20 lessons from hiring

As of Dec 2024, TopHire's onboarded close to 600 teammates over the lifetime of our company. This number includes people that have already left.

I estimate that I've personally interviewed 1300+ candidates over the last 6 years or so. Sameer Parwani my co-founder has probably interviewed 4-7 times more candidates than me in the last 14+ years he's been managing companies.

The feedback loops we have in place has helped us reflect and improve our hiring and selection process. And in this post I aim to to summarise all my learnings as best as I can.

1. Move Fast
   When it comes to hiring, several things are out of your control - such as candidates not being forthcoming during their interview with you or whether those that you do reference checks with are candid with you.
   
   But then what is under your control, you do well. One of them is moving fast. Don't make a candidate wait around for weeks while you are deliberating on next steps. Cut down on unnecessary processes, identify bottlenecks, get to decisions quickly or at least keep the ball rolling, whether it's more interview rounds or doing a trial.
   
2. Be candid with your candidates
   If you are struggling to come to a decision on whether to roll out an offer, tell them so. Don't leave them hanging.
   
   Or if you are skeptical whether they'll fit into the way things are done at your company - pick up the phone, explain to them how things are done at your company and ask them "is this something that puts you off or do you find this sort an approach exciting?".
   
3. Don't give assignments as the first round
   This point isn't even about being considerate towards candidates. Yes it's good to be considerate. But it's literally in your interest as a hiring manager to not give out a 2 hour long assignment as your first round.
   
   You will repel strong candidates by doing this. They'll be put off by you expecting them to invest time into the interview process upfront. All this before they've even had a chance to speak to someone from your team team and build some rapport.
   
   Instead of trying to save your company's time by giving out assignments as first rounds, optimise your process such that you are doing a better job resume screening out candidates that you know won't be a good fit. Or do a combination of resume screening + a 10 min questionnaire to weed out non-serious applicants. But have someone speak to the rest of the candidates on atleast a 15 min call before you invite them to do a 2 hour long assignment.
   
4. Don't be rigid around the % of salary increment they expect
   If someone was grossly underpaid in their previous role, then it's fair for them to expect a 100% hike to get to market standards. It's unreasonable to view salary increments from the lens of "30% is the max we can go" and disregard what their starting point is.
   
5. How someone negotiates an offer gives you insight
   It's fine for candidates to attempt to negotiate on an offer that we roll out. But negotiations need to be done properly and in good faith.
   
   We've had candidates tell us that they're holding an offer of X from another company for the exact same role, but that for them to take up our role, we'd need to offer then 20% more than X.
   
   I ask what their thought process is, and I've come across all sorts of poor reasons such as "I've already committed to them, and I'll only back out the other offer, if you offer me more". This is an immediate red flag.
   
   Some other red flags include when a candidate takes your offer, goes to the other company, gets a better offer and comes back to you and asks to beat it, i.e. a bidding war.
   
   Or if they negotiate multiple times even after you meet their changed expectations because they feel like they need to milk the offer to the best of their ability.
   
   Or if after negotiations, they are unready to make a final decision.
   
6. When you come across a unicorn candidate, go into Sell Mode.
   Every once in a while, we come across a candidate who is a unicorn. It becomes apparent in the first 5 minutes of the conversation that this person ticks almost every box we are looking for. In such cases, switch to Sell Mode.
   
   To be in Sell Mode means many things. Mainly it is about switching gears to pitching ourselves to the candidate, convincing them that we are a great fit for each other. As opposed to the typical candidate<>hiring manager dynamic where the candidate that feels like they are "interviewing" for a role with us and that they need to impress us.
   
   Being in Sell Mode also means fast-tracking candidates, cutting down interview rounds, inviting them to join team events, and so on.
   
   Hiring is like a sales job, at times.
   
7. The most important part of the hiring process is the trial week
   If I could pick the most important part of the recruitment process, it's the trial week. The kind of insights you get from working with someone directly (i.e a trial week) is something that an assignment, assessment or interviews cannot match up to.
   
   Trial weeks aren't a mandatory part of our hiring process though. Since you can't exactly do trial weeks with those that are already holding exploding job offers or are currently employed elsewhere. Trial weeks work great with campus freshers (we do a lot of campus hiring) or candidates who are immediately available.
   
   If you really want to do trial weeks with someone who is already employed elsewhere, consider having them work after their work hours with you for 1-2 hours. Or have them work on weekends in an async manner.
   
8. Reference Checks gives you most insight per minute spent
   I did say the trial week is the most important part of the process. But it's not always feasible to do one. In which case, do thorough reference checks. I've written an extensive guide here.
   
   Speaking to an ex-manager of the candidate gives you a year's worth of feedback on their day-to-day work, condensed into a 30 minute reference check call.
   
   It's more useful than any assignment or any number of interview rounds you do with the candidate.
   
9. Hire people on a similar wavelength as you
   If there's a total mismatch in personalities, general thought processes or style of doing things, there's a low chance that the 2 sides will have a smooth working relationship.
   
   There'll be higher chances of unresolved arguments. Higher chance that they'd be negative about you. There will be low trust towards you as a manager. And overall if they don't relate to you much as a person, they aren't going to be at peak performance.
   
