Chapter 52. MBA Mondays: Best Hiring Practices
Hiring is a process and should be treated as such. It is serious business.
The first step is building a hiring roadmap, which should lay out the hiring plan over time by job type. This should be built into your operating plan and budget. You want to be very strategic about how you invest your scarce resources into hiring and think carefully about when you need to add resources.
Once you have done that, you want to have a system for opening up these positions for hire. This should not be done lightly because each position will require a fair bit of work by a bunch of people to hire for. Don’t open up your hiring process lightly.
The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position you are looking for. Most companies call this a job specification (or spec). The spec should outline the role that is being filled and the characteristics of the person who will be successful in the job. Check out this job spec for a brand strategist job in Twitter’s office in NYC. It starts with a high-level description of the role within the context of the larger Twitter organization. Then it gets into what it will take to be successful in the role. Then it lays out specific responsibilities, and finishes with the background and experience that Twitter is looking for in the candidate.
The manager who is directly responsible for the person being hired should draft the job spec, and it should be signed off on by the CEO and whoever ...
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