As an engineering leader in a growing company, you will likely spend a significant amount of your time hiring engineers: finding them, assessing, and getting them to join your company. In fact, the more senior your role, the more critical hiring, and hiring right, becomes.

What’s the objective? It may seem obvious – to hire the best people, often fast. But I think a better articulation is to hire the right people (a) for the company, (b) for the team, and (c) for their job, in that order. The reason I cascade these is that in a startup, the jobs and even the teams change often, and most startups shouldn’t be losing the talent they invested so much in just because they had change the org structure. And as for the key word in the objective statement, part of hiring right is to ensure a mutual fit. The hiring process is a small window through which both the candidate and the company try to figure out if that fit exists. As part of this discovery, it is critical that the candidate experience is great – to establish a good rapport, maximizing the mutual exposure and lowering the guard or the formalities, and to (hopefully) show a good proxy for the experience the candidate will have once hired.

Most teams adopt an operations-centric view of the hiring process: they shape their hiring so that it can be operationalized, gathering metrics and improving the process aligned with their functional boundaries. For example, they look at the distribution of ratings that each interviewer gave, or assess the recruiting team based on the conversions across the stages of the pipeline. Process improvement happens within the functions (engineers get better at interviewing, recruiters get better at sourcing) at the expense of cross-functional areas. Often, in the process the candidates themselves become statistics, part of a pipeline to be optimized.

It helps drive the numbers but it comes with one large downside: it sacrifices the candidate experience and the focus on mutual fit. This may be fine for companies that are later stage (more is known about them, they can offer better compensation and benefits which is an important part of candidates’ calculus, and they are larger so there is a higher chance of getting to a good team and job fit), but for earlier stage companies – especially those who can’t compete with the established companies on cash compensation (often also equity compensation) – this downside is too much to bear; they simply need to invest in the candidate experience.

A hugely useful technique instrumental in ensuring a great experience can be borrowed from product management, and that is the development of personas and the candidate journey. I’ve been encouraging teams who understand the need to create an excellent candidate experience to apply this technique to hiring.

• A persona is a detailed profile of a typical (but not average) candidate. No two candidates are the same so it’s tempting, when designing a hiring process, to think of an “average” person, but doing that eliminates all nuance and variance and creates a model of a candidate that is actually fairly far away from being realistic. Hence, it is much better to have a specific person in mind, even if their traits are not representative of the entire population. If needed, multiple (but not too many) personas can help extend the model to include wildly different types of candidate (for example, a candidate who just graduated college, and a candidate who has spent 8 years working at tech companies in Silicon Valley)
• A journey is a rich description of what happens throughout the entire hiring process, from the point of view of multiple parties, most important of which is the persona (the candidate). It’s not a flowchart or a series of statistics – it is literally a story that goes into detail around how the person is feeling, what context they acquire throughout the process, and where they need to make decisions and how they make them

The technique, in short, is then simply to come up with a “gold standard” journey of the persona and shape the hiring process with this journey as the north star. Most companies never reflect on what the candidate’s experience is, and are thus missing out on an opportunity to create a great experience that builds a strong rapport, gives the company a chance to showcase itself and the team, and allows for the determination of the mutual fit.

There is no prescription for how to come up with a journey. The one requirement is to see things from the point of view of the candidate, which requires deep empathy and perspective-taking. The journey will, of course, be specific to one person – don’t be afraid to take advantage of the specific knowledge you have (invented) about the persona. Don’t try to overly “productize” the journey, trying to make it applicable to a broad range of candidates. Focus on this one persona, make your goal making the experience great for that one specific candidate.

Over time, I’ve found the following guiding questions helpful in persona and journey development.

Persona

• What’s their age and gender?
• Where did they grow up? Are they born in the U.S.?
• Where did they go to school and why?
• What was their most recent job? Why did they go there? Why did they leave (or why are they thinking of leaving)?
• Who do they trust in their lives who they may be looking to when deciding where to work?
• What are their superpowers? What are their weaknesses? Are they insecure about anything?
• What is important to them in their next adventure? (Do they know or are they confused?) What are their deal-breakers and constraints?

