*The Strong Towns team (minus a few members).*

It was the early 2000s, when I was in my mid-20s, that I started to recognize how little I knew about a great many things. It’s common to see people cite the Dunning-Kruger effect to make a case for someone else’s ignorance, but those people are generally camped on Mount Stupid themselves. I used to sit in church thinking about all the people the sermon applies to other than myself. These are similar intellectual dead ends.

On top of this, I also came to recognize how unintentionally biased I am, to my own detriment. I often recommend Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Khaneman—it’s essential for anyone who considers themselves informed—because it should put an end to most self-delusions. Humans are slightly evolved chimpanzees, wired to recognize certain patterns while ignoring others, biased to confirm our own prejudices while remaining ignorant of our blind spots.

We are all deeply flawed. If you can truly embrace that, it brings a lot of peace.

It also brings quite a bit of clarity. In the 2000s, I was running my own engineering and planning firm and had a pretty poor track record of hiring people. I would summarize my approach as, “If I liked you and felt we could work together, I would offer you a job.” Since I was the president and driving force of the organization, the logic of that made sense. You needed to be able to work well with me and my way of doing things or it wasn’t going to work.

Only, that wasn’t working. For example, I had a guy I had recruited for a year and a half quit just 48 hours after starting. He was a total mismatch, and that was obvious afterward, but I liked him and was blinded by my own assessment of how well I thought he would do. My misappraisal was a recurring theme and it cost us tens of thousands of dollars with false starts and poor performance.

And while I hired plenty of women (note: my rural Minnesota-based company never had a minority candidate apply for a position) and, I hope, provided a respectful working environment with lots of opportunity, there is no doubt that I felt most comfortable working with other men, especially those in my age group that I had the most in common with. In retrospect, I have no doubt that comfort level impacted my hiring decisions. Again, I recognize there is something human in that, but there is a reason such bias has gone from being a workplace annoyance to a cancellable character trait. It’s not just dumb way to run a business, it’s a bad way to be a human.

I want to be a good human, and I really want Strong Towns to be successful, so much so that I desperately want to move beyond my own inadequacy. (I am a slightly evolved chimpanzee, after all). To compensate for my own limitations, I set up a hiring process that is designed, more than anything else, to get the best possible people working for Strong Towns.

*Part of the team on our most recent staff retreat in Brainerd.*

This process has been wildly successful. Not only do we have an amazing team, we don’t have the false starts, burnout, and high rates of turnover I experienced in those early days of intuition-based hiring. And, for what it’s worth, I’m working with the most diverse group of people I’ve ever been around. In addition to respected colleagues, I consider them all great friends. I admire them all.

Every time we hire someone new, I am inundated with inquiries from other organizations about our process. I’m going to take the time here now to describe our process so others can put it to use in building their teams.

Write the Right Job Description

If we want the right person, we need the right job description: one that conveys what the job entails and what we expect the individual to do. Here’s a copy of a description we recently ran. We try to describe the kind of person we want and what they will do to contribute to the team. We are trying to get people to self-select, both in and out. That is also why we put the salary in the description. If that’s not going to work, better to know now.

Notice what is not the description. There are no education requirements, prior work experience, certifications, or any similar prerequisite that would narrow the selection pool. If someone thinks they can do the job and do it well, the last thing we want to do is put an artificial barrier in their way.

Solicit from a Broad Pool

The real challenge is getting the description in front of the broadest possible pool of potential candidates. We want to cast the net as wide as we can. This is a real challenge, and it’s something we’ve worked hard to improve over time. We have an advantage over most other organizations because our reach is significant, but we still pay for placements outside of our network.

And because we want as diverse a pool of candidates as possible, we try every way we can think of to reach groups of people that are not generally part of our conversation. We’re not looking for another person just like us. We’re looking for the best person for the job.

Image via Unsplash. — *Image via* *Unsplash*.

Make Applying Low Friction

To apply for a position with Strong Towns, an applicant need only provide their email address. That’s it.

We don’t ask for a resume, cover letter, references, or any of the other things that are part of a traditional application process. We don’t even want to know the applicant’s name. In trying to cast the net as wide as possible, we don’t want any obstacles that would keep the right candidate from finding us.

And, if Strong Towns is the impulse buy for that perfect person who applies on a whim, that’s great, too. After all, while we’re deciding if we want to work with someone, they are deciding the same thing about us. This process is as much about building a relationship as it is anything else.

Do a Briefing

There have been times when we have had nearly 500 applicants for a single position. That’s 500 emails, way too many for us to communicate with individually. Many of these applicants have reasonable questions about the position that are not answered in the job description. It’s in everyone’s interest to get those questions answered, but that can’t be done individually. And, if we want the best person, we want everyone to have all relevant information, anyway.

We solved this by inviting applicants to submit questions through a form. Then we hold a Zoom briefing to talk about the organization, our mission, the position, and to answer all of those questions. We invite people to ask additional questions at the briefing. Everything is recorded and made available to everyone that has applied.

