The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Recruiting Teams

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Evaluations

Run more predictive evaluations and reduce hiring mistakes.

Making the right decision when it comes to hiring is essential, but not always easy. Coda transforms how you make the final hiring decision, making it more more systematic in helping teams arrive at decisions more quickly and confidently. Approaches such as designing and following a very thorough hiring rubric, to stack-ranking candidates and scoring against key criteria ensures that teams can make collective decisions without the usual concerns of group-think or biases, resulting in a more balanced and informed hiring process. Here are four key approaches that can help ensure you make the right hires:

1. Set and maintain a high bar for hiring.

A notable pattern among the world's most iconic companies—including

Google⁠

, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Disney, and Procter & Gamble—is their extreme diligence when it comes to hiring.

If your company emphasizes doing this well, the benefits will compound over time. It leads to better business outcomes, and makes it dramatically easier to hire other amazing people; great people want to work with other great people. If you cut corners, it’s challenging to recover, and the tax on the business from managing performance cases and working through poor hiring outcomes is steep.

Laszlo Bock, author of

Work Rules⁠

, was a Senior Vice President of People at Google during a period of tremendous growth. He worked hard to maintain a “Do not compromise” philosophy at Google when it came to hiring. “Before you start recruiting, decide what attributes you want and define as a group what great looks like”, he says. “A good rule of thumb is to hire only people who are better than you."

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2. Set the right foundation for effective interviewing.

Structured interview methods can help ensure meaningful engagements with candidates. Setting a strong foundation with a comprehensive role kick off is critical for executional speed and success. During your kick off, build a thoughtful rubric that covers the skills, traits, qualifications, objectives, and responsibilities of the role. Define the interview questions and a script outline to follow. Have a clear scorecard for areas you’re measuring for, and a grading scale.

Our

kick off template⁠

provides structure for everything you need, including intake questions, writing your job description, and defining the interview process and panel.

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Get the template

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3. Drive more predictive evaluations for better quality hires.

structured interview and evaluation process⁠

with repeatable methods makes it easier to evaluate candidates that are applying for the same role. In addition to a solid kick off (as mentioned above) here are some other ways to ensure a consistent process:

Use take-home exercises that simulate role-specific work to get insight into the candidate’s strengths and how they might perform in the role. Understanding where a candidate spikes will help inform how their skill set matches the team’s need.

Always ask yourself: is this part of my interview giving me a predictive signal or not? It’s easy to fall into the trap of asking questions that have poor correlation with actual job performance. One recruiting team I spoke to regularly does retrospective analysis on interview questions, comparing current employees’ performance against the interview ratings that they received on various parts of the loop. When there’s little correlation, it’s a good opportunity to replace that part of your loop with something that can be more predictive.

Reference checks are the

ultimate signal⁠

, if done well. They’re also way to help filter out candidates who interview well, but aren’t actually great hires. Reid Hoffman’s #1 most given—yet most ignored—advice for CEOs is to do more backchannel refs. Some innovative companies are using tools like

Searchlight.ai⁠

to scale provided references. This allows orgs to invest the time that would have gone into this into other activities, such as chasing down backchannel references, or following up with more detail on the references that are provided.

Here are some useful templates to help you get started:

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4. Avoid the pitfalls of group-think and biases.

Hiring teams collect so much data during the interview process, but often fall into the trap of assessing that data sequentially. Meaning, as long as a candidate has made it past the prior steps in the process (resume check, phone screen, etc.) they’ll only evaluate the latest signal (e.g. the onsite loop) to score the candidate.

That means useful insights from earlier in the process can get overlooked, which may have changed the hiring decision.

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Bonus: Think about opportunity cost when hiring.

The impact of getting hiring decisions right isn’t often felt in the short term, but rather, over a period of years. Strong hires, when paired with the right environment and mentorship, can develop and grow tremendously in their careers. When hiring, pay close attention to factors such as raw smarts, technical skills, work ethic, people skills, drive, and motivation. Hire for the now and future of your team.

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Explore the rest of the handbook.

Depending on the needs of your recruiting organization, get started with any of these rituals:

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Recruiting Team Hubs Manage all your recruiting processes from one single source of truth.⁠

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Hiring Manager Hubs Make hiring a collaborative and seamless process.⁠

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Sourcing & Selling Outsell and out-hustle the competition to attract your dream candidates.⁠

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Closing Get more of your best candidates over the finish line.⁠

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Template Library Looking for more? Here's a full list of handy templates by handbook section & use case to get started with today.⁠

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