HIRING BEST PRACTICES

Our Hiring Process

Let’s talk everyone’s favorite topic: hiring! It’s up there with taxes, payroll, and 1099’s, right? I thought so. Lucky you, we’re packing all the super fun topics into Quarter One!  

But don’t fret dear reader, this is actually a topic we feel we’ve got a pretty good grasp on… at least from a process perspective. So, where do you start? Well, when hiring for a remote company, your candidate “pool” is definitely of the infinity variety.🏊If you’re an in-person business or only hire in specific areas, you can 100% still apply these principles to ease the burden of the task, but it goes without saying that your infinity pool has been downsized to a hot tub.  

Just a heads up – I’m going to share the process that works for us. There are a million different ways to go about this, and if you have any tricks or tips up your sleeve, we’d love to hear them in the comments section below!

So, let’s dive in! - Also, all these swimming references have me wondering… is it pool season yet?👙🕶️🍹

Being the tech forward company we are (after all, one of our core values is “work smarter through automation”), we start with an app. Our hiring go-to is Wizehire. We’ll get more into the nitty gritty of how this app really helps us out, but let’s start with the job description/posting itself. Wizehire has a ton of pre-templated job descriptions including sections on skills and qualifications. But think of this as your outline and while it certainly is a good starting place, it is not your ending place. 

The Job Description

When posting available jobs for Accounting Therapy, I believe a huge differentiator for us has been the ability to communicate who we are as a company in our job description. Remember, as much as you are interviewing for the right candidate, they are also interviewing you for the right position. So, you want to make sure your job description shows your personality and tells the applicant what you’re about. Make it colorful and branded so you stand out in the job search. How much more appealing and insightful is it to read:  

This position is for you if…  

• Your attention to detail is off the charts and you regularly go above and beyond the status quo. 
• You love living by a calendar and are schedule oriented. 
• You love working with a team and don’t mind being on camera in virtual work sessions. 
• You love working with clients, are personable, and have a passion for helping small businesses achieve their goals.
  

Versus… 

Required Skills: 

• Detail oriented 
• Time Management 
• Teamwork 
• Customer service oriented 

😴💤➡️ That’s me, I’m sleeping while reading that last set of skills, and yet, when you drill down into it, each set represents the same characteristics... one just is 1000% more engaging. Think of your job description as your online dating profile. This is the first impression, and you want to knock their socks off! And if creative writing skills are not your strong point, don’t be afraid to use something like ChatGPT to spice it up. Just make sure to communicate the tone and personality of what you're looking for to the AI platform to tailor the output. And then edit. Always edit. 😊

Back to Wizehire...

Once you have a snazzy job description, Wizehire will do the heavy lifting of posting it for you on all of the major sites, including Indeed, Monster, and ZipRecruiter. Then, when an applicant goes to apply for a job, they get routed to Wizehire where they upload their resume and you can have them answer screening questions like “what time zone are you in?” or “how many years of QuickBooks experience do you have?” You can also elect the applicant to participate in a personality test which will give you a high-level view of their personality traits to see if they are a good fit for the type of job they are applying for. Finally, it aggregates all the applicants from all sites in one place, so you have a one stop shop for applicant review. Once reviewed in Wizehire, you are able to drag and drop people into different buckets depending on how you want to follow up. 

The Virtual Interview

Fear not my friends, we take automation one step further. Wizehire has the option to auto-send anyone that applies a message within the Wizehire app. So, we utilize this to send applicants a link to a virtual, one-sided interview... 🫨 A ... what did you say?! 

You heard us right, a virtual one-sided interview.  Let us explain: a virtual one-sided interview is done via another app (there are multiple, but we use SparkHire) where a candidate, on their own schedule, completes a virtual, on-camera interview. There are pre-recorded questions from our hiring manager to which each interviewee responds to. They have a certain amount of time to respond and are given at least three attempts to respond to each question (i.e. can re-record, if they feel they need to.)  

So why does it work? For starters, we only review applicants that have submitted a resume and application on WizehireAND have completed the virtual interview. Because we are 100% remote and can hire anywhere in the U.S., this means when we have a job posting out in the universe, we get about 2,000 applicants a month! That is A LOT of resumes that say a lot of the same thing. And, since we’re a small team of only 8, we don’t possibly have the time to interview that many people. So, by adding in this extra layer to the application (the virtual interview), we are weeding out people that are not interested enough in our job to take the time to do it. 

To add to this… it’s no secret that we’re HUGE on company culture. In fact, we’ve hired culture over skill in the past and we’ll probably do it again. Asking applicants to record a virtual interview that includes culture-based questions allows us to get a sense of who they are and what they're about in order to better assess if they would be a good culture fit.  

So, to recap, the two key reasons why we use this are

1. It saves us a TON of time.
2. Allows us to do a first round of “interviews” with many more people than if we were to schedule them with the hiring manager.

Next Steps

Okay, so we’ve now had our applicant fill out an application, submit their resume, and complete a virtual interview. Now what? If they seem like a good fit via their virtual interview, we then review their resume. Keep in mind that this is the FIRST step in our process that is not automated. Up to this point, they are moving and grooving on their own. If the resume looks good (I’m a stickler for grammar and punctuation), we move them onward in the process.  

Now this next phase will differ depending on the position you’re hiring for. When we hire for a bookkeeper, our next step is an accounting skills assessment to ensure they can walk the walk. But when we’re hiring an assistant, the next step might be a series of questions on how they would respond to different situations. This part is really up to you, but we’ve found that incorporating a position-based assessment has really given us more visibility into the skill level of the applicant.  

Once the assessment is completed and they have met expectations, then we finally do an in-person interview with the hiring manager. We like to have some standardized questions, but really, we approach these more as a conversation. We want to get to know them, how they work, what makes them tick, and how they would handle certain situations. You also want to get to know them as a person – what are their own personal core values? This isn’t a question I’ve asked (actually), but now that I’ve had the idea, I’m definitely adding it to my next set of interview questions!  

If they are a go for the hiring manager, we typically then have the applicant do a peer interview with someone else that will be on their team and finally an interview with another member of our leadership or executive team. If all goes well, the candidate is hired!

The End!

So that’s the down and dirty of our hiring process. And again, because we’re a small company with not a lot of administrative human power, we try to automate what we can.  

If you do things a different way, we’d love to hear about it! We’re always looking for ways to improve, but so far, this system has worked really well and has found us some pretty awesome humans!  

With that, we’re going to sign off for the day! We hope you found some takeaways, and if you are currently hiring… what are some automations you could put into place immediately?  

TTFN! (Ta-ta for now! 🐯)