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Recruiters are a confidence engine
Who owns the goal
At many companies the recruiting team owns the hiring goal, even though recruiters never make hiring decisions. The goal ends up sitting with people who do not decide, and the two facts pull against each other.
Where accountability gets lost
No one feels the joy or the pain of a good or bad hire more than the hiring manager and the team. A recruiting organization carries none of the decision and none of the benefit or cost, so handing it the accountability means the act of recruiting has been handed to a function of recruiting. The thread is lost at that handoff.
Fixing it at Cursor
The remedy starts with measurement. What gets measured gets done, so hiring gets tracked the way uptime, customer satisfaction, or revenue is tracked, and hiring managers and leaders are held accountable for it with rewards and recognition around it. At Cursor, hiring is manager led with no hiring committee. The manager collects input from the team, a debrief happens the same day or the next, and the decision goes to the founders for a stamp.
Why does helping make a decision change effort?
Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely published the IKEA effect study in 2012. Participants who assembled a product themselves valued it more than identical pre-assembled items. People attach value to outcomes they helped bring about. A manager who chooses a hire carries that same attachment into the person's first year.
Why do measures change behavior once targeted?
Economist Charles Goodhart observed in 1975 that a statistical regularity tends to collapse once it is used as a target. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later restated it as the phrase when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. People shift effort toward whatever is counted. That is why counting a result such as hires made can improve it and also distort it.
How do large firms usually route hiring decisions?
Many large companies use hiring committees to spread the decision across several people. Laszlo Bock, who led people operations at Google, described its committee process in his 2015 book Work Rules!. The committee reviews packets of interview feedback and makes a recommendation, which separates the people who met a candidate from the people who decide. Other firms keep the decision with the hiring manager alone.
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