The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You

by Julie Zhuo

At the end of the day, you are the person who ultimately owns the team you build.

A great hiring manager brings her understanding of the role—what it needs and why it’s exciting—as well as her time to personally connect with candidates.

Describe Your Ideal Candidate as Precisely as You Can

be specific about the skills or experiences you are looking for.

Develop a Sourcing Strategy

sit down with the recruiter and brainstorm where to look for your ideal candidate.

our ideal candidate would have experience working at both a design agency as well as a tech company because that combination often produces a healthy balance of vision and pragmatic know-how.

I should send out the introductory email instead of the recruiter so the experience felt personal right off the bat.

her recruiting team noticed that a surprising number of their top data-science leaders shared an interest in music.

many times I have had candidates accept and tell me that part of their reason for doing so was because the interview process felt so attentive, focused, and fast.

Even when you don’t end up extending an offer, an amazing interview experience tells prospective hires that you care about the people who might be the future of your organization.

Who was going to reach out and thank the candidate for his time?

By working in tandem on the interview experience, we avoided common mistakes like leaving days or weeks in between next steps, asking candidates to repeat themselves over and over, or giving them conflicting or confusing information.

Show Candidates How Much Yo...

The more distance you create in the process—for example, letting a week lapse between communications—the more likely the answer is no.

The more senior the candidate, the more critical your involvement is in the close because that person likely has many options, and you are looking for her to play a leadership role within your team.

Help her understand why the role is exciting and why she’s the perfect person to tackle these big problems.

HIRING IS A GAMBLE, BUT MAKE...

Google crunched the numbers on tens of thousands of interviews to see if there was a correlation between how high an interviewer rated the interaction and how well the candidate went on to perform. What they found was that there was “zero relationship” and that it was “a complete random mess.

a handful of interviews isn’t ever going to be a perfectly reliable predictor of someone’s success.

An interview can only hope to simulate how well a candidate does on a smaller problem in a fraction of the time.

people are capable of enormous change.

Examine Past Examples of Similar Work

how they’ve done in the past on similar projects in similar environments.

internships are so valuable; when someone joins your team for a few months, you get a much better understanding of how they work.