This document describes a lean hiring process to improve the quality of engineering hires while reducing costs. It involves iteratively ranking resumes, administering a technical quiz to top candidates, collecting feedback, and adjusting the process. Each iteration improves the suitability scoring and increases hiring manager satisfaction. By treating the process as a series of smaller batches with frequent feedback, the approach aims to hire better candidates faster and with higher precision than traditional hiring methods.

1. Lean Hiring
Faster & cheaper way to hire better quality engineering talent!
Vinayak Joglekar
@vinayakj
www.synerzip.com
vinayak@synerzip.com
February 2019

2. Technical interviews & Interviewers
Technical Interviews. Interviewer
Technical Interviews became the bottleneck. Hiring managers were tired of too
many interviews to find only a few suitable candidates in the end. It became hard to
find time slots on their calendars

3. Quantity often undermines quality
More applicants were pushed
in the pipeline to compensate
for the low success rate.
Challenge: This resulted in
interviewer fatigue

4. Interviewer fatigue=bad hiring
Bad HiresInterviewer fatigue

5. Resume Ranking
Resumes scored based on the
job requirements
Challenge: How to parse
dozens of resumes to get the
information
Challenge: Candidates could
hype up their resumes to get
better ranking

6. Tracker
Tracker shows candiates ranked based Suitability
score = Weighted sum of suitability on various
counts like education, experience, technology skills
etc.

7. Tall claims are often hollow
Candidates write long, verbose
and hyped up resumes
frustrating the hiring managers
who eventually discover that
candidates don't measure up to
what their profiles say.

8. Technical quiz game
We gamified the technical quiz
Challenge: Candidates would
try googling answers or consult
their friends.

9. Framework for feedback
Challenge: After all the scoring and technical
assessment, the top scoreres wouldn’t be picked up
by the hiring managers. Sometimes they would
prefer lower ranked candidates, other times they
rejected all the candidates.
In such cases recruiters could ask why?
And it always resulted in learning that either
the weightages used in the tracker didn’t
correctly reflect the requirement or the
questions asked in the technical quiz
weren’t tough enough

10. Iterate, adjust and improve
Each iteration led to better suitability scores and we saw that the satisfaction level of hiring
managers went up with each iteration

11. Summary of the solution
Each iteration started with
ranking resumes in a tracker
and then admknistering the
technical quiz to identify the
toppers.

12. TA by empathy vs employer branding
• Value that your employer branding efforts can
add is limited
• Candidates expect to be treated empathetically
by being more transparent in the hiring
process.
• Respect every one’s time by having a clear and
accurate Job Description
• Give candid and constructive feedback. Treat
the job interview as a learning process.

13. Stock answers are worse than no feedback

14. Job Descriptions were hyped up

15. Lack of feedback=bad candidate experience

16. Q & A
vinayak@synerzip.com
Twitter: @vinayakj
www.synerzip.com
February 2018

17. A day in the life of an IT recruiter
• Many IT recruiters treat
their job as a temporary
one
• Recruiters spent a lot of
time on screening
resumes and following up
with candidates. They
were judged on the
number of interviews
scheduled which resulted
in valuable time of senior
developers and architects
getting spent on
evaluating candidates of
doubtfiul suitability.

18. Four steps –Theory of Constraints
The situation
resembled
inventory pile up
in front of the
bottleneck as
described by
Eliyahu Goldratt
in "The Goal".
We decided to
apply the "Lean
Hiring" process
Credit: Kershaw, R. 2000. Using TOC to ‘cure’ healthcare problems. Management
Accounting Quarterly(Spring): 22-28.

19. Smaller batches = higher precision
Smaller batches=More frequent feedback= higher precision
Challenge:Many a times
the requirments were
umrealistic.
It made perfect sense
to lower the bar at the
end of first iteration than
spending all the time
looking for a unicorn

20. Save time,money yet improve quality
Conclusion: when we used
ranking it saved some time
of the hiring managers –
but with the introcution of
technical quiz it was
almost certain that each
interview was worth the
interviewers time. By
spending a little more time
of recruiters ($10/hr) , we
could save a lot of time of
the archtects and senior
developers ($40/hr). Cost
saving was much more
than the time saved. All
this resulted in better
quality hiring -> the proof
was joiners/ offers ratio
dropped dramatically.