   This point becomes especially important as the seniority of the candidate is higher.
   
   We've had people who were otherwise pretty good at what they do, but ultimately it didn't work out because the manager (or Sameer or I) didn't get along with them at a personal level.
   
   Conversely, for people we get along with on a personal level, we end up having a great run with them. We build a rapport that extends to after they leave our company and join elsewhere.
   
   To determine if there is wavelength sync, among other things you could try what I've mentioned in points no.9 (inviting them to team events) and  no.10 (showing off your culture).
   
10. Invite candidates to your team events
    A couple of years ago, a newly onboarded hire joined us for for his first team event with us.
    
    In the days after the event, we started hearing chatter about how others in the party were put off by this newly onboarded hire's personality. Unsurprisingly, this new hire had a strained relationship with most others on the team and left quickly after an unsatisfying 1 year long tenure with us.
    
    If only we had invited this person to a team event before we rolled out the offer, we'd have saved a lot of energy and time.
    
11. Show off your culture to potential candidates
    We maintain an instagram handle that is meant to give potential teammates an idea of what it's like to work with us. So a ton of posts and stories around parties, events, memes, casual interviews of myself or Sameer. This means that we've deliberately kept our target audience for our instagram handle as potential future teammates. Which is unusual because typically companies target their content to clients or users.
    
    And as part of the application process to work with us, we ask candidates to follow us on Instagram. Aggressive, I know.
    
    The ones who don't vibe with our Instagram posts and activity, they self-select themselves out. And the ones who find it appealing, they are that much more motivated to work with us.
    
    Maintaining an Instagram handle is pretty straightforward. We don't have a social media team. We just share our IG passwords with anyone who expresses in interest in putting up reels and posts and stories when there are team events.
    
12. During early days, hire people you know and trust
    No matter how good you get at hiring, you tend to make mistakes. Making these mistakes becomes especially costly if you are an early stage startup. So assuming you have this choice, hire people you've previously worked with in past companies.
    
    In our case, a few CouponDunia colleagues joined us when we started TopHire. And a Crowdfire colleague of mine also worked on a contract basis with TopHire.
    
13. Get them to open up
    There are two schools of thought when it comes to how to conduct an interview. First there's the "let's put on a mean face and be serious" approach that is popular with old school companies
    
    Then there is the "let me make the candidate feel comfortable and at-ease so they can speak freely" approach.
    
    I prefer approach 2.
    
    When candidates are comfortable, they don't have their guard up and that means you don't get the typical frustrating formal answers from them which are designed to impress (read as mislead).
    
    It lets them think freely and speak candidly. And this means you get to see what they'd be like on a day to day basis. So you get a picture of them that's much closer to reality.
    
    You are, after all, potentially going to work with them on a day to day basis. Why not aim to create an interviewing environment which resembles what day to day working with them would look like - which is not a formal and serious environment.
    
    The side benefit of approach 2 is that as a hiring manager, you come across as authentic and everyone likes authenticity. You get to break free from the clutter because the typical interviewer takes approach 1.
    
14. Look for the Micro Signals.
    Look for the little signs. And if they seem red flaggish, gently pull at the thread until you have adequate data on it. Examples of the little things to keep an eye out for:
    
    1) coming in a few minutes late to the call (+not explaining why theyre late).
    2) assignment submissions are late (+no explanations for why its late).
    3) not following through on things they said they'd do (e.g. the candidate says they'll send across their updated resume after the call, but then they forget. This means that when the candidate promises to do something, make a note of it so you can confirm if they remembered it).
    4) typos in emails.
    5) being rude to the junior people on your team or the office help (empower your talent acquisition team to bubble up such feedback),
    6) zoning out during calls,
    7) bad mouthing previous companies or managers with vague accusations,
    8) how long they take to respond to emails from us,
    9) rescheduling of interviews without an understandable reason.
    10) missing clear instructions in assignments.
    
    I find myself reminding hiring managers to not let these little things go.
    
    For example if someone missed out on an important instruction in the assignment, the average response by a hiring manager would be a passive one - where they'd just think to themselves "oh well, the candidate forgot this bit".
    
    But a non-passive way to handle it is to ask the candidate "Hey, looks like you hadn't done X which was mentioned in the assignment brief. How come?" And we'd see how they respond.
    
    A response by a weak candidate would be "Oh ya. I totally missed that. I'm sorry". That would be the entirety of their response.
    
    A response by a strong candidate though would be "Oh crap. Totally missed that. I'm redoing this part of the assignment. Please give me 3 hours and I'll re-submit this".
    
    The response by the strong candidate makes me overlook the fact that they missed out on an instruction. But at least they knew how to fix it after I pointed it out. It makes me give them the benefit of doubt.
    
15. Identify key characteristics and traits that seem to work well for a role.
    A sales role requires someone good at building rapport, strong verbal communication skills, good objection handling skills and so on.
    
    Whereas the ideal hire in an email-centric customer support role, need not be strong in verbal communication as long as their written communication is good.
    
    Then there are some base traits that are useful regardless of the role, for example general intelligence.
    
