💛 Make your hiring process “plug & play”

Hello and Happy Thursday!

I love talking to People Ops professionals about that one subject they get really excited about - their “soap box topic” so to speak. So, when I heard my friend Sophia O’Rourke talking about her journey to create a simplified hiring process, I knew that I had to hear the whole story, and share it with you!

Sophia is currently the Director of People & Culture at Newstory and loves building initiatives and processes from the ground up. She also fully understands that hiring processes can vary widely depending on the size of your organization, the size of your HR/People team, budget, and a million other factors. There’s no one-size-fits-all and every company will do things a little differently based on their needs.

That’s why Sophia and I got on the mic to talk about creating a hiring process that works for YOUR organization. We discuss an experience she had optimizing her team's tech stack that - as most things do - turned into a larger conversation around their hiring process. Our full conversation is available now wherever you listen to podcasts and we’re sharing a write-up of the main takeaways here in the newsletter.

If “streamline our hiring process” is on your 2025 goals list, this one’s for you!

Yours in simplification,

Jill

❤️

As with many big projects, Sophia’s journey began with a simple question: “Are we making best use of our tech stack?” After doing some research and deciding to switch applicant tracking systems to Ashby, she began the process of migrating her company’s processes and documentation. But during the process, she realized that the current hiring processes were disjointed, not well documented, and making hiring managers groan. She decided to use this as an opportunity to clean things up and start fresh in the new system.

Sophia thoroughly understands how tough hiring is for small businesses. With such a small team it’s difficult to find the time needed to do hiring the “right” way. Her guiding question for this project was, "How can we make this important process easier to manage when it’s one of many other priorities?” She knew that if she and her team could improve the experience for her hiring managers, that would trickle down and improve things for candidates as well.

Getting Started: Get Manager Feedback

Sophia started the project by having some informal conversations with hiring managers and sending them a short survey to gauge how they felt about the existing hiring process, being thoughtful about what questions to ask. She knew that if she asked an open-ended question about what they wanted to change, she’d get very specific answers that might not get to the root of the issue. For example, someone might say they need better interview questions but the real issue is they don’t feel confident in determining if someone is qualified for the role. AI was helpful in crafting questions that got the kind of answers she was looking for.

After reviewing hiring managers’ feedback, Sophia identified the main issue: Each time a new role opened up, there was a lot of prep work that had to be done before the job listing could even be published. She knew that her team needed to create an easier way to tackle the administrative parts of the hiring process so job listings could be published more quickly, and so hiring managers could focus on showing up to the interviews and making a hiring decision.

Automate, Templatize, or Eliminate

This became Sophia’s mantra as she led the effort to simplify her company’s hiring process and we think it's a great example to follow. If the issue you're encountering can't be automated, or turned into a template, it should be eliminated. There's simply not enough time in the day for repetitive, non-scalable tasks.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Which parts of the hiring process are used in every hiring experience? One obvious answer is job descriptions. Sophia knew that AI could be really helpful in generating some templates she could easily rework to make it more of a fill-in-the-blank process for hiring managers, rather than having to start from scratch. (P.S. Sophia’s Job Description Template is linked below!)

• Which parts of the process do hiring managers enjoy, or are they really good at? Things like asking great questions, hearing the subtext of what someone is saying/not saying, and making people feel welcome cannot be replaced by AI. She wanted her team to be able to focus on those functions and automate the rest.

• How can we automate with care? Sophia spent a lot of time typing out the same messages to hiring candidates, and knew they could be templatized, but didn’t want her communications to come off as cold and robotic. For these types of roadblocks, she wrote templates that did 90% of the work so she could tweak it to fit each situation and need.

• Where are the bottlenecks? This is a big one for a lot of People Ops leaders. In Sophia's case, all hiring efforts went through her and she didn't always have the bandwidth to give each role the attention it deserved. She found a way to automate the kick-off meeting she had with each hiring manager with a combination of automations from Google forms, Slack messages, and calendar meetings so that her team wasn't waiting for her to keep things moving along.

Wins & Challenges

Sophia started this project with a big fear of failure. She was afraid that if she didn’t get it right, her supervisors and colleagues would lose trust in her. She was also afraid she wouldn’t be able to give everyone exactly what they wanted. (I know most - if not all of us here - can relate 🙋‍♀️).

She realized that that these were her own insecurities and she needed to set them aside and just go for it. If she made a mistake she could own it, learn from it, and keep going. She also knew she would be setting a good example for others in her company about trying new things and continuously working to improve.

Sophia persisted through these challenges and created an end-product that she’s really proud of! She has gotten a tremendous amount of positive feedback about the results of her hiring process overhaul. She has heard from candidates that the hiring process was wonderful. They felt respected and it was clear to them that her team had done a lot of work to ensure a smooth process. Her hiring managers are so grateful for the administrative relief that came with her streamlined process. It really did allow people to focus on what they do best!

Things We're Loving Right Now

Window Swap - See the view out of someone's actual window somewhere in the world. It's especially lovely on cold, wintery days.

This book on the first Women's Bank in Denver - We could give you a whole sales pitch on why you should read Give Her Credit by Grace L. Williams. Instead, we'll leave you with these two lines from the excerpt: "They didn't play by the rules. They changed them and made history."

Rapid Response Template - This is so important that we’re calling it out for a second time in this newsletter. The incredible Kim Minnick put together this great open source template for creating a rapid response plan in the event enforcement officials conduct an unplanned visit. We sincerely hope you never need to use this. And it’s invaluable if you do.