The Org's Guide to Hiring

Who you hire is who you are as a company. Companies are just collections of people, and the more innovative and highly-skilled the work you hope to accomplish is, the more critical that talent becomes in your success or failure.

In this guide, we’ll run through a wide range of resources to help you through the hiring plan, to provide you with support and exposure to the best applicants, and to help you navigate the ways in which hiring is currently changing.

Building a Company Worth Joining

At the cornerstone of any successful hiring process is the company doing the hiring in the first place. Good companies attract good people, that’s a fact. If you want world-beating talent to want you, you’ll need to build something worth joining in the first place.

The building blocks of strong companies are their culture, values, mission and structure. If you’re starting from scratch, you'll have to lay the foundations for strong candidate sourcing.

If you’re already established, there are many ways you can relentlessly improve your company’s prospects in the hiring market. One key place to start is transparency. Transparency means running organizations which align their interests with those of its stakeholders, customers, and the world. It’s about providing context to the decisions being made and the products being developed and growing trust that is rewarded by loyalty.

Transparency isn’t only a virtue - it’s a competitive advantage. Transparency sets up an organization’s ever changing environment for success. But what does transparency mean in the real world, and what concrete steps can make your company more transparent? We’ve outlined a path to making any company more transparent right here:

How Do I Make My Company More Transparent?

One easily overlooked but essential part of every great company is a great culture. Culture emerges organically from the behavior of a collective, and shaping it in a positive direction requires deliberate effort and forethought. Make sure you research common interview questions to prepare for candidate interviews that will help you in selecting the right candidate that is a culture add to your organization.

The Hiring Process

The cornerstone of a recruiting search is a well-conceived job description with clear job requirements. A good job description will help you understand exactly what you’re looking for and help applicants decide whether they fit your position and reduce all kinds of frictions and wasted time on both ends. The problem is, writing good job descriptions is a tough ask, and the traditional form of most of them is off-putting and sterile. We’ve written you a guide to taking your job requirements up a notch:

How To Think About Good Job Requirements

Careers pages are often a copy-pasted chore. No one gets wildly enthusiastic about designing a careers page, or maintaining it. Nevertheless, a strong careers page can sell your company to applicants and make a strong first impression on the people who might be your future teammates. There are all sorts of small ways to make your company more inviting and make the application process more joyful for those on the other side. Here’s our guide to how:

How to Create the Best Careers Page

While there are hundreds of different job sites and platforms, most of them are terrible. Navigating that world is confusing and disorienting to applicants and creates a serious cost to employers. To make it a bit easier, we’ve profiled the top job sites and made a short digest of the best of them and why:

The Best Job Posting Sites for Finding Top Talent

Attracting Applicants

Once you’ve built strong foundations, you still need to put yourself and your job opportunities out in the world.

Attracting talented employees is a company-wide process, and you can’t leave it up to just your recruiters or hiring managers. This guide will outline the steps your company can take to up your game and make yourself more attractive to the best talent.

How to Attract Talented Employees

A public org chart is another key tool you can use to bring in good talent. More than that, a public org chart will unlock access to our new and innovative hiring platform.

Listing Your Jobs at The Org

The Org set out to solve deep systemic issues in hiring because organizations of all types consistently cite hiring as their number one concern. There aren’t effective options for high growth companies to find great candidates and the hiring market hasn’t evolved in decades. CEOs and hiring managers are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils: expensive recruiters or mega hiring platforms that drown companies in low quality applicants.

The problem is none of the recruiting solutions are built for talent first. Billions of dollars have poured into tools to sort candidates like cattle or inundate personal inboxes with poaching emails. It’s gotten so bad that quality applicants abhor well-meaning recruiters and work hard to circumvent the hiring platforms.

The Org has designed a new platform and new approach to hiring where companies help candidates see where they fit by placing open positions directly in a public organizational chart.

Great people want to work with great people. By listing open roles in the interactive organizational structure, companies empower applicants to explore where they’ll fit, their future teammates, and future direct supervisor.

In addition to making the application process more human, The Org is turning the job discovery process upside down by empowering talent to discover fast-growing mission-driven companies and then explore the team and open roles once the job seeker has found an organization they adore.

User research and market data show us that good candidates prefer The Org over other platforms. Job seekers tell us the process is personalized and more human. The Org leads to more final round interviews and more offer letters. It’s clear, transparency is now the hiring strategy.

We welcome all companies to give our new hiring platform a try for free. Get started here:

Locking Down a Candidate

Once you’ve got applicants coming in, you have a daunting task: sorting through a stack of resumes, identifying qualified candidates, setting interviews, weeding through dozens of personalities and skill sets.

But the reality is a lot of those pain-points originate from not knowing what you really want or how to do the initial screening. More important than how you conduct an interview or what keywords you look for in a resume is how you define and articulate what your company needs, and how you determine what a match with those criteria looks like.

You inevitably have to turn down candidates, and it's important to leave a good experience with your rejection letter.

If you let go of dated ideas about how hiring “should work,” there is a world of opportunities available to you. Throwing out the script and suiting each recruiting effort directly to your needs can save time, energy, and get a better result. Here’s our guide to making that happen:

How to Find (and Hire) the Right Candidate for a Job

Hiring for Remote Work

The process works a little differently in an environment where people can work from anywhere. You have a much bigger pool of talent to draw from, but also more legal and technical considerations when hiring people who aren’t in the same location as your headquarters or executive team.

Adapting to remote work hiring requires throwing out your old playbook and taking a new and more expansive look at what hiring and onboarding can look like. We’ve written a new playbook to help you get started:

How to Hire and Onboard Remote Teams