Talent Makers

Expert Insights: Jan Fiegel

Jan is Head of Talent at Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet-owned company that's focused on urban innovation. Before joining Sidewalk, Jan built the recruiting function at Oscar Insurance, with hundreds of hires during his tenure. He has recruited for growth companies in Germany and the United Kingdom before coming to NYC in 2014.

What are some of the things that you need to navigate with leaders when you're making the case for structured interviewing?

I often get a chance to talk to CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs, and here's what I say. Good recruiting is not harder than any of the other things you're doing: building a product, cultivating a team, or raising money from investors. It's not harder than that. But it's also not easier.

Another way to put it is this: Recruiting well requires the same rigor as an investor meeting. You would not go to meet an investor without having an objective and an agenda for that conversation, without having distilled your message, or without having researched the folks you will meet.

You would skip none of those things when it comes to most key business activities, but somehow we still operate with this notion that when it comes to evaluating a candidate in an interview, “I know it when I see it” is enough.

It is very clear from decades of research that we're all hardwired not to be objective. To counter that, I think about how to make rigor and intentionality easy. You can do this in the simplest of things—for example, ...