Can You Do the Job?

At a time we have informed every applicant about in advance, we send a questionnaire to everyone who has applied. The goal is to attempt to simulate, in a modest way, the kind of skills someone will need for the position. We give them ample time (multiple days) to finish it.

For example, for our last communications position, we gave applicants an article to read and then asked them to write a brief summary, put together the blurb for a Facebook post, create a tweet about the article, and write an email to share it with our audience. These are the kind of things they would do if they were hired, so let’s get a demonstration of how they will do.

The answers here are all anonymous. We ask for the email, but we strip it out and give them a random number, which is how we refer to them. We have no names at all. We ask them to not include any personal or identifying information in their answers (and often judge them poorly when they do). We’re trying to keep as much of our bias as possible out of the process.

*The “yes, no, or maybe” list from when we were hiring for our copy editor position.*

This is the one place we tend to field complaints. While we try to make the questions so that a person can answer them in a reasonable time—I shoot for 90 minutes or less—some people find that it takes them a lot longer. Others sometimes object to “doing unpaid work” for Strong Towns. We don’t completely discount these objections, but this effort is the tradeoff for our process. The time people save on preparing cover letters and resumes that will never be thoroughly considered, we ask them to put into demonstrating their skills.

In respect of that effort, we read every submission. I personally read every submission, and we always have a few others who do likewise. We use a system to rank them either “yes,” “no,” or “maybe”; an approach that we have found tends to average all our biases. We also ask everyone to indicate a pair of “Top Choice” applicants.

We look at the spreadsheet and pull out the consensus candidates for the next round. All of the top picks go on as well, a tradition that has produced some interesting results. A couple of my colleagues would never have worked for Strong Towns if someone hadn’t seen something special in their first round answers that the rest of us had overlooked.

If we start with 500 emails, we might get 150 submissions in Round One with 25 to 40 of them going on to the second round.

Can You Work in Our Setting?

After letting everyone know how they did in the first round, we send the pool of candidates that are moving on a second round of questions. In this round, we focus on work habits and try to determine whether or not the candidate would thrive in our work environment.

Before the pandemic, we were a very unique organization in that we are completely virtual. That’s no longer the case, and I suspect we’ll need to adjust our approach to the second round somewhat—and we might have a bigger pool of candidates that are adept at working remotely.

We use the same process for reviewing the second round as the last: multiple people reading them all with everyone applying the same basic ranking system. Everything remains anonymous. Everyone gets to identify one top candidate, but they aren’t guaranteed to move on. Hopefully by the end of Round Two we can identify four to six candidates we are really excited about.

References and Resume

At this point, we ask our finalists for resumes and references. This is a big reveal as this is the first time we learn anything personal about the candidates. Up to this point, not only do we not know their names, we don’t know where they live, what kind of education or work history they have, or anything. It’s fascinating, and never disappointing.

Let’s Meet

We invite all of our finalists to interviews on Zoom. A couple of us do a traditional interview, which is recorded so everyone on the team here can watch it later. I won’t say our interviews are anything particularly unique, although we do our best to keep things low key and allow the person we’re chatting with to be themselves.

Make the Best Case for Each Applicant

After the interviews are done, I assign people on our team the task of reviewing all of the submissions for a specific candidate and then making the strongest case possible for that person. I ask them to be an advocate for the candidate they have been assigned, highlighting all of their positive traits and telling everyone else why this person is the right person for the job.

We then have a big meeting where we go around the room and discuss each finalist. We start with their advocate, and then we all discuss and react. The goal here is to have the most thorough review process with multiple points of view weighing in on the decision.

Ultimately, I Make the Call

Depending on how things go during the review, I may or may not ask people to identify their own top candidate or even to rank them all on a pass/fail system. I make it clear, however, that the decision on who to hire is not a democratic one. As the person running the organization, I’m the one responsible for who we hire, especially if it doesn’t go well. I can’t outsource that responsibility to the team, and it would be unwise to do that, anyway.

At this point, however, I’m always pretty confident that the decision will be a good one. After all, we have a top candidate that we are pretty confident can do the job, will work well with the team, wants the job for the salary we have budgeted, and is ready to get started.

And I’m confident that it is not my own bias or superficial analysis that got us to this point but a thorough and thoughtful vetting designed to produce the best set of candidates possible.

There are few things more enjoyable in life than offering someone a job. That’s especially true when they’ve gone through this process. I’m sure that there are good people who don’t stand out in this system, but I have to believe the number is fewer than if we started with resumes, cover letters, and personal recommendations.

I’ve taken the time to share this because I want other people to copy our approach. There is a lot of amazing talent sidelined because they lack the resume or connections to stand out in a traditional process. Finding them is our Moneyball innovation. I would love all nonprofits and small businesses to benefit from it, so please copy this approach and modify it for your organization.

The Strong Towns Hiring Process