Standardised Hiring Process

Standardising each step of hiring

It’s one thing to know what great talent looks like. It’s another to consistently find, evaluate, and close those people - across teams, time zones, and hiring managers. That’s where process comes in.

Standardising the recruiting process makes hiring for new roles seamless. It enables fast, high-confidence decisions and makes quality repeatable, especially as the volume of open positions increases when your company scales. No matter the role, the hiring process should follow the same key steps with clear owners to ensure consistency and to keep a high talent bar.

1. Kick off with a hiring process document

Before sourcing begins, before any interviews are scheduled, every role should start with a shared, written plan - the hiring process document. This is a templated document that defines the process from sourcing to screening and later interviewing and acts as the main source of truth for recruiters.

The Role Owner is responsible for creating and maintaining the hiring process document, with support from the Recruiter, who ensures it’s complete and shared before sourcing begins.

2. Building the funnel through sourcing

Sourcing is the highest-leverage part of the hiring funnel and sets the tone for quality. Weak sourcing forces your team to over-interview mediocre candidates and burn time on backfills. At scale, it separates fast-moving companies that raise the bar from those that lower it just to fill roles.

We believe that the ability to identify strong profiles and create a solid recruiting pipeline lies in three things:

• Starting with a sourcing sprint - before launching full outreach, run a 1-week sourcing sprint to calibrate requirements and test hypotheses with the hiring manager, covering:

  • 10-15 (real) profiles across 2-3 candidate archetypes

  • a live review with the hiring manager to align on where your filters may be too narrow or too loose and any adjustments to CV criteria or target companies

• Optimizing the way you contact candidates - a structured approach to contacting candidates can help maximize the response rate and save time and should include:

  • outreach templates with pre-defined fields for personalization with A/B tested versions to find the message that works best

  • a 3-touchpoint schedule to follow up with candidates and ensure no one falls through the cracks when the volume of profiles increases

• Using the right tools to super-charge recruiters - LinkedIn Recruiter is a key tool for contacting candidates

3. Screening for the right talent

The screening call is your first real opportunity to assess whether a candidate is likely to succeed in the role and not just whether they’re interested. The recruiter should be evaluating if the candidate's experience matches your hiring scorecard and if their career trajectory aligns with your expectations. A “maybe” at the screen call stage is usually a no. You’re better off screening out and preserving interview quality than hoping something will click later.

4. Standardising interviews

Early on, founders interview all candidates so the talent bar can be kept consistently high. As the company grows, founders need to rely on managers for hiring. This opens up a problem with misalignment of incentives: managers have KPIs (e.g. launching a product), so they are incentivised to hire average talent fast to get the job done instead of keeping a high bar.

Developing and enforcing a standard interview format early on will help you tackle this challenge and ensure consistency in your new hires. To do this, for each interview type, you should develop:

1. an interview playbook - directs interviewers on how to assess candidates with a step-by-step guide that ensures consistency across interviews

2. interview scorecard - defines requirements as a set of true/false statements on observable behaviours to remove subjectivity from candidate evaluation and align with the skill scorecard of the skill tested in the interview; the skills tested should match one-to-one with the skills defined in your talent framework

5. Engaging candidates

Too many hiring processes treat closing as the final step. In reality, closing starts from the first message and continues at every interaction. In competitive markets, great candidates have options. Offers aren’t just about compensation but about trust, clarity, and conviction. This step is about engaging candidates intentionally throughout the process and delivering a high-impact close when the time comes.

To minimise the number of candidates that drop off during the process, recruiters should build seamless communication with the candidate to understand their motivations outside of compensation and prepare for closing in case of a successful process. We recommend two key touchpoints during the process:

1. Pitch call - understanding the candidate’s experience and motivation is key to effectively selling the role to them

2. Pre-closing call - overcome objections before they happen and start building excitement for the candidate

By the time you extend an offer, it should feel like a natural, exciting conclusion, not a surprise. The candidate should already know you want them, understand the role deeply, and feel like this is their next chapter.

6. Reference checks as the final guardrails

By the time you’re ready to extend an offer, you’ve spent hours interviewing the candidate. You’ve seen their performance in structured interviews, heard their narrative in the screen call, and gotten excited about what they could bring to the team. But what you haven’t seen is how they show up every day: under pressure, on bad days, when they disagree, or when no one’s watching.

Checking a candidate’s references isn’t only about verifying the information they provided, but a helpful tool to collect 360-degree feedback from their former colleagues. It is a critical step in the recruiting process and can often lead to the offer being rescinded.

The reference check should be conducted by the same interviewer who ran the bar-raiser interview. This ensures continuity, allows direct comparison with the candidate’s own narrative, and brings sharper judgment to any inconsistencies.

7. Probation period - the last step in hiring

The hiring process doesn't end with the offer acceptance - it ends after probation.

Probation is the period where you confirm if the person can deliver at the expected level, within your company's environment. It's your last step to identifying A-players and to act quickly if there is a mismatch.

A structured probation period should include:

• Goal setting: clear, measurable targets, set within 2 weeks of joining

• Checkpoint reviews: a mid-probation and a final review, to assess performance against targets and give the opportunity to course-correct

• Committee decision: the final decision is taken by a designated committee based on performance and the hiring manager's recommendation

Monitoring the process

Designing a great hiring process is only half the battle. The real challenge is making sure it’s followed and that it continues to deliver the outcomes you care about: speed, quality, and consistency.

As your hiring volume grows, even small breakdowns (e.g. missed feedback, vague scorecards, drift in sourcing quality) compound quickly. To prevent that, you need to monitor the system just like you would any critical business function.

To do that, continuously monitor three core KPIs at the company level:

1. Volume: % achievement of quotas - ensures that the team meets staffing needs and indicates when additional recruiters are required

2. Quality: % of new hires that are fired/quit within the first 6 months - assesses whether you’re hiring the right people

3. Offer dropout: % of offers declined - indicates potential issues in the process such as candidate experience, competitiveness of offer, time to complete the process, employer brand etc.

To gain insights into the specific hiring process for each open role, you should also look at the conversion rates by candidate archetype at each step. These metrics will give you direction on whether you should shift your approach to optimise the recruitment strategy.