What is your approach to hiring?

When hiring, I think that candidates are interviewing us as well so I make an explicit and intentional effort to ensure our hiring process is fair, inclusive, respectful, and overall a positive experience. To achieve this, I believe consistency in the interview process is key.

While designing the interview process for a particular role, we start by discussing our motivation behind opening the role, which challenges will they be working on and how do we hope to see them grow in our organization. Answering these questions allows us to identify the skills that we’re looking and give us the ability to:

I’ll give you some context. The Applications Engineering team really values both IQ/EQ, which is engineering background or scientific background – so obviously you’re technical and analytical. On the other hand, we love to talk to customers. A lot of our job was flying out to customer sites in Asia or Europe and talking to these users, which range from operators to scientists. These individuals have to have both skill sets, having high IQ and EQ. Those are the two things we wanted to test for in the hiring process.

I look for people who aren’t only good designers with empathy for users. Empathy for users is the absolute minimum requirement for working as a designer. I want to know: can this person talk to engineers? Can they present to executives? Is there a drive to validate assumptions with customers, and to learn and iterate?

Generally speaking, I work hard to make the process human. Everyone will agree that hiring is expensive and stressful. What is often lost when developing a hiring process is that it’s expensive and stressful for both parties. As a result, organizations end up with a process that optimizes for the hiring party. Aggressive scheduling, an opaque process, sunset dates, and gotcha-style interview sessions all put a strong candidate at risk. And not just in terms of performance: Many of these are the antithesis of inclusive.

I take a holistic approach to the hiring process. I don’t like to be constrained to one source of candidates, so I take advantage of in-person introductions at industry meetups, LinkedIn, and references from trusted colleagues and existing team members. To stay ahead of the curve, Kindred looks to hire the top 1% of the applicant pool.

I can share a little more about our approach to hiring engineers: at Asana, we look for engineering generalists. For example, we use Typescript and React, but we don’t require candidates to know it when they apply – we believe a good engineer will be able to pick it up quickly. We look for engineers who demonstrate a strong desire to learn, communicate and collaborate well, value autonomy and have well-rounded fundamental coding and engineering design skills. Our interview process also looks different. We don’t want candidates to feel stressed about potential “gotcha” questions. We want every candidate who comes into an interview with us to…

I am a strong believer in heavily investing in building an engineering brand. This is based on my experience with the iOS community, where I was able to hire folks that I met at conferences, interacted with through open source, etc. The fight over talent in the Bay Area is intense.

The team that candidates will be working with and learning from is one of the most important criteria in their decision making process.

I think hiring is about 3 things: potential, trajectory, and performance. Specifically in that order. Performance is largely a side effect of potential and trajectory. Sort of like luck is a combination of skill and opportunity. Technology changes so fast, much of our knowledge and skills will be obsolete in 5 years. I’d rather have someone with high potential and on a solid trajectory than a great performer whose trajectory has flatlined. The great performer will be obsolete in 5 years.

I value many leadership principles, but few that I keenly look for are Bias for Action, Customer Obsession and Thought Diversity.

Speed matters in business, so I advocate and practice looking for talent that is able to take calculated risks and being comfortable dealing with ambiguity. This fosters creativity and timely delivery of results.

I strongly believe that starting with the customers and working backward holds the key to most successful business decisions, and the hiring approach should reflect this too.

Hiring is the single most import thing I do. Each new person has a potentially huge impact on the organization (positive or negative!). Here are some key lessons:

In general terms, we look for Happy, Helpful, Curious, and Accountable. Those are our core values, and historically most people that didn’t last long in our organization had significant failures in one or more of these categories. Hard skills are obviously important, but these core values are pretty difficult to learn or significantly improve.

