I’ve spent much of 2022 in hiring mode: adding designers, researchers, product managers, and leaders to my team and my company. So far this year, I’ve interviewed well over 200 candidates, from those just about to graduate from college for their first entry-level role to highly-experienced leaders for director and Vice President roles.

When I’m the hiring manager, or the executive to whom the hiring manager reports, I do the following to improve the success of my hiring efforts.

First of all, I do most of the outreach to the most interesting candidates personally. Candidates almost always like talking to the actual leader of the team, not a recruiter.

For high-impact roles, I spend a lot of time on sourcing good candidates. I search for potential candidates, and share the results of those searches (both the positive and the negative) with my recruiter so that they can learn what I’m lookin for. I craft personalized messages, and I follow up on the messages that I send.

When I’m not actively hiring, I still spend time in places where the candidates I most want for my roles are the most likely to hang out so that folks know me and are more likely to respond when I am hiring later. Having a good reputation as a leader who is engaged and thoughtful means that candidates who aren’t actively looking are more likely to respond to me.

I make sure that I know what differentiates working for me, my team, and my company different than other companies. I share that with candidates so that they can better understand why they should choose working for me, my team, and my company over their other potential roles. I determine what matters to the candidate I’m speaking to, and talk up the points where working for me is most differentiated on those points from my competition.

I give feedback to high-potential candidates. Candidates often complain that they cannot get feedback during the interview process, so providing meaningful feedback is a further differentiator. As I strongly believe in giving actionable and timely feedback, it’s a way to show candidates how I live my beliefs. Seeing how candidates respond to feedback gives me additional data to use in my hiring decision.

Hiring is one of the most important things that I do as a leader. Getting it right is important to me.

In my previous role, I worked at a rapidly-scaling startup. I joined when the company had ~600 people. When I left in November 2021, the company had merged with another company, acquired a third company, and in total grown to ~2000 people. As a leader in the organization whose role is inherently cross-functional, in the span of 18 months, I interviewed over 500 candidates for roles across the company. That number includes hiring for the establishment and scaling of the research and content design teams.

Through that process, I observed an inverse relationship in the sources of candidates for my hiring funnel. The sources that had the highest quality of candidate had the lowest quantity of candidates, and vice versa.

My stack-ranking of candidate sources based on the quality of candidates is as follows:

1. Candidates who I reach out to directly.
2. Internal referrals from people who are on my team or very closely aligned with my team.
3. Candidates who a well-trained recruiter reaches out to directly.
4. Inbound interest after I have posted my opening to highly-targeted channels. These channels are those that are the most closely aligned with the role and level.
5. Internal referrals from people who are aware of my team but not aware of what makes a good candidate for my team.
6. Candidates who a naive recruiter reaches out to directly.
7. Inbound interest after I have posted my opening to less-targeted channels, such as job boards for historically-excluded groups or for very senior leaders and managers who work in tech.
8. Inbound interest after I have posted my opening to non-targeted channels, such as a LinkedIn post or Twitter post.
9. …
10. …
11. …
12. Direct applicants via LinkedIn or my company’s jobs website.

If I were to stack-rank these sources based on the quantity of candidate, my listing is almost the exact opposite. Direct applicants via LinkedIn and my company’s jobs website far outnumber all of the other sources of candidates combined. When I looked at the funnel for the last person I hired, I had more than 50x as many applicants who applied blindly via LinkedIn and the company’s jobs website than I did from all of the other sources.

You probably noticed that I listed recruiters twice on my list. I’ve never been able to hand a job description over to a recruiter who I haven’t yet worked with and had them be highly successful in identifying the right candidates to reach out to. A recruiter who specializes in research and design roles has a higher success rate, but it still requires time and investment to learn more about me, my team, and what a successful hire for my team looks like. This education helps them when they talk to candidates. They are better able to represent me and my team to the candidate in their early conversations. When I’ve aligned with my recruiter on what great candidates look like, they reach out to fewer candidates, but those candidates are of much higher quality for my open roles.

Analyzing the quality and quantity of candidates in my hiring funnel helped me identify where I should allocate my time when hiring. In doing so, I was better able to optimize my job description to be a better representation of the role and a successful candidate, allocate my time to the activities that were the most likely to result in a high-quality candidate, and reduce the time that I spent on low-value activities.