James MeinckeIt’s been an incredible year helping hundreds of companies grow and build their teams. We’d like to close the year by compiling some of the best articles on hiring top talent and recruiting strategies.
Our Criteria: These articles received the most clicks from our weekly roundup posts and weekly newsletter throughout 2019. If you have a post you’d like to have considered in future roundups, let us know at content@closeriq.com
1) How to win the war for talent
By: Jordan Wan | Source: Close
“A high performing team is invaluable to a growing startup. Winning the most promising candidates is a cutthroat battle.
It takes a lot more than a generous compensation package to get top candidates to accept your offer. You need to show them early on that they’re joining a company that values every member of their team.
Finding top talent is one thing. Getting them to actually accept an offer from your company is another. The war for talent is vicious and every high-growth startup is competing for the best ones. Having a well-thought-out hiring process where the candidates are the priority can be the difference between winning or losing top talent.”
2) 4 strategic hiring tips for your self-funded startup
By: Karthik Sridharan | Source: The Next Web
“A startup has to get many things right to be successful. One of the most important ingredients in this recipe for success is hiring. Given the hectic nature of work, which might often not have immediate rewards, hires not only need to be smart but also extremely passionate about what they are building.
However, the kind of talent that your startup requires varies as you scale. This problem only becomes trickier if you choose to not take up VC funding and instead bootstrap your way to growth. Because this means putting your own money into the business and being extremely smart and judicious about it. Also, you don’t have a separate HR executive helping you in the hiring process – you are the HR department!”
3) Why Determining “Culture Fit” Is So Important in the Hiring Process
By: Dia Vavruska | Source: Impact
“Hiring a new employee means so much more than adding headcount to your next company meeting. Especially for small to mid-sized companies, every hire you make can impact the dynamic of your organization and individual teams — for better or for worse.
So, what makes a great hire? And, how do you identify them in the hiring process?
Is it based on their academic credentials, professional experiences and references, and technical skillset? Those certainly offer a great starting point.
However, checking the boxes on those items won’t help you uncover the intangibles that make for an exceptional employee — that “it” factor and cultural fit that will excite and inspire your team, and drive your organization forward.”
4) 9 Proven Ways to Improve Candidate Experience
By: Sam Holzman | Source: Zoominfo
“Think back to the last time you applied and interviewed for jobs. What was that experience like for you? If you’re like most of us, your job search wasn’t easy sailing and you may have even walked away holding a grudge or two.
These resentful feelings, which most of us experience at some point in our professional lives, stem from a negative candidate experience. Before the time of online job boards and company review websites, a negative candidate experience was far less harmful to a company’s reputation as an employer. But today, it’s the employers, not the candidates, who suffer most when their candidate experience is lacking.”
5) Success Is Calling: 5 Phone Interview Tips to Reveal Top Candidates
By: Micah Gebreyes | Source: Greenhouse
“Having a sea of qualified applicants can feel like both a blessing and a curse. You’re excited to hire, but you also want to ensure you’re making the right hire. Thankfully, following these five phone interview tips can help you narrow down your pool before bringing candidates in for on-site interviews.
It’s no secret that we love structured hiring at Greenhouse (and talking about it), so we won’t do a full deep dive here. But it’s important to understand where and why the initial phone interview comes into play in the structured hiring process.”
6) Hiring for Ops? The 5 Job Descriptions You Need
By: Meg Prater | Source: Hubspot
“Your team is working harder than ever to differentiate your product or service and close new business. In fact, HubSpot research shows 72% of companies with less than 50 new opps were unable to meet their goals. That number shrank to just 4% with companies earning 101 or more opportunities each month.
Reps need to prospect, sell, and close — and that doesn’t always leave a lot of time for administrative or big-picture work. Enter, the operations manager.”
7) Top 10 Podcasts for Hiring Managers
By: James Meincke | Source: CloserIQ
“Podcasts – Apple led the charge a number of years ago in making user-generated audio more available. Since then they’ve only gotten more popular. In fact, in a 2018 survey, over 25% of people reported listening to a podcast the previous month.
This American Life, Serial, and WTF are just a few of the blockbusters that have led the way – but while those tend to be more entertaining than educational, podcasts are more than just a fun way to pass the time. In other words, podcasts are great for both personal and professional development, too – and you can sneak in some extra learning just about anywhere.”
8) Wondering what to look for in a resume? Not these 5 things
By: Nikoletta Bika | Source: Workable
“Duped investors are the obvious victims of the corporate scam allegedly devised by Theranos CEO, Elizabeth Holmes – a story now told in a new HBO documentary – but they’re not the only ones. While investors spent millions of dollars on claims of revolutionized blood-testing technology, Theranos employees were being unknowingly stigmatized by association with the scandal.
This was recently reported in news media: ex-employees are running into obstacles in their job hunt. Many companies are disqualifying these candidates due to their closeness to Holmes’ alleged deceptions.”
9) Our 6 Must Reads for Hiring Tactics that Break the Mold
Source: First Round Review
“The beginning of every year unleashes a frenetic rush of activity, from wrapping up performance reviews to finalizing budgets to starting on those plans for the quarters to come. Thankfully, the somewhat painful process of wrangling these inputs is worth the effort, as promotions, increased headcount and team building mandates are often just visible on the edge of the horizon.
But while many startup leaders are kickstarting these first few months with a refreshed focus on hiring, that tank full of shiny new year energy and enthusiasm often quickly runs out of gas.”
10) 35 Interview Questions To Hire The Best
By: Chris Orlob | Source: Gong
“You may want to bookmark this page for future interviews. Making a great hire comes down to the interview questions you ask your potential reps. And so many leaders get them wrong.
They stick with generic, run-of-the-mill questions such as “Why should I hire you?”
Or they ask “creative questions” they’ve heard some tech company uses (cough…Google…cough):
“If you were the size of a nickel and trapped in a blender, how would you get out?”
These interview questions are useless in qualifying a candidate’s potential.”
11) The 7 Do’s and Don’t of Reference Checks
By: Alex Adamson | Source: Bowery Capital
“I love reference checks. There’s a line you won’t hear very often, but it’s true. References are my favorite part of an interview process. It’s the social proof to back up what you’ve (hopefully) been able to learn throughout the interview process for a candidate. There are plenty of great reference question templates out there, but we believe that reference checks need to be more than a checkbox during the interview process, so we’ve outlined a few of our favorite Do’s and Don’ts of reference checks below.”
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