Hiring is 80% Preparation
Everyone focuses on the interview, but the battle begins before the candidate even walks through the door. Here are 5 ways to prepare.
Helllooo everyone, and happy Tuesday! I can’t believe we’re already kicking off February. Is it just me, or does this month feel especially packed? Between Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, Chinese New Year, and my birthday 🎂, February is not exactly easing us in…
Because of that, I’m spending this month focused on just one core theme: hiring.
The people on your team are the single biggest driver of your company’s success. So it’s important to realize that your hiring process is the first (and sometimes only) line of defense. Who you bring in shapes how work gets done, how decisions are made, and ultimately, how your culture feels. One bad hire doesn’t just slow things down; it can ripple across communication, trust, and morale in ways that are hard to undo.
In this post, I’ll be focusing on the work that needs to get done before you even make a decision to add to your headcount.
5 Steps to Take Before You Hire
🖐️ 1. Stop, Collaborate, and Listen
Before we even get started, I’m about to become your CFO’s best friend and throw the biggest stop sign in the air. It’s so important to first ask yourself, “Do we actually need to make this hire?”
Salaries and Benefits is typically one of the largest, if not the largest, expense categories on a company’s financial statement. If you start hiring without the right checks and balances, this line item can get really bloated, really fast. It’s also an incredibly challenging and distracting problem to fix down the road. An oversized team can lead to too many cooks in the kitchen, declining productivity, and rising frustration as people struggle to find clear ownership and meaningful work.
It’s important to note that this exercise is a delicate balance. On one hand, you want to avoid hiring too many folks and end up facing a reduction in force or layoff later. On the other hand, you can’t keep the purse strings so tight that the entire team suffers because they’re stretched too thin. Work closely with your CFO to have transparent conversations about the state of the business to determine what levers you actually have at your disposal. This step is really about pressure-testing the need before jumping to the solution, and setting yourself up to hire with intention.
👁️ 2. Be intentional
So, how do we actually do this? Once you’ve confirmed the hire is necessary, the next step is being intentional about how you plan, budget, and justify that headcount. These are some of the strategies we used at SupplyPike that worked well:
Start with the Budget
During budgeting season, I recommend putting forth the highest number you might need for headcount, while still staying grounded in reality. To be clear - don’t ask for 10 people when you only need 3. But, if you think you’ll need 3.5, round up to 4. Doing this will make conversations easier for you down the road. In the middle of the year, it’s a lot easier to spend less money by not hiring the extra person than to go back and ask for incremental headcount later.
PS: Stacy wrote an in-depth post on how to convert your GTM goals into sales headcount numbers. I highly recommend checking it out!
Metrics-Driven Hiring
As you build out your budget, be sure to understand the logic behind the headcount you’re requesting. For example:
Hire an Ops employee for every 50 employees added to the total headcount, or
Hire an AE for every $1M ARR we need to close
Document and discuss this logic with your CFO. These milestones will act as the key to unlocking your job reqs in the new year. 🔑 As the year progresses, hitting those milestones unlocks new hires. If you don’t hit them (and I know this can be painful), you don’t unlock the hire, even if it was budgeted. This keeps you disciplined and mitigates bloat.
As an example, let’s say you and your CFO agree on a 1 CSM:100 customers ratio. You budgeted that you would close 100 new customers and, therefore, hire a new CSM by June.
Scenario 1: It’s June, and you’ve only closed 50 new customers.
👉You would not hire the new CSM because there would not be enough work for them to do.
Scenario 2: It’s June, and you’ve closed 150 new customers.
👉You should have already hired a new CSM when you crossed the 100-customer mark. Based on this trajectory, you might even need to start discussing an additional CSM headcount with your CFO.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
You’ll hear me say this a million times in this post, but always stay in communication with your CFO to make sure you are aligned on this logic and the state of the business. A shocking number of leaders only talk to their Finance leadership during budgeting season. Alignment throughout the year not only makes it easier to get things done - it’s the difference between constantly asking for permission and actually operating as a true business partner.
Our ex-CFO Micah Bender actually wrote a great post about this on LinkedIn from a CFO’s perspective!
🙋♀️ 3. Be Proactive
Most companies manage their budgets on a month-to-month basis. However, because hiring cycles can last 2-3 months, be sure to stay ahead of your budget and post jobs today for roles that you’ll need in 3 months. For harder-to-fill roles, you may even need to be planning 6-9 months in advance.
Building on the CSM example from the previous section: If we budgeted to hire an additional CSM in June, we should be looking at our customer count trajectories in March/April to determine if we should post our job.
💡Things to Consider:
If you have a new hire slotted for January, this could mean posting roles in October or November of the current year, before budgets are approved. Talk with your CFO.
