Lessons from choosing the talent to power a Finance and Analytics function in fast-growing tech companies. Part 2 of 2.

This is the second post of two focusing on the hiring of team members in finance and analytic functions. In this section, I want to speak about the process.

How to hire — The hiring process

Obviously, there is no one size fits all when it comes to hiring. Different managers, personalities, and organisational culture will drive different hiring processes.

A few things I learned about the hiring process include:

✅Some people can ‘sell’ themselves very well and some can’t. This skill does not necessarily reflect on their ability to do the job well. Find a way to validate their capabilities (and your biases…).I find that a case study is a good way to do that.

There are different views as to when in the process to include the case study. Too early can be annoying to candidates, and too late means a lot of time will be wasted on candidates that don’t meet the benchmark.

Asking candidates to do the case study prior to the interview can provide tangible discussion points for the interview. Asking questions about it during the interview can help verify they actually did do it (and not someone else…).

Some companies ask candidates to do the case study in the office (when we still used to go to the office 😉) or in a set time over VC. I prefer to trust candidates, at the end of the day if they can’t do the case study, they won’t be able to perform the job and they should know this.

✅Involve more than one type of personality in the hiring process. It will help with biases and increase the likelihood of identifying misalignments. It will also improve the “buy-in” into the specific candidate. Different people ask questions from different perspectives.

✅ Try and meet the candidates a number of times. It can reduce the impact of a ‘bad day’ (theirs or ours). It can help mitigate a situation where there is a ‘lack of chemistry’ with one interviewer, and in general, the more time we spend with people the more we get to know them.

Obviously, for more senior roles you will have more interviews than junior roles, but in both cases, I think the hiring manager should sit in all interviews, even those in which they are not taking the lead role. Sometimes, when we listen and observe from the side, we hear things we don’t hear when we are the ones asking questions.

✅ Given that intellectual horsepower is important to me when hiring, for a long time I felt that psychometric tests were really important. I still think they have a role to play, but probably more as a factor in the decision rather than the only factor.

Things to consider:

• They put candidates that speak English as a second language in a disadvantageous position. Between perfect English and diversity, I prefer diversity.
• They don’t reflect the real world. Usually, we don’t have such extreme time pressure when solving problems, and the world is not made of shapes.😂

✅ References are the final stage. Most times they don’t add much and, if I’m honest, in all my hiring, the only time I received a bad reference on a candidate was through non-official channels. Even then, you need a certain level of trust with the referee to be able to extract it from them. Someone once told me they don’t do ref checks anymore; they go through back channels to find a mutual connection and get a reference this way.

A few words on trusting your gut

Relying on a gut feeling increases the risk that the hiring manager will select someone like them. Our gut feel can often be a mask for our biases and can go against diversity.

However, ignoring it is not always wise. I’ve learned that often the same small niggling doubts that come up during the hiring process, those doubts that we call a ‘gut feeling’, will often materialise and manifest themselves in unwanted behaviors after joining.

In reality, our gut feeling is the way our brain makes fast decisions. The more experienced we are, the more likely it is that this gut feeling is actually based on some real reasons which we can’t easily articulate. My advice is that if after a due process you still have a bad feeling in your gut, don’t ignore it, try to get to the bottom of it. Get the candidate to meet more people, get them to do a personality assessment, or dig deeper into reference checks.