More concretely, I try to follow the historic data as much as possible and refine my process to improve our success rate. Some of the maxims I’ve found over time and try to correct in myself and others on my team are:

I emphasize on aptitude and attitude over proven expertise and knowledge. When I talk directly to a candidate, I take the time to explain our bigger goals and priorities, why the job matters and who the candidate would get to work with. The selection process for the right candidate can be arduous and time-consuming however it is always worth the effort. Mostly the hiring process includes phone screen followed by face to face interview for in-depth discussion. The actual interviews differ depending on the role the candidate is applying to – for engineers, the process involves significant technical discussion including writing and explaining…

Hiring is one of the areas where I do really well and it’s something that I enjoy. I have a natural aptitude for it, which is definitely not true of all of the competencies involved in technical leadership for me, personally. There’s some basic expectations that need to be set with the team. One is with the engineering leadership team, itself, and the understanding that hiring is part of the job. There are a lot of engineering leaders that have this misconception that hiring is something that recruiting does with their help. But really, it is the opposite: the primary responsibility lies with the engineering managers and recruiting is there…

There are a lot of challenges. Hiring the wrong person is worse than hiring no one at all, so we have an incredibly high bar. Hiring can’t be rushed. You can’t control who is applying or when great engineers are ready to switch jobs. Instead, I find myself focusing more on retention and growing our current engineers.

As a manager of centralized teams, I tend to have a high technical expectations for broad generalists. I find that people who are curious and can learn fast generally thrive on my team. These attributes often make it challenging to source candidates. Essentially, I’m asking: you don’t have to know everything about a specific product/tool/system but I do need you to have enough experience using them as an engineer (user) and an owner (implementer/maintainer). And, typically, you should have opinions on more than a few different options. Be able to weigh the pros and cons and be discerning enough with your judgment that results in an optimal…

This is a great question. Thank you for asking. I talk to a lot of people outside of my company and in the meet-ups or just meeting someone for coffee. A lot of people think about hiring like that, “Oh Eugene. We’re fine now.”. Then you meet somebody in a couple of weeks and is like, “Oh my lead developer left, so I need to find somebody urgent”.

You need to concentrate on hiring as a part of your day-to-day job. It starts with a vision of your company. Where you want to be as a company. What is your strategy to grow? What is your roadmap? Then coming down based on your roadmap, what demand you will have for your team.

Yeah, I’m big a proponent, as you might tell, but diversity and inclusion, especially here at Airbnb… So one of the things for my approaches is to be proactively, so I help put together a lot of recruiting events inside of Airbnb. Even as much as traveling to different countries and setting up conferences and onsite recruiting. One of those places we just finished a month ago, we went to Mexico City and Guadalajara. We did a tech conference and event and then we had a full day of back to back on site recruiting. We sent ten engineers from here. And the whole thing, it was led by myself and someone else: David from recruiting.

As the CTO, I’m still involved in most of the recruiting and hiring, because we are a fast growing team and each hire is very important at this stage of the business. I primarily use referrals and LinkedIn for recruiting. LinkedIn is pretty great for finding a pool of talent, although keep in mind that it does represent just a fraction of the candidate pool, since profiles can be incomplete or absent entirely. That’s why referrals are so important: if I have already invested the time to hire a really good engineer that I trust, then their referral should hold more weight than any other form of recruiting.

If time permits, I like to do sourcing myself. This gives me the chance to reach out to folks who I know through shared networks. I also prefer to reach out to the communities through channels where their natural communication happens – these days it usually means Slack or Discord. When doing that, I pay special attention not to violate any rules or guidelines of the given community, and use chat rooms dedicated to this purpose. If you are looking for web engineers, Reddit can be helpful too, as the React subreddit has a “who is hiring” section every month.

I have found that there are a couple things I’m looking for when I hire… empathy, a yearning to prove yourself, and understanding of technology. I mean, generally I do things most other people do, but with some twists. I care a lot less about what you’ve done and a whole lot more about what you want to do. I also believe that anything that resembles an algorithm interview is… totally absolutely harmful and not useful.

Funny you should ask. Hiring is something I really enjoy doing. My approach to hiring is actually simple, there are 3 steps to it – 1) Preparation 2) Execution 3) Evaluation. And no surprise, a lot of the work is in preparation, being clear with the what, the why and the how.

