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March 10 - April 11, 2018
Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.
Instead of understanding why productivity has slowed or product quality is slipping and then crafting an appropriate solution, many companies simply crank up the hiring machine and “throw people at the problem.” Unfortunately, the complexity of managing a larger team often makes the problem worse, or introduces new ones.
Despite our focus on scaling teams, we recommend considering alternatives to hiring first. Process improvements, organizational changes, or canceling unnecessary projects may allow you to meet your goals with fewer new hires. This costs less, simplifies your job, and adds less risk to your business. In our experience, the complexity of managing a 100% growth rate team is more than twice as difficult as managing a 50% growth rate team.
We often hear the advice that you should only hire “A” players, but we believe that building an “A” team is more important.
Your goal should be to have every candidate walk away from the interview wanting to work for your company, whether you decide to make an offer or not.
Experienced interviewers often develop a strong gut feeling that kicks in 10 or 15 minutes into an interview. Because gut feelings can be a source of bias, they should not replace a thorough hiring decision; instead, they are an indicator that you should dig deeper — into the candidate, and your own reactions.
Some characteristics of team diversity are race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, physical ability, and sexual orientation. A more complete list can be found at CodeOfConduct.com
Form the founding team and choose early hires based on who shares values and ideas with you — people who are passionate about the mission of the team. If all these people are white and male, so be it. If they are black and female, so be it. After that, however, diversifying the team must be a high priority. We’ll
Referred employees stay longer at the company, and employees who made successful referrals stay longer than employees who didn’t.3
A high rate of referrals can be a very good indicator of company health. Conversely, a lack of referrals can mean employees are unhappy with their jobs or unsure about the future of the company.
Be careful to avoid creating subgroups comprising friends who were already friends before they joined. They can end up building their own culture, and then maybe even leaving the company together.
No referral bonus should be paid to managers who refer someone for their own team. Hiring for your own team is part of your job and shouldn’t generate extra pay.
Some companies (such as Amazon) have a progressive scale where the bonus gets larger for each referral generated. This can motivate employees to keep thinking of referrals and not stop after one or two, assuming that they’ve done their part.
Companies that don’t offer bonuses often state that referrals are just part of the job, and employees should refer great colleagues so that they can work with the best people. One can imagine that a bonus might encourage someone to refer less qualified colleagues, but hopefully your interview process is rigorous enough to filter out those who aren’t a good fit.
When selecting an external recruiter, we recommend the following: Ask your network to refer you to recruiters they’ve used successfully in the past. Check references; ideally, they’ve worked with companies that have a strong hiring process. A proven track record of unbiased (or less biased) hiring is important if you want to get diversity right. Interview them on how they calibrate with hiring managers, as this can tell you how well the recruiter will be able to find appropriate candidates. A recruiter who doesn’t understand what you need will have a hard time finding good people.
To align the hiring manager and the recruiter, you can use a calibration exercise, in which the recruiter prepares a list of 10–20 hypothetical candidates with different backgrounds, seniority levels, and strengths and weaknesses. The hiring manager and the recruiter then spend approximately one hour together, during which the hiring manager screens the CVs and explains to the recruiter why certain CVs are interesting and others are not.
One full-time recruiter typically hires one to two candidates each month for companies with rigorous hiring standards and adequate organizational support for the recruiting effort.
Your first recruiting hire will set the tone for your company’s employer brand.
In a typical startup, many people will be in roles where they are hiring for the first time and have no idea what they’re doing. A recruiter should be the subject matter expert.
Just make sure you keep up a regular cadence of posts. A stale, outdated blog is a disadvantage when it comes to recruiting.
We recommend establishing a time limit; you’ll receive fewer replies when there is no time limit.
Google’s research found that, after the fourth interview, each additional interview only increased their “decision accuracy” by a mere 1 percent:
In the beginning (until we had around 30 engineers), this seemed to work fine, but at a certain point, I started to notice a trend in the feedback: “It was nice, but I basically had the same interview five times.”
Confirms that a candidate’s skill set is a fit Ensures that a candidate is a culture and values match Gathers thorough feedback to create a comprehensive view of each candidate Ensures that everyone involved in the hiring process is heard Avoids hiring for the wrong reasons: desperation, favoritism, or otherwise
The ultimate goal of any hiring process is to maximize the probability that a new hire will be a successful, long-term contributor to the team.
Usually, everybody is a decision maker, but there are some exceptions, such as employees doing their first interviews. And interviews for high-level positions (VP of Engineering, for example) often include so many interviewers that giving each one a decision maker role would make consensus nearly impossible.
Not everybody is comfortable disagreeing with their boss openly. To avoid letting interviewers influence one another, follow these two suggestions: Ask interviewers to write up their feedback about the candidate before discussing it with the other interviewers. Let the highest-ranking interviewer speak last, so that person’s authority isn’t a factor in anyone’s feelings about the candidate.
