A data driven approach to hiring the best talent

Written by Niamh Joyce

Last month, the Elements Data Guild was lucky enough to hear from Data Scientist Alvin Lim about his career journey, as part of our #communities series. Not only did Alvin share insights about how to build a balanced Data Science team, where he sees the potential for ML to make the most impact and the importance of cross-functional collaboration in successful Data Science, but he brought us the experience of having interviewed, worked, and built teams himself at some of the worlds biggest tech organisations. 

While chatting with Alvin, we asked some questions about what it really takes to set the hiring process apart and make sure that you’re attracting the right people to your team. Here are some of the key takeaways from that conversation.

Making contact

We all know by now the importance of personalising initial communication messages - after all, first impressions count. As Talent Acquisition and sourcing professionals, we’re aware that our target audience is being constantly bombarded with dozens of offers from competing companies (trust us, we’ve seen the inboxes!) and therefore how important it is to stand out. 

But what does standing out actually mean, and who is it useful to? It’s something I’m sure most of us are guilty of - what can I say that’s going to let this person know that I’ve actually read their CV? Opened their portfolio? Read their recommendations? Scrolling through for something we can pick out - hey, I really like that thing you mention you did. Tell me more!

Alvin pointed out to us that this might not be what people actually want. It’s more useful (all around) to be able to honestly answer the question - “why am I contacting you for this position in particular?”. It’s not a drastic change, but it’s enough to let someone know that you’ve put thought into ensuring that, at least as far as you can ensure, this role is something that will be interesting to the person reading your message.

Setting the stage for interview success:

Reaching out in the right way gives us a good start, but it’s important to carry that transparency throughout the process. Interview prep and feedback, according to Alvin, are the things that set a company apart.

“One company really stood out as a wonderful place to interview because of the clarity of communication and the amount of information they gave me before each interview.”  Sometimes interview preparation can be difficult. As hiring managers and/or Talent Acquisition specialists, we know everything there is to know about the interview. It’s likely that many of us could give our candidates the script on how to pass, exactly what will be asked and why, etc. But over-preparation is a problem (not to mention obvious), and often just as problematic as no preparation is. It’s easy to err on the side of caution, sometimes without even realising it, by giving candidates information on what to expect, but not what’s expected of them.

This is, in most cases, not the right thing to do. Companies that interview well ,do it with the mindset that they’re testing for success, not for failures. When you’re hiring, you should be looking for what your candidates can do well, rather than what they can’t do, or what they struggle with. How can you expect to do that when you’re blindsiding your candidates? Discussing this with Alvin (who has been on both sides of the desk) a good yardstick could be - prepare enough that when the interviewee walks out of the room, they should have a feel for whether it went well or not. That means they know not only who is interviewing them, but what they’re assessing. In other words - does this interviewer want to know that I’m capable of (for example) planning to build a website, building a website, or presenting a website to their manager? 

The psychology of interviewing

Alvin’s background as a psychological researcher definitely opened up some extra insights here, when he very helpfully compared running an interview to administering a psychological test.

Interviewing can be intimidating for an interviewer as well. You have a short space of time in which you’re supposed to evaluate a strangers skillset, figure out if they’d make a good colleague, see if they’d be easy to work with, learn what they can contribute to your team...the list goes on. Preparing interviewers is just as important as preparing candidates.

We’ve talked about wanting an interviewee to know what they’re being assessed on. Before we can do that it’s important to establish - does an interviewer know exactly what they’re looking for? It’s not possible to look for everything in 1 hour - if it was, that would be the entire interview process for every open job. If we were shut in a room for 30 minutes with a total stranger and told ‘find out if this person is good’, it’s unlikely that we’d come out with a clear understanding of their capacity to build a house. So it’s important that we support our hiring teams in working out what is possible to assess in that time, and how that should be done. Interviews, therefore, should be carefully constructed in a way that allows the team to methodically assess the key skills with a clear outcome.  An interviewer who is given an hour to find out ‘Can this person effectively explain to you how their skill set would help you to solve x problem’, has a pretty good chance of being able to answer that question. 

Alvin then tied this to his experience of working in psychological research. In this environment, naturally, the job of someone administering a test (like an IQ test) is to measure the person at their best. This is the only way you can build a profile of a person's real strengths and weaknesses, and figure out what they can contribute and what they need support on.  In the context of an interview, seeing someone at their best means a prepared interviewer, as much as it does a prepared interviewee. 

Beyond interviews 

It doesn’t end there - it’s worth noting that (unsurprisingly), all the places Alvin mentioned as standout interview experiences are places he ended up working. Going to the effort to ensure that an interview process is set up the right way for candidates doesn’t only allow someone to perform their best, but it helps them get a view for how their skills suit the position they’re interviewing for. More than ever, interviewing is a two way street. Letting interviewees see that you are invested in getting the best out of them, by creating environment that harbours success, is a great way to improve overall candidate experience and improve the chance of offer acceptance.