reference. This is a good place to discuss specific questions in those interviews too. You’ll want to share these so that separate interviewers don’t cover the same questions. It’s also useful if you’ll have different folks swapping in and out of the process depending on their availability.
4. External Job Post. This is where the job post is written, discussed, edited, commented on, etc. I personally find it helpful to write it here because the information I need to write it is in the same document (see: section 2)! A few things I like to include in all job posts: short blurb about the company, why we’re hiring this role, overview of how this role interacts with the rest of the company (list specific teammates by name!), a list of common tasks or projects, what kind of experience we’re looking for and why, and a summary of our benefits and perks. This section is a good place to talk about the questions to include on the application itself — beyond, you know, name, email address… — it’s time to get creative! Ask your hiring team for help.
5. Homework. All of our hiring processes include a practical portion — we find that it’s the best way to illustrate that someone can do the job to be done. Instead of a live challenge with interviewers, we put together a series of questions or tasks for candidates to complete and return to us when they’re done. A lot of our work isn’t synchronous, so we don’t expect this part of the hiring process to be either.
Note: I totally didn’t come up with the idea for a document like this. It mostly came from a workshop I attended at Greenhouse Open. Later, when reading Hire with your Head, many of the same ideas were confirmed there.
Ok, the biggest challenge with all of this? It’s A LOT of information to fill out. To avoid totally pissing off my Hiring Managers, I like to divide the document into a timeline.
Now, in my ideal world, I’d have the entire document filled out before we post the job. That doesn’t always happen, but it’s nice to have standards :P
Must be done before a job description is written and posted: Sections 1 & 2 (Job Details, Goals and Expectations)
The Hiring Manager doesn’t have to do all of this, of course. As soon as they have some idea of their hiring team, we can start asking them for help. I contribute as much as I can, but I need to hear from the experts!
I can do most of this part, with minimal help from the team. Section 3 & 4 (Hiring Process, Job Description)
Once the goals and expectations (section 2) are decided on, I’ll have a clear idea of what we expect from this new role, and how I can communicate with candidates about it. I’ll put together a hiring process and job description. My first draft is reviewed by the hiring team asynchronously prior to meeting for a short meeting all together.
This meeting is my hiring kick-off call. It’s a way of saying — this is when feedback on the hiring doc is due — and a place to clear up any hazy or missing details. The call is successful if the hiring team understands why the position exists and understands their role in the hiring process. Then, we’ll have the job posted live soon after. If the call is unsuccessful, meaning there are lots of unanswered questions, we can’t come to an agreement, or there’s a change in the role itself, then it’s back to the drawing board. The pace changes and I have to work closely with the Hiring Manager to figure out what’s next.
After the job is posted live. I’m ok with posting the job live without Section 5 completed (the homework), but only if the team has come up with a vague understanding of what this might be, and there’s someone accountable for getting it done.
You don’t want to wait too long to get the homework figured out or you’ll reach a point in the process and make your candidates wait. Booooo.
Time-to-hire metrics are interesting, but don’t tell the whole story, of course. Who cares if you hire someone really quickly if you haven’t properly vetted them and they don’t end up having the skills necessary to do the job? Who cares if you hire someone quickly and the rest of your hiring team doesn’t understand why the role exists and you have no onboarding plan?
For the first time officially, we’ll have a hiring plan for 2018. It’ll change, of course, but it’ll be nice to see what our plans are for the rest of the year. That way, I can plan my time accordingly, too.
I’m realizing now that I demand a lot of planning from my team. It’s not that without a plan we can’t push ahead, but we’d be doing so aimlessly. When something changes at the company, without a plan, we don’t know what adjustments we need to make to existing efforts.
Anyway, I’d love to hear from you. What happens before you open a new position at your company?
