Stop 6 of 9 · Later
Hiring and onboarding
A scorecard written before the advert, a pipeline with a clock on it, and two weeks of onboarding where the Projects do the teaching.
Hiring is a machine or it is a mood
Nadia has hired reactively for nine years: somebody leaves, the job gets urgent, a post goes up, and the person who interviews well arrives. Two of those hires worked. At eight people, going to twelve, the difference between a machine and a mood is most of the next two years.
The machine has four parts and each one produces a document you keep.
The scorecard
Written and signed off before the advert. Not a list of skills, a list of outcomes with a number and a date against each.
I am hiring an operations coordinator for my eight-person dental-supply company. They will own inbound order intake, returns processing, supplier reorders in the portal, and the weekly stock count. Write a scorecard with two parts. Six outcomes, each with a measure and the month by which it should be true, written so two people would agree whether it was met. Then five competencies, each with the question I ask to test it and what a weak, an acceptable and a strong answer sounds like for this specific job. Do not include any pay information. Do not write a job advert yet.
The pipeline with a clock on it
Four stages, and a number on each: applied, screened, interviewed, offered. What you are watching is time in stage, because every hire Nadia lost, she lost to a company that moved faster.
Here is the applicant tracker export: [paste the tracker export]. For each candidate give the stage, days in that stage, and who owes the next action. Then list anyone who has been in a stage more than five days and what the specific next action is. Then tell me median days from application to first call across all candidates so far. Do not score, rank or comment on any candidate.
Two weeks where the Projects teach
The onboarding plan is not a document about the company, it is a sequence of real questions the new person answers using the Projects from stop 1, checked by the owner of each Project.
| Week one | Week two |
|---|---|
| Shadow Marco, answer twenty real questions from the Operations Project, log every one it could not answer | Run the Monday stock count and one supplier reorder session with the coordinator watching |
| Read every exception logged in the last month and say what they would have done | Own the reconciliation review step with Marco checking |
| Write three instruction lines the Operations Project was missing | Draft the thirty-day check against their own scorecard |
Here is the scorecard and the Operations Project instruction set: [paste both]. Build a ten working day onboarding plan where every day is one or two real tasks from this business, not reading. Every task names who checks it. At least three tasks must produce an improvement to the Operations Project itself. End with the six questions I ask on day 30, taken straight from the scorecard outcomes.
The thirty-day check
Two numbers and one conversation. Which scorecard outcomes are on track, and how many questions escaped to Nadia that a Project should have answered. The second number is about your system, and you fix it before you judge anybody.