How to improve your hiring process

Hiring is one of the highest-leverage decisions you can make, but too many leaders get it wrong. Discussions often focus more on budget than on the person and role, and the process is rushed: review a handful of candidates, pick a passable hire and hope training will turn them into a great one.

This mindset is a mistake.

The gap between a 70th and 90th-percentile hire is game-changing: Google research shows that top talent delivers exponentially higher impact, while recruitment expert Geoff Smart estimates that mis-hires cost companies millions. So the question isn’t whether to invest more time in hiring—it’s whether you can afford not to.

Here’s an introduction to Smart’s hiring framework and a downloadable hiring scorecard tool for making better, more systematic talent decisions.

CADENCE CURATION

Listen: How to Hire Senior Leaders | Dr. Geoff Smart | Podcast interview (45 mins)

Making better hiring decisions isn’t about gut feeling—it’s about objectivity, structure and alignment with strategy. In this interview, Geoff Smart, author of Who: The A Method for Hiring, breaks down a systematic approach to hiring top-performing board members and CEOs. Key advice:

• Avoid the three most common pitfalls in hiring: The best hiring decisions evaluate candidates against clear criteria, not impressions or hypothetical questions. (01:11)
• Ditch intuition, use a hiring scorecard: Define the mission of the role and clear metrics to evaluate performance objectively. (08:44)
• Structure your process: Understand the four interview types and get the right data at each stage. (19:47)
• Nail your top candidate with five simple questions: Use Geoff’s ‘who’ interview framework to evaluate your final candidates objectively. (24:19)

CADENCE TOOLKIT

Tool: The Hiring Scorecard

A hiring scorecard improves your recruitment decisions by replacing bias and guesswork with a clear framework for identifying top-tier talent. It starts with the end in mind—defining what the role is for—to better focus your interviews and decision-making.

Use the Cadence Hiring Scorecard tool to

• Understand how a scorecard works
• Clarify your needs and expectations for a role
• Draft a scorecard to bring more objective, evidence-based evaluation to your hiring process

ANY OTHER BUSINESS

Bonus points for dealing with the right questions up front!