Four words are at the heart of everything we discuss in this book. Two of those words—Talent Makers—are the subject of Chapter 9. The other two words are Structured Hiring. These simple ideas, when implemented consistently, can transform your organization. Although this chapter is short, it introduces the concept of structured hiring, which permeates the rest of this book.

When leaders have a financial problem, they know it. Their bank balance is low. When an organization has a customer problem, they know it—customers shout at them and leave for the competition.

But when organizations have a hiring problem, often the symptoms are misplaced and the leaders misdiagnose it. They don't really have a vision of what could be better; they just think it's always been bad and that it's unlikely to change.

The first problem is that they look at HR as a back-office function—a cost center. As we saw in the last chapter, if HR does not speak the language of known costs and known returns, then it will be easily marginalized.

We have a situation where the businesspeople misdiagnose hiring issues as “Why can't HR get its act together?” instead of the true diagnosis: “We used to think our job was making [bolts, software, policy papers, whatever]. But our first job is to become excellent at hiring people.” That's the surest route to delivering those outputs.

The misdiagnosis continues: HR catches heat and then thinks the solution to its people problems could be a better ATS, as we discussed earlier: “If only my Applicant Tracking System (ATS) had a robust reporting engine, I could get my CEO that report that shows every single interview that was conducted this week—that's what we need.” Or “If only an ATS had more buttons so the head of engineering could review 100 résumés for one position, then the problem would be solved.”

What we found again and again is that organizations came to us with what they thought were ATS problems, and soon they realized that they instead had business problems.

Take diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I), for example. Some people come to us and say, “We have a problem with diversity hiring. We're looking for more female engineers. What can your ATS do to help us with this top-of-funnel issue?”

When we hear this, often what we'll find after further discussion is that the company may have a top-of-funnel issue, but definitely does have a candidate experience issue, as well as a problem with poor decision-making. The kind of candidates they want to hire are most likely getting sidelined in the loose, semi-process they're using that allows too much flaky decision-making. They often have an operational issue as well, because they don't have the data to know what is going on throughout the hiring process. They just know that they're not meeting their objectives.

The Master Plan

The first step to becoming world-class at hiring is what you're doing at this very moment—reading this book. The second step sounds so obvious:

• Have a plan and follow it.

Everybody knows that, right? Common sense, right? Then why were we seeing company after company with no plan?

Somebody needs a job filled, so the job description gets posted on a website. After a while, people apply and then you start to do interviews. After the interviews, people discuss the candidates one by one: “I just met Rajesh. He seemed really good. What should we do next?” Someone says, “Let's interview him again.” Meanwhile, your colleague interviewed Rachel and asked very different questions of her than were asked of Rajesh.

If you ask someone who's involved in this hire, “Where are we with filling this role? What's the next step?” the answer most likely will be “I don't know.”

This halting, unstructured approach would have been laughable back in 1908 when the Model T was being assembled. No one would say, “So what do we do next? Maybe we should pick up some bolts and see where they fit?”

Therefore, when organizations come to us with what they think are ATS problems, our first order of business is to convince them that they need something that was a known concept more than a century ago: a prearranged plan. And it has to be written down to the real details of what their hiring process is. Then you follow that plan.