The Other Side of the Hiring Desk: Lessons From A Job Search

When it comes to hiring your next team or team member, there's a huge advantage in being faster than your competition. The best candidates go quickly and speed lets you drive the hiring timeline rather than be driven by it. More importantly, it communicates competency, interest, and respect to your prospective employee.

About this time last month I found myself unexpectedly on the job market. That's no big deal; it's a risk we all accept when working for startups. Nonetheless, I knew an opportunity when I saw one. For the first time in my career I had the chance to conduct a truly national job search without regard for the cost/benefit analysis of uprooting my family. Moreover, I had a chance to learn first-hand what such a job search might be like from the stand-point of the next person I tried to hire.

After all, no matter where I landed, any future hiring I did would almost certainly be at a national scale.

Rejection is Preferable to Silence

At the time of this writing I have been in the application/job-search process for over a month. Of the nearly 100 job ads I responded to, more than half have still not responded to my initial application. Of course, any job search is going to involve a great deal more "nos" than "yeses" but we indicate a great deal about our organization, its professionalism, and the seriousness with which we take our hiring process by how we communicate rejection.

A verbose rejection notice tells the candidate that their application was at least reviewed, even if we chose not to move forward. It communicates that whatever time they spent jumping through hoops with our hiring system, applying, and crafting a cover letter wasn't wasted. They were considered and we chose not to move on.

But when we simply allow the line to go dead we deny applicants that courtesy. Given how tight the labor market is right now, that feels like a luxury we can't afford. Sure, the risks of ghosting your applicants are low; there isn't really a Yelp for the hiring process where irate candidates can leave scathing reviews, but word still gets around.

Fast Is Less Than A Week

Of course, one of the chief problems of the silent rejection is that the candidate doesn't know he has been rejected. Certainly, as time passes, the likelihood of a positive response drops, but it never truly reaches zero. In one of my own previous roles I was tasked with going through a pile of resumes more than 6 months old and inviting qualified candidates to participate in a round one phone screen.

Needless to say, few did.

Most hiring managers are somewhat more timely than that and if you want to beat them to the best candidates you'll have to move fast. Of the applications I sent out that got responses, the average response time was seven days with the most common response time at six days. So, for those of you looking for a metric to hang your hat on: six days is the number to beat. If you can get responses to candidates faster than that you're ahead of the game.

But there is a little more to explore in this data.

The First Mover Advantage

Rejecting a candidate is, after all, the easiest part of the hiring process. It's just a few mouse clicks in most hiring management suites. Scheduling an interview is considerably harder. Even with engaged candidates, there are calendars to compare, interviewers to line up, and schedules to clear. So while we still see big spikes at the one and two week mark, what really stands out are the companies which can put an interview together within mere hours of receiving an application.

Indeed, of the companies that invited me to a round one screening, more than a quarter of them managed to do so within a day of receiving my application. When I first saw that figure I assumed that those numbers might correspond to cold-call contacts from recruiters. In fact, recruiter-initiated applications accounted for less than a quarter of those fast-mover interviews.

A substantial portion of the software development hiring world is clearly prioritizing speed to first contact.

A Marathon and Not a Sprint

The five companies in the graphic above represent the five finalists in my own job search, though the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Their interview processes are fairly similar, with each scheduling four (or more) touch-points before they're willing to extend an offer. Stacked up like this, we can see the difference decision velocity makes in the hiring process.

Consider the advantage "Eve" enjoys.

Eve could start interviewing candidates a full week after David does and still have an offer on the table first. That advantage allows Eve to sign a candidate in the time it takes David to schedule a Round 2 interview.

That candidate can't just wait for David to hurry things along. Offers usually come with a use-by date and few candidates will risk turning down an offer-in-hand from Eve for the possibility of one from David. Facing Eve's deadline, David's most promising candidates will be forced to withdraw themselves from consideration, rendering the time and money David spent on their recruitment a waste. If we assume that Eve is hiring the best candidates available (and why wouldn't we?) that means that David's entire candidate pool will be Eve's cast-offs. Likewise, Bob will only be able to sign candidates that both Eve and David have passed on.

To The Victor Go The Spoils

At this point you may be wondering if this entire post is a long-winded way of telling you to speed up your hiring process. In one sense, yes, it is. In another, however, it is about challenging a common hiring conception: that it is better to pass on a dozen candidates you're not absolutely sure about than to make one bad hire. There is truth in that aphorism: hiring decisions should be rock-solid, but they need to reach consensus quickly lest we find ourselves consigned to a picked-over candidate pool in which few truly exceptional opportunities remain.

To that end, hiring - especially technical hiring - can't be work that happens at the margins of other, committed work. We must be intentional about it and consider it as another important, prioritizable project for the entire organization.