Your recruiting process might be excellent.
Your new-hire experience might still be letting people down.
That's an uncomfortable thought, especially when you're the person responsible for recruiting.
And this week, I had a reason to think about it.
We received some leadership feedback about hotel arrangements and fleet coordination for a few of our out-of-town hires.
Nothing disastrous. Nobody dropped the ball. The work was getting done.
But it could have been cleaner.
I'll admit, that wasn't particularly enjoyable to hear.
My first instinct was to think about what we'd already accomplished, the communication that had taken place, and the pieces that were working.
But there's a problem with defending a process simply because it worked.
You can be so focused on whether something got done that you forget to ask how someone experienced it.
And that distinction matters more than we sometimes realize.
The decision we ask people to make
Think about what happens when someone considers changing jobs.
We interview them. Evaluate their qualifications. Discuss compensation. Explore their experience and determine whether they might be a good fit.
But somewhere in that process, they're evaluating us, too.
They're trying to understand whether our organization is somewhere they can succeed.
Whether our leaders are people they can trust.
Whether the opportunity we're describing actually aligns with what matters to them.
And sometimes, they're making that decision with a spouse, children, financial obligations, and a whole lot of uncertainty sitting quietly in the background.
That's why I created the PATH framework.
I felt something was missing as recruiting became increasingly focused on speed, technology, and efficiency.
Don't misunderstand me. I love technology.
I spent nearly an entire day this week working in SharePoint and Power Automate.
Apparently, that's my idea of a good time now.
But I never want technology to become a substitute for understanding people.
AI can help us identify talent, organize information, and eliminate repetitive work.
What it cannot do for us is take responsibility for the trust we're asking someone to place in our organization.
That's still our job.
And it doesn't end when someone accepts an offer.
The part we don't always see
I've been thinking about how much effort we invest in getting someone to say yes.
We source. We screen. We interview. We follow up. We negotiate. We communicate.
Then the candidate accepts.
Success.
Another position filled.
But what happens next?
The employee arrives for orientation. They're introduced to new people, new systems, new expectations, and an entirely different environment.
For an out-of-town hire, there may also be travel arrangements, hotel accommodations, transportation, and unfamiliar surroundings.
Every little interaction begins shaping their opinion of the decision they just made.
And here's what I find interesting.
The candidate who trusted us enough to accept the offer is now discovering whether the experience matches the conversations that earned that trust.
That doesn't mean every inconvenience becomes a crisis.
It means the details matter.
Not because people expect perfection, but because they are paying attention to how we respond when things aren't perfect.
I know I would be.
What if we're measuring the wrong finish line?
Earlier this week, one of the recruiters on my team celebrated his first anniversary.
I couldn't be more proud of the work he's done and the way he's embraced Better Hiring Conversations and PATH.
Watching him grow has been one of the most rewarding parts of my year.
But it also made me think about what we're really trying to accomplish.
Is our success measured by the number of people we hire?
Certainly, that's part of our responsibility.
But what about the people we hired six months ago?
Are they thriving?
Do they understand what's expected of them?
Are their hiring managers seeing the same things they are?
And perhaps most importantly, are we still having the conversations that helped us earn their trust in the first place?
Those questions led me to develop something I've been calling our One to 100 Engagement Plan.
It begins with a new-hire intake form that helps create a personalized playbook for the employee's first 100 days.
Both the new hire and hiring manager receive it.
Throughout those first 100 days, benchmark surveys will give both people opportunities to share their perspectives.
The goal isn't to create another administrative task.
Goodness knows we have enough of those.
The goal is to uncover the small disconnects that are easy to overlook.
Maybe expectations aren't quite aligned.
Maybe communication could be better.
Maybe something that seems insignificant to a manager is becoming increasingly frustrating for an employee.
Or maybe everything is going wonderfully, and we need to understand why.
I want to know.
Not after someone has resigned.
While we still have an opportunity to have a conversation.
Hire to retire
I've always loved that expression.
Hire to retire.
Not because I expect every person to stay with one organization forever.
But because I believe we should approach hiring with the intention of creating a relationship worth maintaining.
That takes work.
It takes more than a strong recruiting process.
And it certainly takes more than a polished orientation presentation and a welcome email.
It takes a willingness to listen when the feedback isn't flattering.
It takes recognizing that a hiring manager and a new employee might experience the same situation very differently.
And it takes understanding that the responsibility for a good hire doesn't belong to one department.
It belongs to everyone who influences that person's experience.
I'm not suggesting recruiting should own every part of onboarding or retention.
I'm suggesting we shouldn't become disconnected from the very people we worked so hard to understand.
That's an important difference.
The conversation that follows
I don't know yet what our One to 100 Engagement Plan will reveal.
We haven't collected the evidence to claim it will improve retention.
But I believe asking better questions and creating opportunities for honest feedback gives us a better chance of understanding the people we've hired.
And that's where PATH comes back into the picture.
I didn't create it to make recruiting sound more sophisticated.
I created it because I believe the quality of our conversations influences the quality of our decisions.
For both sides.
This week's leadership feedback reminded me that those decisions have consequences long after an offer is signed.
And spending Wednesday building a system to support the next 100 days reminded me that technology can serve the human experience rather than replace it.
Maybe that's the balance I'm still learning to find.
Using automation to create capacity.
Using that capacity to have better conversations.
And using those conversations to understand whether we're delivering on the expectations we helped create.
Because at some point, every new hire stops listening to what we say about our organization.
They start experiencing who we really are.
And I wonder how often we take the time to ask whether those two things match.
Until next Friday,
Brandon Labonte
Better Hiring Conversations
Better conversations. Better decisions. Better outcomes.