Why Hiring Great People Should be Your Company's Top Priority

Hiring is one of the most important things a company can do. Many companies say that their people are their greatest asset, but in reality, staff are portable. They come and go. However, this statement does hint at the right conclusion: that hiring great people is the most valuable thing you can do. As a CEO, your success is tied to the strength of the leaders you hire and the results that those leaders deliver is tied to the strength of the teams they build beneath them.

To design your company around the notion that hiring is the most important thing you can do, start from the top. As a CEO, people watch what you do more than what you say. How much time are you making for hiring? Google's founders were involved in every hire, this clearly showed the importance of hiring. And if you knew the founders were involved, then you needed to only send the best candidates up to them.

Creating and continually improving a hiring system is crucial. Google created a standardized system for all hires. The hiring packets were the same for everyone and every attempt was made to remove subjectivity from the content of those packets. Creating space for staff to hire well is also important. If staff are asked to fit in hiring on top of a full workload of other meetings and deliverables, they will feel pressure and either the hiring or their other work will suffer. In the worst case, your best people, the ones you trust to help hire more great people, will leave.

Measuring and iterating on your hiring process is also important. There are many ways to measure and improve your hiring process. Some metrics to consider include: % of candidates by source, % by university, your hiring funnel, time to close great candidates, and % of staff referring.

In conclusion, if you want the best team for your company, then hiring needs as much space and importance as the building and selling of your product. After all, it is the people you hire that will do those things. Nail that and the rest gets easier. As a CEO, it's important to consider questions like: In what ways am I setting (or not setting) the example around the importance of hiring? How much of my time is allocated to hiring? Do I track this? Am I happy with it? Do I explicitly create time in my schedule for hiring or do I just fit it in when I can? Do we have a system for hiring consistently? How can we improve it? Are we good at hiring? What % of our hires are truly great people? Do staff realize that hiring is their top priority? How do we make this their top priority?