The last few months were a hiring frenzy for me. As my company is growing I hired a new COO as well as a new full-time PA. As you all know, hiring is a job in and of itself. It can be tedious. And more importantly, choosing the right people becomes critical – especially in a small business like mine. 

In my attempt to find the right people I wanted to work with I also let go of a few people who weren’t the right choice. It wasn’t easy nor pleasant, which made me commit to myself that I am going to be better at hiring moving forward.

The problem was that, unlike the many product managers and developers that I hired in the past, I was never a COO or a PA myself. I had a general idea of what I’m looking for in a candidate, but I wasn’t able to rely fully on my intuition as I do more easily with product manager interviews. This is especially true given that I tried and it took me in the wrong direction. Add to that the fact that my company is only forming now, and the jobs are not 100% defined, and you understand why it was a complex and super sensitive mission.

I needed a method to hire people whose jobs I’ve never done myself. I needed to add structure and clarity to the process while keeping it effective and not too time-consuming. The good news is that I have succeeded, and I’m happy to share this simple and powerful method with you. In hindsight, it is a great method to use also when your intuition can serve you right. It might not save you time in these cases, but it can definitely make sure you don’t overlook things that are important for you in the person that would eventually join your team.

As a product leader, there’s hardly anything more important than bringing in the right people, so it’s worth the time and effort to make sure you make the right decisions. The beauty of this method is that it will eventually save you time in hiring, too. Here is how it goes.

Step 1: Create the Full List of Skills and Capabilities

Many people are approaching me for help with hiring product leaders and managers. I always ask them what they are looking for. So many times I get a profile: 5+ years of experience, PLG background, etc. While these might be important checkboxes to tick, it doesn’t help you find the right person. You all know that even though your job description says 5+ years of experience if you find a great candidate that only has 3 years you would hire them. So what is it that really matters to you? When you say 5 years of experience, what does that represent for you? You need to clarify that for yourself to fully understand what you are looking for.

Your list should also include the things that you really need from the candidate, in terms of skills and character and not only things that you can see on their LinkedIn profile. For example, one of the things that I am looking for in anyone I’m hiring is a sharp mind. I need people who get it quickly, and who would identify issues without me leading them in that direction.

The list you make needs to be exhaustive. It is an internal list that is not going to be shared as part of the job description or told explicitly to candidates. But it needs to include anything that is important for you. This is key because that’s where the method becomes so powerful. You need to think in advance of the things that you are looking for, not as part of considering any specific candidate which can skew your thinking. Don’t be afraid to include skills or capabilities that you don’t know how to assess in the hiring process. We’ll figure it out later. 

Make sure you include the real qualities that you are looking for, and not just knowledge or specific experience. My list typically includes a sharp mind, communication skills, service-oriented (since the people I hired will be customer-facing), great English (especially written in my case), a sharp eye for detail, thoroughness, and so on. There will be a core that would probably repeat itself in any position you are looking to fill because this essentially represents your company’s culture. 

Once you feel the list is complete – that is, if you have a candidate that answers all of these qualities that’s everything you need, you can move on to the next step.

Step 2: Understand How to Test Each One

Once you have the full list, go through each and every one of the skills and capabilities there and decide how you are going to assess it as part of the interview process. I separated the assessment into questions that I wanted to ask and assignments that I gave. Assignments could be simple simulations during the interview itself, but in some cases, a home assignment was a better option.

Some of the skills are more straightforward to assess than others, of course. For example, if I need great English, I can let the candidate write something and review it. But how do you assess a sharp mind? I actually have an answer for that: it is manifested in how well and quickly the candidate understands your questions and answers exactly what you asked about. My experience in the two positions where I used this method, is that there is always a way to know if you look hard enough. When I needed to test the thoroughness and eye for detail of the PA, for example, I built an assignment that included filling out a complex spreadsheet following detailed written instructions. As you can see, this was one assignment that helped me assess a number of different skills, and that’s of course perfectly fine.

Don’t move on until you have completed the assessment method for each and every skill. If you leave some of them blank, assume that you won’t be able to assess them at all. Would you be willing to hire someone that may or may not tick the checkbox for these skills? If so, maybe you need to remove them altogether. But don’t do that just because they are hard to assess. Be creative and honest with yourself. If they are important, they are important, and you need to figure out a way to properly assess them.

Note that many of these assessment methods are simply specific, short questions. It helps you to break down the interview process into smaller pieces that you can now mix and match as needed.

Step 3: Delegate

This method is built so that every step adds value, and even if you stop after the first step you are already at a much better place. You now know what you are looking for in more detail, and perhaps can trust your intuition in assessing each and every skill. I highly recommend continuing to the second step, of course, since it helps you prepare in advance, makes sure you cover everything in the interview and ensures a process that is less error-prone.

If you stop now, you can make great hires. But having done this work helps you in another dimension, which is the actual time you need to personally spend on the process. Now that the interviews are not generic bulks of “a professional interview” vs. “a character interview”, you can ask others to lend a helping hand more easily. You still have control over the process, since you know exactly what they would be asking and what to look for in the answers. 

If the interviews are conducted remotely, I highly recommend recording them, so that each person in the interview process can see the previous interviews and know what to focus their attention on. In your final interview, you can then address all the gaps that were left open from previous interviews. For example, if you were left with concern about a candidate’s response to a certain question, you know that you need in your own interview to test this point from a different angle.

Since the interview is then highly prescriptive, you can delegate more easily to people who would otherwise not participate at all in the process. Split the questions between everyone who can help. In my case, my husband did the first interviews after a short phone screening that I ran. When the COO joined, she took upon herself the phone screening, then my husband conducted the first professional interview, then the COO conducted a second interview (both were remote and recorded), and in my final face to face interview, I had more character-related questions, as well as any follow-up questions as a result of the candidate’s answers in previous interviews.

In your case, it might help you to include more junior product managers in the hiring process, or guide the recruiter better on the phone screening, etc.

Understanding what you are looking for and breaking it down this way helps you assess each candidate according to what you really need, and makes it easier to see the pros and cons for each more objectively. Even if you need to make compromises in the end because you couldn’t find the perfect candidate, you would know what you can give up on, and more importantly, think about how you can compensate for that. For example, (I would have loved to have a PA who is a native English speaker but couldn’t find any that also qualified for everything else I was looking for. So I lowered the bar on this requirement to “if they use Grammarly they would be perfect” level. This allowed for certain English mistakes to be fine, but others were disqualifying candidates.

This method is really simple and seeing how powerful it is I started advising my customers and CPO Bootcamp participants to use it as well. I believe that had I used it in my previous roles when I hired product managers more intuitively, I would have made fewer hiring mistakes.

The people you work with can make or break your company, so hopefully, this can help you, too, make sure you hire the right ones for you.