Here are some lessons on hiring top talent:
- Be creative and realistic in designing the job spec
- The job spec should look attractive to candidates. It is best to formulate the job description as a mixture of what the job demands and what employees enjoy doing. For example, in a core service that one of my teams is supporting, I worked with business stakeholders to create an element of AI in a process which would help business become more automated and then used that AI element in the job spec to attract new developers.
- The job description should honestly explain the work involved. For example, if you have most of the logic in stored procs and little work in designing distributed scalable services, describe your job with honesty as related to SQL rather than distributed systems so that the candidate understands the work involved and is later happy doing it.
- Work with your team to create the job spec. Developers who are actually doing the work are more tuned with the work and what other developers at their level are looking for. Involving the team in creating the job spec helps create a better bond within the team.
- Get a good set of interviewers and train them well
- In some companies a central interviewing body for the company consisting of top developers constitutes the interviewers. While having a good set of interviewers across the company is good, my observations on this matter are that this brings in developers who don’t mesh will with the current teams.
- What I have found working better is an interview group consisting of some members from the team the candidate is interviewing for added to the firmwide interviewing body who jointly execute the interview. The purpose of involving the team the candidate is being interviewed for is that the current developers in the team are better tuned to identify qualities needed to succeed in the job while interviewers from the firmwide body ensure that the strategic goals of the organization are being met as part of the hire.
- Choose the interviewers smartly and then train these interviewers appropriately. The group of interviewers should be comfortable with hiring people smarter than themselves rather than looking out for average candidates. Good interviewing is a complex task and therefore needs proper attention for training the interviewers.
- Choose a standard set of questions so all interviewees are gauged to the same reference. Pay attention to having a solid set of questions that cover key aspects of what the organization is looking for in the candidates. I see too many companies using the most difficult algorithm questions in 30-minute interviews; interviewers should gauge whether they can themselves do those questions without too much difficulty in the allotted time. Rotate these questions every few months, I have seen too many companies use the same set of questions for years while their questions are available on various sites and this defeats the purpose of having a good set of questions.
- Interviews should be conducted where the objective is to determine if the interviewee has ability to do the work the job demands and possess capability to collaborate when brainstorming for a solution with the team. Therefore, it is best to create a set of hints for each question where interviewers work through the questions with the interviewee while providing hints appropriately to gauge the candidate’s collaboration and communication abilities in addition to their problem-solving capabilities.
- Train your interviewees to avoid biases during interviews.
- Have a reasonable number of interviews
- The best candidates will be passed offers quickly and will avoid your company’s path if you have too many interviewers unless you are one of the top companies in your area of expertise.
- I have seen the below set of interviews work well for most engineering jobs:
- Manager screens the resume
- HR checks the candidate
- Candidate takes an online test such as one on hackerrank or a developer does a phone interview
- Candidate does another interview with a phone screening team consisting of folks from within the team and firmwide interviewing body
- Candidate is brought onsite where a full day of interviews are scheduled
- Candidate is taken for lunch where the interviewer gauges the candidate’s communication and other soft skills
- If the candidate is successful until this point, the hiring manager takes time to understand the candidate and explain them the job. The goal here is to explain to the candidate what the job involves so that the candidate is not surprised when he or she actually joins the team
- Hiring body follows a systematic approach in gathering feedback on the candidate and making a data driven hiring decision
- Spend time on checking references
- HR negotiates the salary and passes the offer
- Manager stays in communication with the candidate while selling the candidate the job. This is important as the candidate likely has other options and you need the candidate to stay engaged
- Fill the hiring channel with a good number of candidates
- The ability of candidates coming into the hiring stream should be close to the job requirements. For example, if you have a very big hiring pool but 95% of the candidates are failing the phone screen, then you are just wasting your engineer’s time. A better approach would be to have a smaller candidate pool but one where 20% of the candidates pass the phone screen.
- Use all means at your disposal to fill the candidate pool with good candidates
- Look internally within the company to fill the position.
- Use your and your team’s network to look for the candidate.
- A large number of quality candidates are in-fact not looking for jobs. Have your recruiting team reach out to candidates in your competitor companies.
- Hiring manager should get involved with the recruiters and understand their pipelines so as to come up with a creative way to improve the candidate pool.
- Leverage feedback from references
- References can shed a lot of light on the candidate and hence must be appropriately leveraged
- Should check managers, peers and direct report references
- Give appropriate compensation and title to the candidate
- Compensation and title should be inline with what other employees within the company are getting. Otherwise, the existing staff eventually discovers the trend and feels demotivated.
- I have often found that because of their need to fill roles, companies are willing to pay a higher salary or give a higher title to a new candidate compared to those with equivalent talent internally. While this results in a short-term win, it leads to a system where high turnaround occurs and in the long run, the companies end up over-spending.
- Keep reanalyzing your interview process by analytically looking at the data and figuring out ways to readjust it. Many companies create a good system but fail to keep it up to date and in a few years, the system fails to keep pace with the current market conditions.
- Ideas on not losing top talent
- Please have a look at my article here on keeping employees motivated
- In addition, below are some ideas that will help prevent top talent from leaving your company.
- Demonstrate active support for the candidate’s interest and ambitions.
- Try to look at the equation from what the job can do for the candidate and sell that to the candidate.
- Employee Onboarding
- The onboarding process provides an excellent opportunity to provide a significant and lasting impression in the first few week’s of the employee’s tenure at the company.
- The team should have a smooth induction for the employee via a good introduction to the organization, products, repos, tooling, expectations and engineering culture.
- The hiring manager should do regular check-ins with the new hire with intention of coaching and providing feedback that enables the candidate to charter a good course. Don’t just throw the new candidate on the deep end and expect the candidate to either swim or sink.
- Take exit interviews seriously
- Understand what was the cause of exit and rectify it.
- Most employees don’t leave for more money but instead leave because they are unable to realize their potential or due to bad relationships within the company. If you see a pattern here, rectify it.
References:
https://hbr.org/2019/05/your-approach-to-hiring-is-all-wrong
https://hbr.org/2009/05/the-definitive-guide-to-recruiting-in-good-times-and-bad
https://hbr.org/2021/01/your-star-employee-just-quit-will-others-follow
https://hbr.org/2020/05/now-is-an-unprecedented-opportunity-to-hire-great-talent
HBR Essentials: Hiring And Keeping The Best People