“Engineering Leadership” series of posts cover some tips and techniques for engineering managers to setup, scale and run high performing, long term focusses engineering teams. Current “Hiring & Onboarding 202” post does NOT intend to walk through how to identify right talent in the hiring process but explains how to have a result driven hiring process.

Having built multiple engineerings sites ground up till 50+ engineers in the past, I always consider hiring as one of the important processes to constantly learn, unlearn and evolve in the current competitive talent landscape. Many great leaders who could scale engineering orgs have peculiar and effective hiring methodologies. Hiring right talent fast has been single most successful factor in accelerating many leaders’ career path and ensuring they can deliver.

Challenges

Some of the challenges I faced and I frequently heard from my leaders during hiring process.

• “I need to build the team ASAP. Help me.”
• “Recruitment team is slow. I do not have enough of pipeline.”
• “Hiring 8 SDEs in 2 months? - This is impossible. Are we moving too fast?”
• “Hiring fast may dilute quality. What about sustainable growth for org.”
• “Candidates are not willing to relocate. Hiring in my City is hard”
• “I think we need to pay higher for this role?”
• “We have an offer rejection… The candidate did not show up on day of joining.”

What worked for me

Below are some of the things that worked for me where I was able to setup multiple engineering teams. The situations include -

• Setting up a ~ 30 member team from scratch in < 5 months.
• Growing a 60 member team to ~ 100 in < 6 months.
• Helping my over all org to move from 30 to 150 in < 1 year.

1. Own the Hiring, Hold yourself and team for a high Ownership bar

I have always owned the hiring process and outcomes myself and advice leaders to do the same. Recuitment team is a stakeholder and helps in your team setup. Avoid delegating hiring process to recruitment team and play the role of enabler. Have a high bar in each step that you are responsible for such as -

• Explain the hiring needs clearly, providing forecasting for head count.
• Always prioritze your positions. Not everything is a high priority.
• Provide clear job descriptions, examples and be part of sourcing.
• Scout for internal referenes. Reward the referrals.
• Exploratory discussions with candidates.
• Arragne interview panels as required.
• Be responsive. You are likely to receive larger feed of prospects to screen and decide on. Candidates pick your team if you are faster.
• Help other leaders in hiring by providing interview bandwidth.

2. Be a Good Partner to the Recruitment Team

Generally recruitment teams are handling multiple roles and are always packed. They co-own the goal of hiring for multiple leaders. Engineering leads who partner and collaborate well with recruitment teams yield better success. A few tips -

• Give ideas and quality feedback to your recruitment team.
• Feed the team with enough details of your business/product so they can communicate better with candidates.
• Understand their working style and make yourself available.
• Get to know your agencies beyond direct recruitment team. Help in sourcing by sharing internal refferals, your linked in contacts and etc.
• Don’t have metric driven relationship with recruiting. Socialize and learn the hiring trends across industry.
• Know the talent landscape/Limitations. Be flexible to ideas from team.

3. Have Regular Cadance and Consistent Process

Generally engineering leaders are packed with tons of things on a daily basis. Hiring can;t be taken as a part time activity as it demands quality time and constant focus.

• Have a weekly/biweekly or even more frequent regular catchups with recruitment teams.
• Have time blocked in your calendar to speak with candidates for exploratory discussions and interviews.
• Have template to exchange visibility on hiring process with your recruitment team and engineering leadership.

4. It’s all about hiring fast!! Every step should index for speed.

Some leaders are worried about sustainability and quality when they hire fast. They are concious about ‘hiring mistakes’. I disagree with that thought process. You always need to hire fast! Quality and sustainability comes together by holding high bar in candidate selection but not by being slow. Also, onboarding and initial engagement for candidates need to be taken into consideration when setting up teams especially new sites.

• Tweak your entire process to be faster. Identify the bottlenecks and make them faster.
• Sourcing: Explore all options available for sourcing. Sourcing is the top of your hiring funnel. Have a strong sourcing process.
• Interviews: Ensure interview panels are available. Reward interviewers for time spent. Coach panels. Maintain good interview experience bar.
• Debrief/Decision Making: Have timeline for giving your decision once onsites are done.
• Offer rollout and roll sell calls: Have clear and faster offer rollout mechanism and roll sell process for hired candidates.