If the numbers are not trending as quickly as you’d like, but the role has historically taken 6 months to fill, it might still be worth your while to post the position anyway, knowing you have an extended lead time. 💡Remember: posting on your job board is free. Filling the positions before you need to is not.
If your role typically has a higher turnover/promotion rate (like BDRs), you may decide to staff more headcount than strictly necessary in order to mitigate gaps on the team. Be sure to keep your pipelines full and warm so you can shorten the hiring cycle as much as possible.
🔎 4. Be Clear
After completing parts 1-3, you should have a very clear picture of who you need to hire and when. A very crucial next step in this process is to actually document what this role will be doing and the skills needed to be successful. It sounds so obvious, but trust me, I’ve been on the receiving end of this not being done too many times!
To combat this, the hiring team at SupplyPike decided to build an “ICP” for each role we wanted to hire. ICP is a term typically used by GTM teams to document the Ideal Customer Profile. It’s a short, easy-to-digest, and, more importantly, easy-to-remember description of your target market, and is very effective in focusing your GTM teams.
So, we stole that concept and applied it to hiring! 😏
For us, ICP stood for Ideal Candidate Profile. We created a short questionnaire that hiring managers were required to fill out, forcing them to slow down, think, and be intentional about who they actually needed to hire. This clarity was valuable not just for recruiters but for interview panelists as well. As a panelist, having that level of alignment straight from the source made evaluating candidates much easier. As recruiters, it also gave us something concrete to point back to when a hiring manager inevitably started wavering or getting enamored with candidates who didn’t truly fit the profile. #accountability
Key questions from our questionnaire:
Job title
Job description
Salary range (for HR/Recruitment-eyes only)
Key metrics this role would be responsible for
What success looks like in the first 6–12 months
Team dynamics HR/panelists should be aware of
Remote-friendly or not
Non-negotiables
If you decide to apply this at your company, a few quick recommendations:
The questionnaire is an internal-only doc, so it doesn’t need to be super clean or presentable
It shouldn’t take more than 20-30 minutes for your hiring manager to fill out - if they struggle with this, that’s usually a signal that they don’t yet have clarity on what they need, which makes hiring harder and increases the risk of bringing in the wrong person.
This is a great opportunity for your recruiting team to step in and help bring that clarity.
Note: Of course, every hiring manager wants to hire the best possible person at a reasonable cost. Part of the recruiting team’s role is helping hiring managers stay grounded in what’s realistic for the market and the salary range. Some hiring managers can get bogged down in the details and define ICPs with “non-negotiables” that simply don’t exist (or don’t exist at certain compensation levels 👀). If time passes without success, it’s worth revisiting the ICP and discussing whether some non-negotiables should become negotiables.
📑 5. Recruitment Strategy
Now that we’re set up, let’s go out and get our candidate pipeline filled! As you search for the right candidates, spend some time thinking about your recruitment strategy to make sure you are putting your efforts into the right places. For example,
For all positions, do the standard “textbook” recruitment strategy, like post the job on job boards, update your LinkedIn with the #hiring tag, reach out to your network, etc.
For entry-level positions and internships, leverage college/university events like career fairs, speaking in classrooms, and good old-fashioned word of mouth.
For entry- to mid-level positions, you can probably rely on your hiring managers and any in-house TA teams to handle filling these positions.
For senior-level or niche/technical positions, you may have better luck connecting with dedicated external recruiters in these niche spaces. Personally, I’m a bit 50/50 on this. Some roles are just really hard to fill.
For leadership roles, we have tried using external recruitment firms in the past and hired candidates from them. However, while their resumes might fit the bill, we have found a harder time with culture fit. Ultimately, we decided that promoting from within was the best route for us. If that’s not an option for your team, be sure to really spend time with the candidates you talk to and suss out alignment on culture and leadership philosophy.
Saying this as someone who ran a TA team, when engaging with TA teams and external recruiters, keep in mind that they are typically incentivized by filling positions, not necessarily filling positions with the right people. You are responsible for that. So, speak up and don’t settle for less, or it will become a problem - your problem - in the future. At SupplyPike, we had a hiring philosophy that took us far - every new hire should raise the bar of the company.
Now that you’ve completed the prep for hiring, you can post your job! Next week, I will be going over the interview process and making an offer. 📝
Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Am I forgetting anything? Do you have a funny recruitment story to tell? Leave a comment below 👇
Have a wonderful week!
Christine
Christine’s Corner
📖 Read of the Week: I’m still making my way through People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry! The book version and movie version are definitely sisters, not twins.
🍿 Watch of the Week: I finally watched Fargo and I can see why it’s a classic. Frances McDormand is so good and William H. Macy is so good at being bad.
🎧 Song of the Week: APT. by ROSE and Bruno Mars has been on repeat in our house. Another favorite of my son!