Please give us a little background about what you do.

I work at Alphabet, the parent company of Google. I previously was part of a team called Mergers and Acquisitions—Technical Integrations. It focused on a variety of aspects of integrating acquired companies into Alphabet. I've also worked with most of the Alphabet companies on business system implementations, including HR and finance systems.

Could you describe the types of companies you work on at Alphabet?

Not counting Google, they range from companies that have started with just a handful of employees up to medium-sized businesses at the time that they became independent companies. They also range from being new to hiring, to having established practices around it. No matter the size, most of them have been in a pretty explosive growth phase.

How do you go about implementing a structured hiring approach within a new organization?

First, a structured approach definitely helps, because it creates consistency. When it's time to analyze data and find insights, you can actually find the data you need. If instead you have an ad hoc approach, where people just jump in and start doing things instead of thinking what should be in place, then it will be very difficult to gain insights. They end up spending their time cleaning up after themselves.

You need stakeholder agreement and systems discipline in order to implement structured hiring. Those companies that I've worked with that know what they want, are disciplined, and tend to have much better results. At first, they invest a lot of time to figure out what their processes should be. But eventually they get to a phase where they can take much deeper looks or insights at data and then make further process improvements in order to get the best talent. They are continuously reflecting on what's working, what's not working, and then fine-tuning things instead of making dramatic changes. The second order of business is to be focused on data and reporting, but the first order is to agree on processes and be disciplined.

How have you handled the recruiting ops function, where someone is thinking about what processes and systems to use, how to train people, and so on?

When companies are in early stages, they don't have a full-time recruiting ops person but it's typically someone on the recruiting team that fulfills the function. It's a critical function because in teams where there isn't someone like that, the wheels start falling off very quickly and it becomes a mess.

What are some of the recurring pain points that you've found in companies you've worked with?

One is that people tend to overthink some of the decisions in the hiring process. Some companies tend to have many more stages than they should, in order to arrive at a decision. That's a sign of decision paralysis. It often shows up when you have too many interviews. The solution is to make sure people specifically identify the areas that they should assess in a candidate. This makes the process more focused so that the candidate is assessed on the things that matter the most.

Another typical issue I've seen is not only having too many interviews and stages, which end up taking more time, but also introducing too many gates into the process. For example having a hiring committee stage in addition to individual decision makers. It's better to rethink the whole talent acquisition (TA) process and focus on the things that matter the most. That not only provides a much better experience for the candidate, but it gets to a faster conclusion about who is the best candidate. Otherwise, if you don't have a thought-out plan and don't know what good looks like, you just keep interviewing.

What are some of the ways you refine the hiring process over time at your companies?

A couple of things come to mind. First, after you've spent time defining what the processes should be, you need to have something that lets you know when things aren't conforming to the processes and rules that you defined. Sometimes, it takes a couple of dashboards that show you the exceptions. Then people can go and train those who didn't know what to do, or just didn't do it. It's really important that data hygiene is carried on over time. People tend to forget, or aren't as disciplined as they need to be. That's where the training comes in.

Second, something that's very useful is to look at who are good interviewers and good hires. In other words, when someone is hired and is successful, how did they do in the interview process? Who were their interviewers? Who were their hiring managers? Try to identify the patterns of what is working and not working. It takes a little bit of diligence to close that feedback loop, but it's worth it. You cannot think of recruiting or talent acquisition as a separate function that's only up front in the funnel. It's something that has to be part of the whole people landscape. You have to look at it holistically, from the perspective of the entire time that someone works for a company, and not just during the recruiting phase.