Maia Josebachvili has had a long career around great winning teams. She's worked at a number of companies, started her own company, joined Greenhouse and was instrumental there, and was Head of People at Stripe.

What is it that a great leader does that others don't do?

I've been fortunate in my career to work with some exceptional leaders. Though their working styles vary, there is a common thread I've observed in all—they have the consummate “tell me how I can help” attitude.

We had a great new leader join the company and in his first week he emailed me and our head of recruiting and asked simply, “What can I do?” He attended our recruiting all hands in his first month, introduced himself, and said, “I'm here to help. We're going to build this amazing team together.”

Another woman came in and right off the bat wanted to know the history of the recruiting process. “What's a sacred cow that I should be aware of? Where's the room to innovate?” She clearly wanted to partner with us on the recruiting process and build the best team together.

Those are just two examples out of many. I've found that the best leaders see themselves and recruiting as true partners.

Let's say you've been in recruiting a long time but you're new to your company and the leader is not fully onboard with these concepts of great hiring. How do you effect change upward to the leader?

Evidence-based approaches often work best in these cases. If you look at the strongest teams in an organization—the ones that consistently outperform expectations and navigate a changing landscape—they often have a strong hiring culture in common. This kind of culture is set from the top, with a leader that prioritizes great hiring. As an example, I worked with a great C-level exec who described hiring as always one of his top three priorities. Though he had a team of 100-plus, he was always available to help. He'd say, “Whether you're hiring a director or an entry-level role, if I can help get on a call and close the candidate, I'll do it.” And he always did. Not surprisingly, he had one of the strongest teams in the company. So, if you have a leader who isn't quite on board yet, I'd suggest finding examples of what “great” looks like and showing them the difference that a strong hiring culture can make on the overall performance of the team.

Let's say you come into a company and there is an inconsistent level of hiring maturity. What would be the first thing you put into place to get them higher on the curve?

It's important to start with the CEO. It all flows from there. If hiring is not a regular topic at leadership team meetings, it's hard to picture how the whole organization will evolve their hiring maturity. Getting higher on the curve often requires some cultural evolution: You're evolving your articulation of what is most important and where people should be spending their time.

One tactical and visible manifestation of this is the company all-hands meeting. I'd want to make sure the CEO and senior leadership team are talking about how we're doing with hiring: celebrating successes, reinforcing behaviors, and sharing areas of concern that they'd like to see improve. This could take a few forms—for example, talking about the new hires that we're very excited about and giving a little summary of the work it took to find them. I've found it inspiring to hear from leaders that they didn't want to settle and kept interviewing, even after the 50th one, because finding the right fit was that critical.

It's also important to insist on accountability at the leadership and management level. Recruiting and People teams are here to enable great hiring, but ultimately it's on each manager and leader to ensure they're improving their hiring maturity and building the best team. One great way to do this is to include a hiring goal in each team's goals at the time they are set. Then, just like you would review sales performance at the end of the quarter, you also look at how the team did against their overall hiring target and key roles for the quarter.

What are your tips for instilling a strong People culture on your teams?

Be explicit about the importance of hiring and people, and then reinforce that consistently through your behaviors, what you recognize, and where you spend your time.

Early on, I was running an area and my manager asked me, “Who are the rising stars on your team who should be on my radar?” I thought that was a great question, and I started to ask it of my direct reports. Then every other month or so, I'd hold a casual coffee roundtable with the folks who were identified. I was explicit in its purpose: “I've heard you've been having a ton of impact. First, thank you! I wanted to make sure you knew that I and your manager saw that. And second, I want to hear from you. You have a great perspective into the org that I don't have and I'd love your advice about what else we should be doing.” These meetings were some of my favorites and I always walked away more energized and with better insight into how we could continue to improve our function.

This example is more about demonstrating the importance of people once they're on your team, but the same goes for hiring. I make it a point to publicly recognize leaders for making great hires and make sure the team knows how critical I think it is for our ability to have an impact.

Can you talk a little bit about leaders you've worked with who themselves were great at working with candidates or getting personally involved in the hiring process on their teams?

One key practice they have is in communicating personally with candidates. We all know that the best candidates are inundated with in-mails, and recruiter emails can easily slip through the cracks. If a recruiter is having a hard time getting a top-tier candidate on the phone, I've found that an email from the leader directly can often tip that candidate over the edge.

It's a similar dynamic when it comes to landing competitive candidates. The best people often have multiple competing offers, and a company's closing approach can be the decision-maker. A call with a senior leader who is a couple of rungs up the reporting chain can go a long way to making a candidate feel valued and excited about the opportunity.

You have an unusual perspective on reference checks. Could you please describe it?

This is an underutilized but critical part of the interview process. Let me put it this way: if I had to pick between doing interviews or checking references when hiring and I could only do one, I'd lean towards doing the references. This is especially true for senior leaders who are usually strong in the skill of interviewing. I also think leaders are better positioned than recruiters to get the most out of those reference checks. This is not a knock on the recruiters—there's just a different conversation that two CMOs will have, and the long-term relationship and reputation is too valuable for them to not be honest.

If I'm the leader doing the reference check, I first do a bunch of warm-up questions. Then I basically hinge most of it on my last question, which is “Where would you rate this person out of everyone you've ever worked with? Top 50 percent? Top 20 percent?” I never go much higher than the top 15 percent because I don't want to lead them. But if they're not replying with a number around the top five percent, I have pause. Every reference can share strengths and areas of development, but that doesn't give very clear insight into whether they're one of the best. Another question I like is “Let's fast-forward—pretend that I hire this person and it doesn't work out. What's your prediction as to why you think it didn't work out?”