You can’t “hire perfectly” anyway, so stop having 6 rounds of candidate interviews.

In supporting friends and former colleagues who are job hunting for tech industry roles over the past several months, I’ve heard multiple stories of people enduring 3, 4, and sometimes 6 rounds of interviews.

This misguided attempt at “hiring perfectly” has to stop.

As a friend once told me, “we’re not doing brain surgery” in the professional services technology world (most of us, anyway). Philosophizing aside, this kind of insane interview cycle simply serves to turn off strong candidates and isn’t necessary for weak ones.

Worse, it often hides a number of much bigger underlying problems with agencies:

You’re afraid to fire so you try to protect against that by “hiring perfectly”. Firing a low performer will always cost less than keeping them on. It will always boost your culture. As legendary football coach Nick Saban says, “top performers hate mediocre performers and mediocre performers hate top performers.”

You don’t train or support your front-line management so the front-line, day-to-day folks responsible for nurturing and managing your talent aren’t set up for success, and thus aren’t providing the right level of mentorship and development for their reports.

Fear of rectifying this situation through thoughtful training programs and resources forces you to choose the “easier” option of trying to hire perfectly. “If I can hire the exact right person”, you think, “they won’t need coaching”, and thus you won’t need to confront the challenge of building a strong management culture. It should be obvious that this does a huge disservice to the career development of your managers and individual contributors alike.

Your internal-facing culture is reflecting poorly on your client experience. One dimension to evaluate tech services firms is their cultural focus: are they an internal or external facing culture?

An external/client facing services firm places the client experience at the center of the agency people, process, and delivery. An internal-facing organization is consistently more concerned with their own processes and role in the work. This internal-facing culture reflects in client relationship length and health, and it also reflects in an extended hiring phase. Internal-facing organizations often have an inflated sense of self-worth, and extended interview processes can be a symptom of that.

Instead of trying to hire perfectly, address the fundamental gaps in your firing and management approaches. Those are more challenging and longer-term undertakings but they yield stronger, more sustainable organizations and they don’t push your internal problems outward onto the people you want to bring aboard.

Here are some additional more tactical tips:

• Recognize that hiring is no more quantifiable than what makes people laugh. The people with the biggest successes in hiring still have many, many failed hires under their belts. You will miss some, which is why internal coaching and fast firing is so important.
• Clearly define the attributes of success for the role you’re filling. Make sure your key leaders agree on this, and if they don’t, hash it out.
• Beyond the general attributes, look at the team the candidate will be joining and identify what type of person would enhance the team. Some organizations use personality profiles to do this; others simply step back and evaluate team dynamics. The closer you are to the team dynamics the better you can make these evaluations.
• Release your ego. You can still have a strong internal culture (individual and team drive, client-centricity) by employing levity and without acting like you’re doing brain surgery.