Why you should use Hiring Templates

Hiring a new employee is never an easy task. Hiring Templates help by giving you an easy-to-follow template with everything you need to start hiring.

Ott Niggulis

In hiring, mistakes can be expensive and the more senior the employee, the more expensive the mistakes. 

This often leads to drawn-out hiring processes with multiple interviews and decisions based on arbitrary data and personal feelings.

Things are even more difficult when hiring for roles that you’re not familiar with. How are you supposed to know what a top performer looks like when you lack data and haven’t done the job yourself?

Ben Horowitz suggests learning by interviewing high performers - people who are already good at the position you’re hiring for. This is a good starting point. Interviewing will give you initial insights and a general understanding of the role.

What interviewing high-performers doesn’t give you is synthesised information in a format that can be used during the hiring process. Ready-made Hiring Templates, on the other hand, are designed to provide you with exactly that - a template to follow. 

What are hiring templates?

A good hiring template is like a detailed roadmap of the position. It includes everything you need to know and pay attention to when hiring. 

Templates create an understanding by clearly defining the skills, experiences, qualifications, knowledge and abilities needed to succeed in a given role. 

The templates need to be detailed and easily understandable to be useful. No fluff like “experience with relevant technology.” I recently found a CMO hiring template that included exactly that with no explanation of what the relevant technology entailed.

Experience with relevant tech is essential, but wording it vaguely is not. Spell out the kind of experience you’re looking for.

In hiring, understanding who exactly you’re looking for is crucial. All other parts of the process build on being crystal clear on who and what you’re looking for.

Example Competency based questions from a Wisnio Hiring Template

The three pillars of Hiring Templates

With any new position, you as the hiring manager will have certain expectations on what the new hire has to achieve. Candidates need to have certain experiences, qualifications, knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve those performance indicators.  

These requirements are often grouped into: 

• Key objectives - a description of the key objectives a candidate should accomplish to be considered successful;;

• Position requirements - the experiences and qualifications required to accomplish those objectives;

• Competencies - the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to perform the job successfully.

The competencies and position requirements give the candidates the support structure needed to achieve the position's key objectives. All three are vital to successful hiring - each section solves a small piece of the puzzle, and together they form a detailed roadmap.

Example Position Requirements from a Wisnio Hiring Template

To better understand how objectives, requirements, and competencies come together, let’s take a look at the Head of Product role as an example.

Putting it into action

As Head of Product, your primary responsibility is to align the product development roadmap with business strategy and ensure that the product meets customer requirements. 

As an example, let's take a closer look at distilling business needs into specifications that engineering can work with.

Key objective - Distil business needs and expertise of the company into specifications that engineers can work with;

Position requirement - Proven ability to break down complex questions and analyse them systematically;

Competency - Teamwork and collaboration - works effectively with others to achieve collective goals.

Interview question - Describe a specific business problem you have solved. Please explain the process and reasoning in detail.

All pillars are interconnected and support achieving the position's goals. 

Conclusions

Hiring is complex, and mistakes are expensive, but you can improve your chances of success with a good hiring template.

Like any template, the key is understanding how to use it effectively. Having a clear understanding of who you're looking for is crucial in hiring.

On the Wisnio platform, all users can use and create Hiring Templates based on the three-pillar system of key objectives, position requirements, and competencies.

If you’re looking for inspiration or ready-made templates, take a look at our recently launched Hiring Templates library here.