Healthy Hiring

“Thank you for your time in interviewing me. I really appreciated [your practices] in the interviewing process. It made me feel valued and seen as a candidate and showed me you that you live the values you talked about.”

This was a note from a candidate years ago that I hold onto because it reminds me how important hiring is.

Truth is, I love hiring! I have subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) tried to serve on as many hiring committees possible. But I have found that many hiring managers dread it, seeing it as a means to an end. However, hiring done right is more than that. In fact, hiring could be the missing key in helping you as a leader build a healthy, high-functioning team.

Why is hiring important to building a healthy team?

From my experience, most people recognize hiring is important for two reasons:

1. It is more expensive to hire a new employee than to retain them so we should get it right.
2. We need to find the right “fit” for our team (Side note: I have a complicated relationship with that word and concept in hiring given my background in equity and belonging work, but for now we will use that term generously and assume we are talking about competency, skillsets, and alignment of values).

Neither of these reasons are wrong.

According to the Employer Council, the average cost of hiring an employee in 2023 was $4,700. However, many industry experts have stated that when factoring in training and productivity loss, the true cost can range between 30% - 200% of the position’s annual salary. And certainly, part of employee retention is ensuring that we have done our due diligence to assess if the candidate possesses the skillsets needed for the role and if there are the appropriate values alignment.

AND neither of these reasons fully capture the importance of hiring to building a healthy team.

Defining a healthy team

First, let’s talk about what does a healthy team look like? Patrick Lencioni describes five behaviors of healthy, high-functioning, high-performing teams:

1. Vulnerability-Built Trust: Team members are transparent, honest, and comfortable admitting mistakes and weaknesses without fear of retribution.
2. Productive Conflict: The team embraces open, unfiltered debate about ideas to find the best solutions, avoiding “artificial harmony.”
3. Commitment: Through open debate, the team achieves clarity and true buy-in for decisions, even if there was initial disagreement.
4. Accountability: Peers directly hold one another accountable for their performance, and agreed-upon standards.
5. Focus on Results: The team prioritizes collective success and overarching objectives ahead of individual egos, status, or departmental goals.

These outcomes are not possible without first building a culture and environment that encourages, promotes, and normalizes healthy behaviors. I consistently tell candidates I coach that you can learn a lot about an organization based upon their hiring process. Our hiring practices subtly tell people about our organizational culture and the embodied values that drive team functions.

The Role of the Leader in Hiring and Building a Healthy Team

At Leadership Center, we believe that leaders are key to the overall viability of an organization. Leaders have a role and responsibility in supporting holistic team wellness. We put a great deal of effort in planning professional development workshops, encouraging healthy work-life balance, and creating employee incentives. Yet, amid the busyness of the day-to-day grind, it is easy to forget that part of creating a thriving organizational eco-system starts with hiring.

I’ve been there. The stress of losing a valuable contributing member of your team, distributing their work among a team already at max capacity, and thinking about the risk of loss productivity or the looming deadline causes me to want to rush the hiring process. There are also certainly times when circumstances simply do not afford us the privilege of taking our time to pursue the ideal.

However, one of the values that you will see over and over again from the Leadership Center is that we encourage leaders to slow down and reflect, especially when things around us feel chaotic. This value holds true for hiring because the hiring process gives us an ideal opportunity to assess the overall health of our team.

Building Healthy Hiring Practices that Lead to Thriving Teams

I have hired countless student leaders and full-time professional employees on college campuses. I have developed and ran hiring processes and most recently, I have been a part of hiring for multiple c-suite level positions. I have also had the opportunity of participating in processes from the other side as a candidate, working with both internal human resources teams and external search firms.

These experiences have taught me that our hiring practices can have a profound impact on how a candidate shows up to their role on day one once they have been hired. It can prime them to lean into the healthy behaviors of a healthy, high-performing team. Also, when done intentionally, a good hiring process also sets up the rest of the team to receive the new colleague in a healthy way.