The Wild Reset: Hiring Through Change
Start up chaos can be exciting, cringe, toxic, and addictive…you blink and the half empty office with an idea and a pitch deck is a 500+ person company and…it’s different. (Major whiplash). With the growth, talent management can feel lawless and counterproductive to building a “real” company.
You saw that analyst with his first job clench a VP title. The SDR that stayed late after 3 months is now a manager. Someone’s roommate skipped an interview, showed up to a team happy hour, and a post it note with offer details was handed off to a beleaguered recruiter. Interns became Senior Engineers the day after graduation.
In hypergrowth (or hyperchange), an aperture appears for rapid advancement, exciting projects, and little consideration for experience or oversight. Political savants, opportunists, and a few diamonds in the rough will grab shiny titles and career defining chances to lead in record time.
But this opening starts to narrow just as quickly as it appears - a few experienced C-Suite and VPs are hired externally (instead of dizzily promoted) and they in turn hire their trusted staff, and the chaos for the most part settles. Talent and HR build out leveling guides and neat promotion checklists. We weave these plans into our hiring forecasts and interview criteria and life for the moment feels calmer. Order has been brought to the wild west - or so you think.
Wild growth requires wild reset moments.
Echoes from the first and second generation of employees of quick advancement continue and start to muck up the works for recruiting. Current employees, now misleveled, titled, or paid out of alignment with new structures are left unclear on what happens next. Across the board Talent becomes the new frontier for fixing this friction and bringing about a reset of expectations and direction.
Here are some of the signs you might need that wild reset…
Your external hiring has rotated to market (you’re now paying market rates) for a Senior Engineer: you need X years of experience and X skills before you can consider that talent for an open role. Except your own interviewers (also Senior Engineers) don’t currently meet some or most of those requirements - disagreements in debrief meetings increase and things get…personal.
Candidates sold on the promise of career growth don’t see a promotion in their first 6 months; they jump ship to another team (or jump ship altogether). Attrition starts to rise along with tensions between teams seen “draining” talent from one another.
Referrers get more creative and insistent with influencing the hiring process in favor of their candidate above more qualified talent. Unqualified referrals aren’t making it past a resume review - much less being offered a job on the spot if they run across the CEO in an office tour.
Offers are being challenged - recruiters are now leveling and paying a new IC close to the hiring manager’s own compensation. Candidates are questioning why they’d report into someone with half of their own (total) working experience.
How do you actually do this “wild reset”? It’s not an all hands with some vague hand waving about new HR policies and compensation philosophy - it’s a coordinated and direct cascade of this new context at every level of the company. From your already weary senior executives adjusting to startup land, to the VPs and Directors new to the title and shape of the organization that they grew up in, and the first or second time line managers. And that message is this: we’re now a new company, and this means X, Y, and Z.
X, Y, and Z are how talent is evaluated, compensated, and managed. And the “new company” part is often glossed over - sure, we say it in passing “we’re a whole different company than 6 months ago!” but not directly as a call for change and action. Founders want continuity in culture and excitement, momentum, growth. Saying we are something else now is scary.
I say “wild” because this type of candor rarely exists. The promises, titles, and risks in early startups certainly feel wild - but resetting how a company operates clearly, concisely, and consistently is equally as wild in its rarity (and difficulty).
You have to spell out, repeat, and reinforce these new practices: How you hire new talent (or existing talent) - how does each team work with one another - what does this role or level or title mean now? And regardless of a thoughtfully executed reset, talent is at the heart of these changes. We have to bake it into everything we do. So…
Meanwhile, on the talent island, these wild reset moments are happening regularly - not just mid-hyper growth or after a layoff. It could be after you’ve hired a new leader, architected a new team, stood up an internship program, stratified a sales organization, etc. Any organizational change presents opportunities to reset on what a role is, how to sell it, how to qualify talent, and more.
Start with a reality check for your job posts - odds are your interviewers & hiring managers haven’t read that post in a while! Is it accurate to the day to day of the role we’re hiring new talent into? Does it still map to new leveling guides? Even better, you can check that posting by asking for candidate feedback after your initial phone screen (what stood out to you about this job posting?) and again after they’ve completed their final interviews (did the job post and what you’ve learned in interviews align?) - and AGAIN with your new hires at 1, 3, and 6 months into the job.
The job post is your most critical artifact - it attracts candidates to apply, forms the foundation of interview questions and evaluation criteria; it’s used to measure performance or justify promotions and exits: an essential roadmap for current talent to move up, out, or laterally in your organization.
Know everything about your hiring team - and accept change as a constant. Don’t be afraid of chaos, conflicting details, and rapidly shifting structures. But know how to distill that into a realistic and salient pitch back to your candidate. The most successful recruiters have an arsenal of information ready to thread together to tell a compelling story.
How is the rest of the company selling this opportunity? Start with the immediate hiring team, then expand to the function, department, and so on. In larger audiences, presenting how to sell a job to their networks, providing social templates, and training folks on how to leverage your ATS is helpful (i.e. top down communication). But in smaller group settings and 1/1s having folks pitch to each other yields the best results. Recruiters act as facilitators - highlighting and resharing selling points aligned with the updated role & asking clarifying questions and challenging points that are no longer aligned with your wild reset.
Monitor and understand the promotion and attrition rates for your hiring teams.
Is there increased attrition due to mismatched roles or performance?
Do you have internal recruiting happening between departments - is it temporary or consistent?
What do exit surveys say about people leaving the company?
When do people get promoted and why?
What is the career path for this role?
How often is performance feedback given?
What skills will this candidate gain from the role in year 1?
Use these metrics and data points to measure alignment pre and post-reset and as a resource for fine tuning your selling motion - but beware of repeating “myths” from early employees with meteoric rises. You’ll want success stories to be aligned with your new reality post-reset.
Recruiting often comes down to this - can you tell a compelling (and honest) story that people follow? Not just your candidates - but your hiring leaders, managers, interviewers, and founders. And can you evolve that story to match the pace of change? Does it reflect your company today and next week?
I hope you found this post inspiring, and I wish you luck!
