Talent Makers

11Final Thoughts

Great hiring—if done well—is not easy. That's not the promise we make. Great hiring is difficult, and so is software engineering, accounting, sales, and being an excellent executive. It's competitive, dynamic, and just plain hard. But when you're great at hiring, you feel justifiably confident and everyone can see the results. When you're bad at hiring, the effects ripple throughout the company.

As the nature of work has shifted and great talent has more power than ever, hiring has emerged as a reason why some organizations enjoy outsized success. Most organizations haven't figured out how to adapt their hiring approach, and that means the ability to hire great talent at will is very much a competitive advantage.

When is the right time to put into place structured hiring?

It's natural to wonder if the involved techniques we've covered are maybe overkill for very small organizations. In the early Greenhouse days, we attended a conference with a whole bunch of different startup entrepreneurs. Somebody asked, “At what stage of your company should you start to really focus on culture and people practices?” When they asked this of first-time founders, the answer was maybe 50 to 100 employees. When they asked the same question of second- and third-time founders, the answer was day one. They had lived through the pain of doing it wrong, and once was enough. You're never too small to be putting these practices in place, even if they're done semi-manually on spreadsheets ...