Head-hunt and interview for higher-level roles

1. The constraint and what graduates it

Recruiting is how you find and hire people to work for your company.

Item	At this stage
The constraint	The number and type of roles you need now exceeds your current network. You can no longer ask your friends, and everyone good you already knew is employed
To graduate	Learn to head-hunt at a higher level, for higher-level roles, and add multiple interviews and interviewers who each filter for different skills

Some of what follows comes from the last few stages. What is new is the level of person you are trying to hire.

2. Become the head-hunter

The first move is to become the head-hunter, so outreach matters more than it did. Job ads typically do not deliver the highest-level roles. Think it through: a higher-level role needs more skills and more experience, so a person who has them is rarer to find, and that person probably has a job already, because more people want them. There is less supply and more demand, so they are harder to find.

The best people have jobs. They are not looking for you; you are looking for them. So you have to find a way to get their attention, and you need to start reaching out to people now.

3. What the outreach message does

In one practice here, the messages that have won interviews with really high-quality candidates do these things:

• Introduce yourself, and give them some information about you.
• A lot of times, lower the risk by talking about a track record, or let them know you have a really cool role.
• Always close with a referral ask: by the way, if this does not work for you and you are not interested, do you know somebody who would be?

The referral ask earns its place. In one practice here, two people now on the team were hired this way: someone who was messaged replied that they were not interested right now and really loved where they were, but had a friend who would be perfect for the role, and passed on that friend's details. That friend has worked out in two cases.

4. Where to find higher-level people

The easiest way, especially if the role is a higher-level one, is to ask where higher-level people spend their time. Typically it is on a platform like LinkedIn. There, for example, you can pay for LinkedIn Recruiter, or pay for a second outreach tool there. Both tools have different levels, and both let your message pop up in the inbox of somebody who is not a connection of yours.

So it does not matter whether you have an audience or not, as long as you can craft a message that gets people's attention. LinkedIn also lets you filter by the type of experience, the type of role people have, where they live, and more, which is why it is called a fantastic tool for outreach.

You can still reach out to people in your own network, but by this point you have probably exhausted it, so you more or less have to move to doing this.

5. Split the four-way fit across four interviewers

Next, move to a four-person, four-way fit process. The four kinds of fit remain the same as at the earlier stage: expectations, culture, skill and potential (they run as a short screen followed by one interview on SOP 149 section 9). What changes is that you give more to each interview and add more people to the process.

The reason: people with higher-level skills are also better at bluffing you. A lot of times the skills they have are presentation skills and influence skills, and those are what you have to be able to see past in an interview. So when you are recruiting for higher-level positions, dig in more and have more people in the process.

Segment the four, so that a different person handles each. Often the split looks like this:

Fit	Who runs it
Expectations	A recruiter, as the screen
Culture	One of two other leaders
Skill	The other of those two leaders
Potential	The founder or chief executive

At this point, in the view here, you still want to run a potential fit: making sure this person's career goals align with your goals for the role.

Splitting the fits is how you mitigate more risk in bringing the right people into the business. As the business gets bigger, you want other people's perspective on the candidate too. With anywhere between 20 and 50 people on the team, you have others who know what the team's culture looks like. You also have people who will be working with this person and so have a reason to make sure they have the skills: if they do not, the job is going to be harder. Put people into the process who have a stake in getting a good person.

6. Select, and check references

Selecting is picking the right person. It covers the rate (the compensation you will offer them), what the offer is as a total package, and how you check their references.

While your business has no more than 50 people, be involved in all management selection and do the final interview yourself. That is strong advice here: it is heavily advised that you do the final interview, and heavily suggested that you approve all of these things too.

The reasons offered:

• The offer is more complex. It is a more complex compensation package, with more things you will want to play with, and it will have to be more custom to the person's experience and skill. Building such a package is SOP 160 — Build advanced compensation plans.
• They may hold the leverage. You reached out to them, and a lot of the times they have a little more leverage than you. So be very prudent in how you select, what you present to them, and how you check references.

References. The more prominent a role becomes in the company, the more prominent reference checking becomes. In one practice here, a hire for an individual contributor might have called for only one or two references. For someone at manager or director level (at this stage the one hiring is a leader, with directors and managers), the practice might be to ask for four to five references, and might be to spend 30 to 45 minutes talking to each.

• Ask every reference the same questions, so you have the right data to compare.
• Ask two follow-up questions to every answer, not one. If you ask "would you rehire this person if given the chance" and they say yes, ask "okay why". When they give a reason, ask "okay can you tell me why that's true". Always keep digging.

The thread through all of it: go deeper into each way of judging whether someone fits; lower the risk by having a different person handle each part; get very specific about the selection process and stay involved in it, so the offer you present is customized to the person.

7. Keep the heavier process for higher-level roles

The first of two points to add: this applies to the higher-level roles. It is not that the two-step process from before is replaced and every individual contributor now goes through a four-way fit. For frontline roles, say editors, customer service or sales, you do not need all of this, because it does not make sense. The process of the whole business is not changing. There is a new level of person to attract, and the process to attract them is different.

8. Expect the candidate to negotiate

The second is a cautionary warning about selection. A couple of times, founders have been offended that a candidate wanted to negotiate their pay. At a higher-level role it is far more common. The candidate is not insulting you: it is par for the course, far more standard.

If you are now bringing in directors, maybe even a leader above them, the conversation changes and the tone is different. You are having more conversation with them, because it is a bigger bet financially for both parties. It is far more like dating than a one-off encounter. In one practice here there might be three or four calls discussing compensation with somebody coming into a director or leadership role, to make sure it works on both sides.

If you can't talk about money on the way in, you will not be able to for the whole time they are employed with you. You might as well start with transparency at the front end, because it sets the tone for the entire relationship.

9. Where this sits

• One stage earlier, recruiting meant promoting on purpose and paying for referrals: SOP 152, section 8.
• The two-step screen and interview this page extends, and the case for checking references at all, are on SOP 149 — Prioritize and niche down at five to nine people, section 9.
• Deciding whether to hire a skill in or train someone into it: SOP 44 — Buy or build talent.
• The benefits higher-level candidates expect: SOP 159 — Select and roll out employee benefits.

10. What this page does not decide for you

• The wording of an outreach message. Not established on this page.
• Which of the two leaders takes culture and which takes skill. Not established on this page.
• How long each reference call runs for an individual contributor. This page gives no figure for it.
• What to ask references beyond the rehire question. Not established on this page.

11. What this page does not cover

Writing the job ad is SOP 148 section 8. Employment law is not covered on this page.