ThemePeople & Culture
CardCard 53 of 66
Questions5 to explore

Recruitment

Attracting, recruiting & employer brand

How an organization attracts and selects people is one of the most consequential things it does, and yet the process is often poorly documented.

Recruitment knowledge tends to live in one or two people: the hiring manager who always knows what to look for, the office manager who runs the process, the founder who makes the final call. When those people move on, the organization loses its institutional knowledge of how to hire well.

Capturing recruitment means documenting the process itself, the criteria used at each stage, the tools and platforms that work for this organization, and the employer brand: what the organization says about itself to attract candidates and whether that matches the reality people find when they arrive.

Past hiring mistakes are also useful to capture, even briefly. The reasons a hire did not work out contain real information about what the organization needs that job descriptions rarely reflect.

What to capture

For this part of the company brain, what is worth writing down and keeping current. The goal is not a complete archive but a living record that new people can read and returning people can trust.

Hiring process & stages

The steps from posting a role to making an offer, including who is involved at each stage, so that recruitment does not have to be reinvented every time a role opens up.

Role criteria & evaluation

What the organization is actually looking for in each type of role, beyond the job description, because the gap between what is written and what is evaluated is where inconsistency creeps in.

Employer brand & positioning

What the organization says about itself to attract candidates, where it says it, and whether that message reflects the real experience of working there.

Platforms & sourcing channels

Where the organization has found good candidates in the past and what has not worked, because this accumulated knowledge is lost every time the person who ran a search cycle leaves.

Questions to explore

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

What does the current hiring process look like from posting a role to someone starting?
Who is involved in hiring decisions and at what point, and how are those decisions actually made?
What are you really looking for in a strong candidate for a typical role here, beyond what is in the job description?
Where have you found good people in the past, and where has sourcing not worked?
What does the organization say about itself to attract candidates, and is that consistent with what people find when they join?

Things to notice

Hiring processes that exist in one person's head create bottlenecks and inconsistency; even a simple written flow is significantly better than nothing.
Evaluation criteria that are not documented tend to drift toward pattern-matching on past hires, which compounds existing homogeneity.
Employer brand messaging that does not match the actual culture creates early attrition; document the gap honestly so it can be closed.