How can you create urgency in the hiring process?

Have you had outstanding positions that have gone unfilled for long periods of time? Are qualified candidates going elsewhere?

The first thing you need to do is make hiring a priority. Next to budget planning (i.e. getting money to hire), hiring should be the next most important thing your team does. Without people, you cannot accomplish your goals.

Your team needs to understand they can, if necessary, slip other things to support the hiring process. Until they do and until you actually support that ideal, hiring will always remain secondary. It is much easier for your managers to spend time on fighting fires or working on products than hiring.

The second thing I would do is set goals for your team and hold people accountable. Here are some sample goals:

• Resumes reviewed per position per week
• Hires per month per manager (goal: 1)
• Time elapsed between identifying a good resume and a phone screen (goal: 48 hours)
• Time elapsed between a good phone screen and face to face interviews (goal: 48 hours)
• Time elapsed between good face to face interviews and an offer (goal: 48 hours)

Time allowed for candidates to accept an offer (goal: 72 hours)

Set goals for the above items with your team. I have place some goals I have used before in parenthesis above.

Another big issue that limits hiring is that many companies allow teams to have way too many people interviewing a candidate. I limit the number of interviewers to 4. Pick people you trust to do the interviews. Make it a priority for them to interview candidates. Make sure you get their input back quickly. You can support senior candidates who want to talk with more of the team but make sure to set your team's expectations.

Many companies are pennywise and pound foolish. They will negotiate every little piece of compensation to get someone at the lowest cost. In the end, you may leave a bad taste in a candidate's mouth. Even if they hire on, they may resent the process. It also takes a lot of time in the process. And, in the end, it costs much more if you lose a candidate.

So with all these techniques to increase urgency, how do you make sure you are hiring good people:

• Learn which members of your team are good interviewers
• Do reference checks (blind ones too if you can)
• Train and manage new employees well
• Don't be afraid to manage out mistakes quickly
• You can make a positive difference in how your team hires!

More later ...

Does your team have a sense of urgency?

Does your staff drive action items or do they let them happen? Do you have to check on action items you have assigned or does your staff update you on a regular basis? Do projects slip because your staff waited to follow up on action items?

I get astounded all the time by people who do not follow up on critical action items in a timely fashion. Some people do not have a sense of priority. Some people do not have a sense of how much time they will lose if they just let events play out. Some people just to not have the drive to follow through quickly.

You and your teams can easily slip products days or weeks or months without a sense of urgency.

Recently I was involved in a project that was coming to the end of an integration cycle. I was getting status on a Friday morning. I was told that one bug may have an unbounded solution. The manager went on to say that he thought he would get people together that afternoon to discuss it. I said no that we would meet in 10 minutes. If we had not met, then we would have lost at least one half week. By meeting immediately, developers had time to research solutions before the weekend and begin the work. These kind of issues occur everyday.

Here are things I know to do to help this issue:

• Hire people with a sense of urgency
• Set expectations about action items
• Spend time communicating to your group about urgency
• Hold people accountable for being late
• Developing a team with a sense of urgency will, many times, make the difference between success and failure.

More later ...