Regularly remind the team to be aware of unconscious bias before they leave feedback, and call out stereotypical evaluation/feedback not based on merits but rather on differences (i.e., “lack of presence” for female candidates, “communication skills” for underrepresented minorities, etc.). To create awareness, we recommend you conduct an unconscious bias training with recruiters and hiring managers.
A headcount policy, for example — wherein each manager has a certain number of reports and wants to maintain that number — can cause teams to focus only on candidates with more experience.
Every minute devoted to putting the proper person in the proper slot is worth weeks of time later. Jim Collins, Good to Great
Reference checks should be mandatory for managers but can be optional for individual contributors.
Successfully closing a new hire, especially in a competitive market, requires a clear and compelling offer, presented the right way. It’s important that you: Make sure the candidate understands their future role at the company. Set clear expectations for the candidate’s first few months at the company. Make sure the candidate understands the financial aspects of the offer, especially any elements beyond the base salary. Bonuses and equity can be very difficult to understand, and candidates will appreciate any clarity you can provide.
In our experience, the closing rate is much higher when the same person leads a candidate all the way through the process.
Don’t rely on the possibility of additional requests to up the offer — a substantial percentage of candidates don’t like to negotiate, and for them the first offer is the final one. If they do negotiate, try to avoid a lengthy back-and-forth process by asking them to provide you the numbers that they will definitely sign. You may not be able to match them, but better to know this sooner rather than later.
The deal sponsor told me that once dispersed throughout engineering, the tight-knit Geoworks team (later dubbed the “Geoworks Mafia”) acted as a sort of communications backplane across the organization, allowing ideas and techniques to flow more efficiently between teams than they would otherwise.
Spending a day with the support team to understand how users perceive the product, and the most common complaints (if applicable)
New employees spend one or more weeks (depending on the learning curve) with each team, at least enough time to complete an easy task. By the end of the rotation, they’ll have worked with nearly everybody and built personal connections, and should have a decent overview of how the various components fit together.
The first three days of on-boarding are general company presentations (legal, marketing, product, and others), attended by new employees of all departments. Following that, we do one week with one session per day about engineering topics.
In all cases, it is worth doing a thorough exit interview, because often the reasons cited by the employee are not the actual reasons they are leaving. It’s much easier to say, “I’m just looking for new challenges” than to say, “I think my boss doesn’t like me.”
Remember, teams are groups of people. Because people are unique in their collection of talents and motivations, it’s rare that they can self-organize into a cohesive unit that can efficiently pursue a common goal. This is the key role that people managers play.
Maturity of the engineering team This is not simply “years of experience” (although it doesn’t hurt if your engineers have worked for a significant time at well-managed companies). But some engineers are simply more self-managing than others, requiring less time and input from their manager to get their job done, and less coaching on how to improve.4
The biggest challenge comes during compensation review when the VP relies on performance evaluations from the team leads to adjust salary for the entire engineering staff. That is a difficult week!
Management is a very different role requiring different talents from engineering to be successful. Not all great engineers will be great managers (and vice versa), and you want to avoid the situation where senior engineers end up feeling forced to do something they aren’t motivated or suited to do.
look for engineers who demonstrate the qualities you want to see in your management team (empathy, credit-sharing, mentorship, strategic thinking, etc.). Watch out for those who demonstrate warning signs such as an inability to handle conflict or stress, difficulty discussing sensitive subjects, and desire for more control or information access.
Minimize fanfare for new managers If you decide to have an existing team member take on management responsibilities, be restrained in your public praise for their transition, no matter how grateful you are (see “This is not a promotion”
Counteract this via occasional skip-level one-on-ones, where the head of the group meets directly with ICs, bypassing any managers in between. You can also use roundtable discussions (where a selected group of ICs meets with senior leaders), attendance at planning off-sites, or participation in executive staff meetings. Try to intentionally “flatten” the org so that communication between senior leaders and the rank-and-file doesn’t disappear, but is, in fact, strengthened.
Knowing which engineers will make great managers is a bit like knowing which professional athletes will make great professional coaches.
Find examples of when the IC has shown leadership. You want to see that they can guide the work of other engineers, helping them learn and become more effective.
As a manager, you can also try to evaluate whether a promising IC possesses some key traits that are correlated with management success. In rough priority order: Mentorship Do they happily help coworkers improve their skills and knowledge, even when it means slowing down their own work? Communication Can they clearly articulate complex ideas, in both verbal and written form? Can they address difficult subjects, such as critical feedback, without mincing words or being vague? Empathy Do they seem capable of understanding the feelings and perspective of others, even when they may feel
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The best management candidates are often smart and perceptive enough to know that it’s a hard job that they haven’t been trained for, and therefore be wary of it.