    So for every role you'd want to break down what is important and what is not as important
    
    Then create a hiring rubric for the roles that you are hiring for. This is what ours looks like.
    
16. Candidates are also interviewing you.
    Hiring is a 2 way street. Candidates are also judging the company through the lens of how the interviewer is conducting themselves.
    
    Which means that as a hiring manager, you need to put your best foot forward too. Start the call off by introducing yourself, be as polite as you can and don't with the approach of dropping a barrage of questions back to back.
    
    Give them a good interview experience. An indicator for whether you are delivering a good interview experience is if over time, you start hearing feedback from candidates that the interview felt more like a "conversation" rather than an "interview".
    
    The tone you'd want to adopt is "I want to get know this person better" rather than "I want to see if they can answer all my questions" or "is this person good enough to join my company?".
    
    Importantly, everything that you'd expect the candidate to follow, you have to follow it yourself too. For example - keep your video camera on if it's a Video Call (side note - it's rude + annoying when an interviewer keeps their camera off but expects the candidate to keep it on), show up on time, look presentable, don't seem uninterested or lethargic, don't give half baked answers or seem to be in a rush.
    
    h/t Ritu for this point
    
17. Build a culture that's big on taking detailed notes.
    Not just writing notes, but detailed ones. There are several benefits to inculcating a writing culture.
    
    Writing forces clarity in thought.
    
    Writing also help in building feedback loops. When I interview a candidate for example, I note down pretty much every noteworthy detail from the conversation. Not just what the candidate said, but what my immediate thoughts were about what the candidate said. For example if I think something seemed suspicious, I may leave a note saying "This seems off to me and needs further digging in next round".
    
    Over time, you'll thank yourself for having taken copious amounts of notes that goes years back. We find ourselves digging through old notes at times to see what we did right or what we did wrong and reflect + course correct. For example if someone turned out to do really well with us, we'll go back to our interview notes with them from 2 years ago and notice that this person actually did have some mild red flags that we thankfully chose to overlook in favour of all the other positive things.
    
    Or let's say there was some hire that turned out to be a total misfit, we look back at all our interview notes and might come to realize that all the signs were there and we just chose to ignore it.
    
    And then we fine tune our mental model and heuristics for what to value and what to ignore.
    
18. Being analytical about hiring
    Remember how during the interview process, I mentioned we use this hiring rubric to rate candidates on various aspects?
    
    Now after someone begins working with us and some time has passed, we assign everyone in our team a 5 point work performance rating. The rating is based on our own observations as founders, observation and feedback from the person's manager, their subordinates and general performance.
    
    We've then done some basic correlation analyses to determine which of the candidate ratings we assigned during the interview process has "predictive power" when it comes to determining their work performance rating.
    
    This correlation analysis may help us derive insights such as:
    
    1) Looks like low professionalism in interviews is a strong sign that they won't do well with us as a teammate.
    2) Looks like their "Inclination towards HR" doesnt mean much at all. People who we thought had "low inclination" anyway seem to have done just as well as people who we thought had "high inclination". Actually well this could also mean we're not really good at determining a candidate's inclination on the basis of what they say. Maybe we should not make this an aspect that needs be rated during interviews.
    
    Yes, there are pitfalls to this approach, because we only hire people we think would turn out to be good. So there's bias that's present. But not a big deal.
    
19. If someone is a cultural issue, let them go quickly
    If you notice someone spreading negativity and sucking other teammates' energies, act soon to let them go. If you aren't a decision maker but you notice someone being toxic, bubble the feedback up to management so that they can investigate and act on it if needed.
    
    If your hiring process is thorough, the chances of mistakenly hiring someone who is a cultural problem will anyways be low.
    
    But roughly once every 12 months we end up with someone who is a clear cultural misfit.
    
    We rarely let someone go for low performance. Most of the times we've had to part ways with ex-colleagues is because of dishonesty or cultural misfit.
    
20. Don't give honest feedback to candidates you are rejecting
    We’ve tried giving honest feedback in the past. A lot of people do not react well even when worded politely. They get offended & defensive.
    
    After they invest hours in an interview process, you’d of course like to give them transparency. But if the transparency has a meaningful chance of turning the interaction contentious, it’s not worth it.
    
    We still give high level, sugarcoated feedback, which does give directional information. For example, we may say “with just 1 year of talent acquisition experience, your experience and the expected salary don't fit our salary parity bands".
    
    But the truly honest version of the feedback may have been “In your one year of talent acquisition experience, you did not show the level of achievement we are looking for. You worked on low difficulty openings and spent half the time as a recruitment coordinator. You may have future potential but we are looking for demonstrated success hence we are passing”.
    
    This type of honest feedback is going to get defensive pushback at least 20-30% of the time.
    
    Having said the above, occasionally I do end up giving truly honest feedback to candidates.
    
    For example when I've built good rapport with the candidate. Which then gives me the confidence the candidate would understand that I'm being honest only because I want to help them.
    
    Or I'd give them honest feedback if they write to us saying "Please tell me exactly what went wrong, I'm open to any critical feedback and will work on it". Which is a sign that they aren't going to get offended.
    
    (this point is from Sameer)