Hooked on Failed Hiring Forensics - Issue 22
"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." — Henry Ford
Unless you’re really fortunate, your startup will have a near-death experience or two or three. This is especially true when it comes to hiring. And while hiring mistakes can be a major blow to the fragility of your startup’s early ecosystem and team, resist the urge to jump right back in without taking the time to investigate the why behind the miss.
What’s going on?
It’s bound to happen — the dreaded mis-hire. And at the leadership level, it hurts big time. But beyond the sting you feel to your pride comes massive disruption to the team and business momentum. The pressure you felt during the initial stages to recruit someone is nothing compared to the emotion of quickly churning out the leader who you thought was “the one.” Sometimes mis-hires aren’t immediately apparent, but over the first 60-90 days, you begin to see signals that there is serious misalignment — red flags that weren’t successfully unearthed during the hiring process. Or worse, you saw flags and still chose to hire anyway, convinced they weren’t that big of a deal. But hindsight is always 20/20. You wish you hadn’t compromised and instead spent more time qualifying a solid, two-way fit. Now you’re dealing with unwinding a newly recruited leader — the most painful process of all. It's easy to panic, feeling the pressure to solve this intensified gap right now. Maybe there was a silver medalist from the recent recruiting cycle? But in moments like these, pump the brakes before making rash decisions. There is a wealth of learnings that can come from failed hiring processes. Taking the time to do an honest and self-reflective post-mortem can make the difference in finding a “rebound relationship” or game-changing leader.
Why does it matter?
You ended up here for a reason, and 99% of the time, that reason is tied to some sort of breakdown in your hiring process. The best time to stop, reflect, and recalibrate is on the heels of a failed process. Get everyone in the room to investigate the crime scene and run forensics on where things broke down and why. The bigger reasons for failure tend to tie back to half-baked job specs, when you haven’t taken the time to fully align your team around the problem you are working to solve by hiring this leader in the first place. Other crucial considerations include the consequences of not hiring, setting clear deliverables, identifying skills, attributes, achievements that denote success, and ensuring motivational alignment to do the work that needs to be done. This job spec is your team’s hiring blueprint and is vital to the talent fit discovery process. It helps you point to all the necessary things to suggest someone can succeed at your startup. Then you and your team must divide and conquer to surface the candidate data. Something is amiss if you took the time to do this and still ended with a failed outcome. It’s time to check your work with the learnings most recently uncovered in this particular outcome.
What do others think?
“At Echodyne, we are committed to ongoing recruiting success and leverage learnings from every hiring session. We eliminated surprises by having transparent conversations about our biggest strengths, weaknesses, and priorities so that recruited leaders can mentally prepare and think through a 180-day plan for how they’d tackle our bigger challenges. Internal team preparedness is table stakes. Everyone is aligned around the job spec, problem to solve, focus areas, and expectations – leaving no stone unturned. Beyond these internal mechanics, we leverage the board in the interviewing process and validate achievements through deep reference checking.” – Eben Frankenberg, President, and CEO at Echodyne Corp
What do we think?
With hiring, going slow now will ensure you reach maximum velocity later. And that begins with an inward assessment. Retrospectives provide space to learn through failure so you can fix what’s broken. But these sessions require honesty and curiosity to identify the root cause of process breakdown. It’s easy to blame the person you hired when things go wrong. “It’s not me. It’s definitely you.” While it’s the responsibility of both sides to do the work to find a two-way fit, the hiring process you establish as a founder — as the leader — is only as effective as the intention you put into it. Most leaders want the exact same thing you do — a great fit with a kick-ass team, where they can learn, build, and pull off the impossible. And this failure to launch is just as painful for them as it is for you because they’ve gone through the process of uprooting their life.
What do YOU think?
Take Action
Write an alternative ending. What would today look like if you could do it all over again and get a different outcome? By revising history, you can often discover misalignments and gaps in the process that brought you here. Use this learning to work backward into a better outcome next time.
Analyze. Similar to a product retrospective, work with the interviewing team to identify what went well in your process and what didn’t. Retrace the steps of the process from start to finish, starting with the scope. Identify the areas of misalignment and how the leader didn’t match needs. Where was the biggest misalignment? Was it an attribute misalignment? Skills? Motivations? Sometimes it’s as simple as needing a hands-on doer vs. a scaled-up leader. Were there moments when red or yellow flags were ignored? Find these specific breakdowns and highlight them as important validators for round two.
Interview feedback. It’s perfectly normal to have all levels of interviewing proficiency and experience. Take the time to go back through the collected feedback and assess the interviewing quality. What were the questions? Did they yield the right information? Did the interviewer dig deep? There are many AI tools that will record sessions — use these to record sessions, level up your interviewing quality, and make sure assigned focus areas are properly covered. Interview training can be a great investment to elevate interviewing capabilities.
Missed red flags. You don’t want to make the same mistake again. Identify and incorporate deeper interview techniques to ensure a more thorough evaluation of candidates. Implement changes that address the shortcomings identified during the analysis phase. These things will tie back into the skills, attributes, achievements, and motivation sections of your scope.
Recalibrate the role spec. All the above points will feed into your role recalibration. Does the problem to solve still hold true? Has it shifted?
Two-way fit collaborative sessions. Two-way fit sessions allow a new leader and founder time to brainstorm on key topics relevant to the challenges facing the business and the real work to be done. This time together provides a deeper understanding of working styles, philosophies, and actual problems to solve. These sessions require transparency to be effective.
Revisit your external job post. Reflect on the externally branded job description. Did you accurately represent the role in a way that provides transparency into the challenges facing your startup or the specifics about the good, bad, and ugly of the role? Revise as needed so candidates understand what they are signing up for and opt-out when the role isn’t aligned.
If you’ve leveraged an external recruitment firm, regroup. The firm will conduct a feedback call to seek information from the off-boarded leader. Do not skip this step. Get as specific and detailed feedback as possible, then reflect and make a new game plan with the necessary changes.
Learn and let go. Rehashing the past over and over creates a negative ripple effect and will have an unforeseen impact on those around you. Seek to learn from it and then move on.
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