PeopleMirror Hiring process audit Hiring Process Audit · USD 69
Six hires, six different processes
Job definition, screening, interviews, scoring and candidate communication reviewed across your last six roles.
Nothing here is broken in a way that has hurt you yet. The pattern across six hires is that every manager runs their own process, which is normal at 34 people and becomes a liability somewhere between here and sixty. The point of doing this now is that it is cheap to fix before there are more managers.
No evidence of unfair treatment in the six hires reviewed, and no consistent basis on which you could demonstrate that if it were ever questioned. Interview questions, scoring and rejection handling all varied by manager rather than by role.
Variation
The same company, six ways
| Stages | Written brief | Same questions | Scorecard | All told | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support lead | 3 | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Backend engineer | 4 | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Account manager | 2 | No | No | No | No |
| Designer | 5 | Yes | Partly | No | Yes |
| Ops coordinator | 2 | No | No | No | No |
| Finance analyst | 3 | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
Two hires, both run by the same manager, had no written brief, no consistent questions and no outcome communication. The other four were run reasonably. This is a manager variation problem rather than a company process problem, and it is easier to fix for that reason.
Findings
Five things to change
| # | Finding | Risk it creates | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| F1 | No written scorecard on any of the six. Decisions recorded as messages in a channel | You cannot show why one candidate was chosen over another. This is the finding that matters if a decision is ever challenged | High |
| F2 | Two candidates were never told they were unsuccessful | Reputational, and avoidable. Both had reached a second interview | High |
| F3 | Interview questions vary between candidates for the same role | Comparisons are not like for like, and the variation is undocumented | High |
| F4 | Salary discussed at different stages by different managers | Anchors differ, offers are inconsistent, and candidates talk to each other | Medium |
| F5 | No record of who interviewed whom, or when | Makes any later review impossible to reconstruct | Medium |
| F6 | Job adverts written fresh each time, no template | Requirements drift and inessential criteria creep in | Low |
F1 is the one to fix first. Not because anything has gone wrong, but because a scorecard is the only artefact that makes a hiring decision explicable six months later, and you currently have none.
Fix
One page each, and that is the whole system
At 34 people the failure mode of a process fix is that it is too heavy and nobody uses it. Four one-page artefacts is the right weight, and all four can exist before your HR hire starts in January.
Role brief, one page
What the role does, the four must-haves, the three nice-to-haves, the salary range, who interviews. Agreed before the advert goes out and not changed mid-process.
Scorecard, one page
The four must-haves down the left, a 1 to 4 score and a line of evidence against each. Filled in within an hour of every interview, by every interviewer, separately.
Question set, one page
Two questions per must-have, asked of every candidate for that role. Follow-ups can vary. The core questions do not.
Candidate communication rules
Everyone who has an interview gets an outcome within five working days. Nobody is left unanswered. That is the entire rule.
- This month
Write the four templates
Half a day. Use the support lead hire as the model, because it was the best run of the six.
- Next hire
Use them once, then revise
A template that survives one real hire unchanged is usually a template nobody filled in. Expect to cut a third of it.
- Before January
Brief every hiring manager, together
One hour. The two hires with no brief and no outcome communication were not malice, they were a manager who did not know there was an expectation.
- January
Hand it to the HR hire as a starting point
They will improve it. Arriving to four working templates is a far better first week than arriving to six different processes.
- Within 6 months
Re-audit
Same six questions against the next six hires. The measure is whether the columns in section 01 look the same as each other, not whether they look sophisticated.
For legal review
Questions to put to a qualified adviser
- What hiring records are we required to retain, in what form, and for how long?
- What are our obligations on data protection for unsuccessful candidate information?
- Are there any protected characteristics questions in our current adverts we should remove?
- What adjustments must we offer candidates in an interview process, and how should we ask?
- Are our right to work checks being carried out at the correct stage?
- Does anything in our offer or rejection wording create an obligation we did not intend?