5. Hold a High Bar. It Ensures Quality and Sustainability.

No matter what’s the speed at which you want to hire, hold a high and right hiring bar. Remember that high bar does not mean too many rejections. It has to deal with ensuring correct job leveling guidelines, souring right, having right interview loop consturcuted, having a bar raising and culure fitment discussions, providing visibility of the bar to candidates so they are well prepared. It;s not possible to ensure a 100% fit and successful hiring process but always improve iteratively. Note that having a wrong hire and replacing them is very costly.

6. Focus on Internal Talent Hiring.

Internal transfers are common in any medium to large size companies. Try to tap onto prospective internal candidates through good visibility for your team. Ensure that you are not ‘poaching’ any one. Your team’s reputation is key in attracting internal candidates who are looking for options. Internal hires are key when you are starting teams fresh as they bring in lots of tribal knowledge of the company and culture. They hit the road running fast.

When you are looking at internal hires -

• Follow internal procedures. Don’t skip the loop.
• Share as much as open information about team with the prospects. Understand mutual fitment.
• Talk to current manager, review the feedback and allow a graceful transfer process.
• Be transparent about career aspirations and growth oppurtunites of internal candidates.

7. Travel, Conduct Hiring Events. Go Blitz hiring!

You should reach out to talent in groups then letting them reach out to you. I could always hire faster by travelling across the country and some times cross borders. For example , When we had to help my sisters teams grow from 30 to 150 based on Bangalore, we travelled to 5 cities conducting hiring events twice a month. 70% of our hiring was done through these events.

• Prepare strong interview panels and recruiters who like to travel.
• Plan the hiring events across cities. Give time to the team for preparations.
• Plan ahead for a sufficient candidate foot fall on day of hiring. Let candidates go through pre- screening to ensure quality.
• Organize the event day well. Plan to roll out offers on the same day possibly or ASAP.

8. Post Offer Engagement.

Rolling out offers does not ensure candidates joining your team. We are in an extremely competitive space so focus well on post offer engagement.

• As a hiring manager stay in touch with offered candidate. Give them details on team, interesting work items, ramp up plan and etc.
• Connect offered candidates with some senior peers in team.
• Enourage them to read on some relevant topics.
• Have them possibly visit your office for a coffee chat or a socializing event.

9. Learn. Share the Feedback with Relevant Stakeholders.

Talent landscape, job market dynamics change very fast. Keep reviewing how hiring events, offer processes and get learnings each time something comes up your way. Obseve for pattrens of low quality pipeline, interview delays, bad candidate experience, offer rejections, no shows and learn from them. A few examples include -

• If an offer for a given role is being rejected due to compensation, it’s time to share it relevant team and review the same.
• If quality of pipeline or speed of interviews are not upto the mark, share this feedback and attempt to fix.
• Understand the hiring experiences of your peers.

You are not done yet… !

Onboarding 202

Hope all went well and the employee has joined your org. It’s very important to have a smoother onboarding process to ensure he settles down in his new role. This is an important step to ensure the hard work of hiring process starts seeing rewards.

1. Ensure you set expectations for onboarding in your first meeting. Give him first hand over view of team, stakeholders, his role, product’s vision and other applicable information that inspires the candidate and re assures/resets the image he had created of the environment during his wait to join.
2. Share the Personalised Plan for him. Introduce to key stakholders and team. Have a plan where he will be paces well and is learning as per his style. Generally engineers learn by doing.
3. Have a buddy and a mentor to assist during the initial days of his work. As a hiring manager, ensure you spend time with him initially.
4. Setup check points to connect and exchange details on how the onboarding plan is. Seek feedback on how the plan can be improved. Generally issues like obsoleteness of the documentation, better approach for current problems and etc. are shared by new team members.
5. Create an overall inclusive and welcoming environment to accept these while ensuring current limitations are communicated to them.