Journey

• How did they first hear or learn about our company (maybe long before they decided to apply)?
• What were the circumstances around which they decided to explore working at our company (maybe not specifically apply yet)
• How much did they know about the company when they made that decision?
• Who in the company did they first talk to? How did the conversation make them feel afterwards?
• What other companies are they looking at and why? What stages are they are with these other companies?
• How much research have they done before the first meeting, and after? What did they find out?
• How did our company fare against their criteria at this point, and what was their synthesis? (e.g. the company fails criterion X, but I’m excited about Y so I’m okay overlooking X)
• How did they decide to move forward with the next stage?
• Was the candidate clear about the process coming up?
• How did they prepare?
• For each person they interviewed with, what did they know about the upcoming interview, how did the interview go, what did they learn, and how did they feel? What did they think of the interviewer?
• How top of mind was our company to them throughout the process?
• How did they find out that they got the offer? Was it a soft announcement? A formal one? What information did they get?
• What was their decision-making process? Who did they talk to?
• What did our company do throughout the process? Who reached out and what did they say?
• What sealed the deal for them?
• Once they accepted the offer, what did the company do – immediately after, and right up until they started?
• What was their first day like?

Journeys (and personas) can get pretty detailed. If this is your first time doing it, you may want to start with a shorter timeframe – but keep the level of detail high (i.e. don’t just “summarize” the journey, again, because that removes a lot of the nuance and specificity that is important when desigining a good hiring process).

One tool I use when mapping some of the long-running aspects of the journey (e.g. how the candidate feels, how how likely they are to join the company) is a graph that shows the strength of the feeling over time, from the very beginning until the new hire starts. It helps quickly identify “peaks” and “troughs” that may be helpful when deciding how to design the process. Maybe there is a part of the process that you know (qualitatively or quantiatively) is particularly painful or frustrating to the candidate – it’s okay to start with places that you’ve received direct feedback from candidates on. Here, too, it’s important to take the candidate-centric view; you may be tempted to look at just the end of the process where candidates reject your offers, but it’s likely that the root causes have little to do with the specific part of the journey you’re mapping. It’s usually better to start earlier in the process because the later part of the journey hasn’t happened yet so it mostly doesn’t affect the candidate’s experience (barring reputational issues that may be affecting candidates coming in).

Once you’ve mapped the persona and the journey, start identifying themes and opportunities to create pockets of delight or derisk things. Try to find an edge that only your company can provide. The best approach is to do things that don’t scale – right now, they don’t need to. In my experience such an edge could look like the following:

• Speed and nimbleness – startups can move fast and are responsive to what they learn about the candidate, the market, and their own needs
• Access to leaders – the VPE or CEO messaging the candidate directly throughout the process, or being the first person that talks to them
• High touch, personalized, context-rich contact throughout the process – team members who know basic facts about the candidate when they start the interview, CTO who was briefed on what the candidate cares about, mutual connections, etc.
• Flexibility in the process – being responsive to the candidate’s needs. Perhaps they need to take care of their young child and they would benefit from the interview being split over several days. Perhaps one of the meetings can happen after hours

However, always keep in mind that the reason we’re starting with the journey is that these techniques may or may not be additive to the candidate’s experience, and you may want to know when in the journey they are best applied.

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The persona and journey approach can be a helpful technique in shaping the hiring process in a way that’s less focused on just making the operators involved (recruiters, interviewers) more efficient, and more focused on the candidate experience, which helps build trust, rapport and makes a mutual fit more likely. The biggest downside of this approach is the time involved to build the journeys and use them well. Many personas and journeys I’ve built in the past simply didn’t end up being used for their intended purpose. Often, it’s because the personas aren’t specific enough and the journeys aren’t detailed enough. If you spend the time investing in crafting a great journey, the resulting insights and changes that will likely become evident will be well worth the cost.