The best way to scale your hiring in both volume and quality is to create a solid mini-project ("prompt") to allow candidates that look good "on paper" to demonstrate their Super-Powers, their passion to want to become part of your team, and their understanding of your business and the opportunity. Here are a few ideas to create your own "Screening Prompt". I've written them as an email that you can send to candidates that you have selected based on their profile (resume, and maybe a cover letter).
“Dear Jane,
Thank you for applying for the Digital Marketing Manager (aka "Growth Hacker") position at our company.
In addition to getting to know you through video- or in-person interviews, it’s going to be your work that will impress us. For that reason, we encourage you to complete one (or more) of the following prompts below before we take the next step.
To make your "homework" meaningful, we came up with three examples that are real and should be usable right away if you land the job.
FRICTION
Please "Mystery Shop" us, and share your findings. What's your experience as a prospect or visitor? How do we follow up and where do you see friction or potential confusion? What would you do to improve this early part of the funnel?
EXPERIMENTATION
Looking at our website and the content, please "design" and share an experiment that you would propose we run. An A/B or multi-variant test that would get us new insight and be actionable. How would you think about that and what criteria would you use to make this meaningful?
CONVERSION
As part of the mystery shopping, how would you improve our website content, email communication, and landing pages to drive engagement and have people take the next step? Feel free to write an example email that can be the first email someone would see from us and that has a great "Call-to-Action" (feel free to make up anything we would promise them in an email like that).
PICK
Feel free to pick any of the three examples that help you impress us. You can do more than one as well. This exercise is not about quantity though. It’s about letting your qualities and talents shine.
Thank you again for applying to become part of our team. This role is one of the most strategic positions on the team, and we look forward to seeing your work and get to know you better.
Please post your work as a google doc and share it with us as part of the next step in this journey.
Stijn"
I hope this helps you get great candidates. Many prospects will probably not take this leap, and I believe that's ok. You only should be talking with the potential hires who are willing to invest this type of effort into such an important decision.
