How can you experiment with your hiring process to find the best candidates?

Look at what your current culture is like and see how you want to complement with new hires. You don´t want to get more people with negative cultural traits, find the ones that are aligned with your future vision.

When having a Kick-Off meeting with the Hiring Manager, check what they currently have in the team (e.g. Introvert, Extrovert, Leader, Enabler, etc.) and identify what they are missing and what they need to hire for. This way you ensure diversity within the team which goes well together.

Something that may already happen informally in your organization but could be a more structured experiment is targeted referral seeking. As a leader, when I worked with people who struck me for their professionalism, commitment to personal growth, innovative approaches, or whatever capabilities were important to me, those are the people I asked for referrals when seeking to hire new team members. Birds of a feather and all that... As an experiment, there are improvements that could be made to this approach to discover new paths to hiring success: establishing diversity goals, skills focus vs past job focus, referral rewards vs no rewards, etc.

For Mid-Senior level roles, I would definitely recommend looking at your previous pipelines and working with that data to show the Hiring Manager what has worked and what hasn't. For Entry-level roles do Assessment Days, where you get 20-30 candidates to come to the office or virtually do a round of interviews (the whole process) and at the end of the day you select however many people you want to hire and extend the offer the next day. It's an amazing way to shorten your time-to-hire and save a lot of time for individual interviews on the Hiring Team side.

On top of measuring your results, it's important to set specific goals/KPIs to which you can benchmark future hiring. Let's say that for a certain role last time it took you 50 days to hire someone, the goal for the next round of hiring would be to bring that down to 40-45 days.

Sharing is always important to professional development and goals. Also don't always go to someone in your field for advice, branch out a little bit and approach a different department to see what think of the process or a change. Having an outside opinion can bring positive change.

Don't be afraid to ask stupid questions. It will be difficult to do that for the first few times, but once you get used to people looking at you weirdly it gets easier. The more questions you ask the more knowledge and information you will receive that will help you develop new experiments to try out.

My mantra: Be curious. Experiment but I would pick one or two where you desperately cannot attract or source candidates. Experiments should go at least three months. Give it time to catch with candidates. The best experimentation is in your candidate engagement tactics via email, text, and insert your fave sourcing tool. Key metric to focus on: response rate. Number of candidates who responded to your campaigns (positive or negative) divided by total number of people you reached out to in the same campaign. You can take it a step further by looking at your Positive Response Rate. #of positive responses (interested in speaking)/total number of people you reached out to in the same campaign. Ping me if you have questions.