Talent Makers

2From Chaos to Confidence: The Hiring Maturity Curve

On the one hand, it's true that when it comes to hiring, organizations are all over the spectrum from ghastly to amazing. On the other hand, that by itself is not a particularly valuable or actionable insight.

What's more useful is first to understand what the spectrum is in the first place, and how to think about the different stages. Then it's helpful to examine four key competencies and how they look and feel across that spectrum.

By the end of this chapter, you'll have a type of identification kit, which you can break out at any time to assess the situation at your organization overall, or in any portion of it.

So what is this spectrum? We call it the Greenhouse Hiring Maturity Curve, and it looks like what you see in Figure 2.1. It's the result of observing the stages of the many thousands of organizations we've worked with.

The easy part is showing the curve. The harder part is explaining the nuances. To start, we have four stages:

Stage 1: Chaotic. Call it the Wild West, or a free-for-all, it's where hiring painfully gets done when circumstances force the issue.

Figure 2.1 The Hiring Maturity Curve.

Stage 2: Inconsistent. There may be bright spots where hiring is working, but it's the exception rather than the rule.

Stage 3: Systematic. This is where organizations have their act together—where the machine can ...