Your hiring funnel decides how big the team gets by December. When screening fails, the team spends weeks interviewing people who will not pass, and strong candidates take another offer while your process makes up its mind. This post describes the four-stage funnel I design for engineering teams during audits, and the metric package I bring to the CTO every week.
Write the scorecard before you open the role
Define what the person will ship in year one. Laszlo Bock shows in Work Rules! (Crown Business, 2015) that structured interviews, with the same questions for every candidate, predict performance better than free conversations. Before the role goes live, the hiring manager lists three or four must-have skills and what counts as evidence of each. Geoff Smart and Randy Street, in Who (Crown Forum, 2008), call this document a scorecard and expect it to travel to every interview. Without a scorecard, each interviewer grades what they find relevant and the funnel turns into a collection of opinions.
Three conversations and an exercise on your code
30-minute screen, exercise on your product, systems interview, closing conversation. The screen looks at scope and time in role, so evidence replaces keywords from a résumé. The exercise uses a problem from your codebase, with tests the candidate runs on the spot; 90 minutes is enough. The systems interview starts from an architecture decision the team took in recent months, which reveals how the candidate reasons inside your context. Will Larson, in An Elegant Puzzle (Portfolio, 2019), shows that long processes lose strong candidates to competitors who decide in days.
Measure the funnel every week
Time between stages and pass rate per stage. Record the date of each transition and the reason for each rejection. A stage that holds a candidate for more than five working days needs a look. Mass rejection at one specific stage points to a badly written question, not a weak market. These two lines of data say more than any open-roles count, and they go in the report I bring to the CTO.
The offer belongs to the hiring manager
HR organizes schedules and paperwork; the person who decides is the one who will work with the hire. When the team takes part in interviews, onboarding starts before day one and retention goes up. A candidate rejected for a skill nobody on the team can exercise exposes a flaw in the role design, and it corrects the scorecard. Review the document every four hires.
What to bring to the next meeting
Four columns: cycle time per stage, pass rate, candidate source and rejection reason. Close the week by choosing which stage to shorten and which question to rewrite. Fixing the funnel takes an afternoon; a bad hire costs months of salary and context nobody gets back.
