Getting up to speed on Hiring
“Hiring is the most important thing we do” - we hear that all the time, even on low investment tides. All companies have a HR or People Team which has some sort of structure to support hiring.
They are an important part of of delivery, either perceived as one of the reason of a block - “We can't deliver because we need more engineers” or a key team on hyper growth times - “We have to triple our engineering team before EoY".
I will talk about the most common I experienced more and how to get into the loop to perform the most important task you need to do. It is important to note that hiring at any scale resembles a sales funnel:
The names will change locally but in general these are the steps - at scale and speed they can get parallelized or merged. At each step you will see distinct dynamics based on how many candidates were approved from the previous step.
You don't have to - you should not - adopt Google or Facebook processes to be successful. You can get inspired but take your own culture into account. There is a risk that using part of processes you have not lived thought the scale that created them, will make one of the hiring funnel steps harder or too limiting/permissive, hinder progress and outcomes of the following steps.
The common complaints are time to fill a position, low number of hired engineers are background, seniority and offers that are not accepted. If you consider to the expected end result - to hire people to help you overcome your challenges, these questions can be described as symptoms of combined issues in distinct parts of the funnel.
Preparare to contribute
To contribute positively and to get your team involved into the hiring process, each step has to have a clear description and expected results. If they don't that's part of your job. Start by defining metrics that are easy to explain and describe progress - just like sales.
Look for Diversity distribution, positions closed over time, time to close a position, balance of seniority and new hires churn before 6 months. If you can find them it means that your organization is very mature.
Make it common to share these metrics with your team leads and at team wide meetings so everyone is in the same page. If you don't find them don't be scared, they are easy to gather.
If it is your first time you get more involved with hiring I strongly advise to become friends with your talent acquisition (TA) team. You will learn that the differences of resources are big - budget, time, workload management are a world apart of what an engineer experience within a product development team.
Also define hiring managers that know their place in the process: they own grading, budget, team or some part of a product, so their opinion is very important in a process ran by people from different teams. It is hard to hire by yourself, it is a communal process.
To effectively contribute as an Engineering Leadership you will have to dig into each step of the funnel, pick a local metric and task to do. Let's walk to each step and figure out how to contribute:
Top of the funnel (Acquisition and Screening)
help to look into the new sourcing channels: bootcamps, companies, user groups
write better job descriptions (preferentially that does not ask the world from a junior candidate)
identify affirmative positions and the balance of diversity.
Contributing with LinkedIn parties
Build a referral list of past colleagues you and your team liked to work with
Besides working with acquisitions, most of the time TAs are responsible for screening candidates. Knowing what you are looking for and the company culture is their super power.
If you contribute with the TA team to understand what you mean by the job description you gave them - they will help you understand how it fits to the company culture, what other teams have been doing and screen for successful candidates.
Interviews
Have and share control of your agenda to reserve time to do interviews. If it is hard to get to time with you the candidate will experience longer time between steps and it will increase the time it takes from first contact to closing an offer. Timing is important as other companies are hiring. People will get tired of waiting.
Trim how many interview steps you need. If there are any conditionals, make it explicit: a candidate for a junior position identified as senior may have one or two steps added. Make that clear for your team and for the candidate.
Be pragmatic to define how many interviews you need: technical, culture, behavioral. My worst case scenario was 17 interviews for a leadership position. I had the time and I felt confident the company would get what they needed to know. Most people I know would quit the process way before that.
If you don't have guidelines to interview, adopt questions and acceptable answers (a rubric) that your team can be trained on. Consistency helps a lot in this stage. The training can be run by HR, TAs or Tech Leads. It doesn't needs to be too complex, role playing games are very helpful here.
When getting new people to interview, have them to shadow more experienced interviewers, then reverse-shadow (they interview and an experienced person shadows to give feedback), then get into rotation.
Make sure that all interviews have a summary based on the questions and information you look for. Technical interview rubrics help a lot to compare candidates to the role. Behavioral or Value interviews can carry examples of how the presence of a given behavior or value. There are SaaS platforms to do it but a Google Doc for each candidate already helps on that.
Make sure all interview scorecards carry the interviewer assessment: Yes or No. Don't let the Maybe get into this stage. If you are not sure, it is a No.
Committee
Committees are simple - they help you catch things that were overseen in other steps and refine the hiring process. They can be seen as an extra step but that helps a lot to have people that haven't interviewed a candidate ask questions after reading the Scorecard we mentioned before.
They should be simple, keep questions straight and benefit from candid feedback. Avoid creating new rules at them, be clear on feedback and don't get carried by day to day urgencies.
As part of the committee you can give Yes or No if you are unsure and use the space to properly grade the candidate if it was not possible before.
The hiring manager has an important role in this stage to iron out all remaining questions as they will be accountable for the candidate success.
Offer
After the committee and if all decisions point to a Yes, it is time to work with HR in an offer. The hiring manager will have to assist here in a format that contains the salary, benefits, variable compensation, what is the role and so on.
If you do, create a template for that so they are comparable. After filling them and approving the hire, get in contact with the candidate to send and explain the offer, creating a space so they can read and have meaningful questions. There are a lot of offers turned down due to details that can be discussed but are oversaw.
Remember that's a moment of high anxiety for the candidate so you have to create the proper space to discuss the offer.
Onboarding
Well, that's for another post ! Don't be frustrated if you don't nail the process right away. Use the metrics to incrementally improve it.
I've released a book called The CTO Field Guide. It is a book to help Tech Leads, Directors of Engineering and CTO to get up and running in their jobs. You can get it here