I spoke about this topic, hiring the best technical talent like a boss, at a CTO summit in Sydney last year and shared my strategies and frameworks. Feel free to download my deck. I enjoy hiring for a few reasons, it is a critical task, one that is both important and urgent and it can transform the culture of a team to better or worse.

https://youtu.be/CcCjqC4QohU

I look for three main things: passion, willingness to help others, and creative problem solving. I try to understand what has driven a person in the past and what motivates them on a day-to-day basis. For people with more experience, this means getting into the details of projects that they are proud of. This is very useful in shining a light on what goes on in their mind and what motivates them. Everyone brings a different perspective. People focus on different things at work and are motivated by different things, so spending time on making sure their motivation and the needs of the team are aligned is important.

It’s related to the first question, actually. Because of the difficulty in opening people up to self-awareness, you need to consider that at the beginning when hiring. What’s the criteria for hiring, so that you can have the right people on your team? To me, the most important aspects are personal characteristics because I want to have my team with that growth mindset. Do you have self-awareness and really embrace growth and changes, so we have an open mind here? We have a need to be humble and don’t just have a fixed mindset where there’s no way to grow or change. I think that’s my number one hiring criteria: Has to have a growth mentality.…

Once we know that the candidate’s skills meet the minimum required threshold level, we look at attitude, thinking, and curiosity. Unfortunately, in the real world, it’s tough to go to recruiters and say: “Hey, I want to hire someone with the right attitude. I want to hire someone who can think well and has lots of curiosity.” How the heck is a recruiter going to find a person based on that description?

Right, yeah. I was about to deal with that. The challenge of trying to build an engineering team that was broadly representative was pretty fun. And we did in a couple of ways. The first thing we did was design a hiring process that could remove as much bias as possible. Take old tests with a very specific rubric instead of white-boarding or real-time challenges where some people may not be as comfortable as others. If English is not your native speaking language, then you’re already a step behind if you want to do an interview, or white-boarding. There’s a few of these.

When hiring, I try to focus on work ethic, attitude, passion, and an ability to admit to past failures. We can train for skill later!

I only hire motivated, driven, curious people with positive attitudes. Obviously people will have “off” days. I also require that people can admit to, and demonstrate that they learn from, past mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but those who can articulate and teach others what they learned from mistakes will improve the culture of our organizations.

We’re a mission-oriented company. People join us because they are inspired by the mission of changing healthcare. We want to build exposure to that mission into the entire recruiting process and make sure that the people that end up joining us have a reason they want to work at One Medical (as opposed to any other company). Ultimately hiring is not just about adding people to the team, it’s about retaining great people over time. We want to make sure that the people that join us are going to be good fits for the long haul.

Certainly, yes. Hiring is an important day to day activity that an engineering manager follows in any team. And like everyone, I use LinkedIn. One of the important pieces in LinkedIn is to say vocally and advertise that you are hiring. And the way you can say that is when somebody sees a LinkedIn profile on the job description, you can say, “I’m hiring for so and so engineers, with these many years of experience.” And this can attract a lot of candidates to send you LinkedIn requests. And you can look at their profiles and their resumes and bring them all for interviews. The other aspect of LinkedIn, which not many engineering managers may…

There is no quick answer to this one. Hiring top talent is the key to build any successful organization, yet the job market in the silicon valley is super competitive and will become more so in the next few years. Recruiting is a long-term investment and requires lots of diligence and hard work. To begin with, you need to have a crystal clear understanding of what kind of talents you are looking for and a strategy to create a healthy pipeline with such talents from all sources. You need to build a strong team (recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers) and identify metrics to monitor. You need to get the basics right, that is, making…

In hiring, I find it really important to set up an inclusive hiring process, and throughout its design and execution, provide a positive candidate experience, positive interviewer experience, and fair evaluations.

So on hiring itself, I think the lessons are pretty consistent – in the end, you’re looking for talent. The questions are, where are you looking for talent? How are you thinking about sourcing and identifying talent? That is really important. Trying to get creative about how wide of a net you cast and then making sure that you have real clarity on how you’re identifying talent.

I actually think this is the single most important thing you can possibly do for your team is to make sure that hiring and recruiting works well because at the end of the day, you as a manager, you’re not going to be able to do everything on your own. You have to trust that people will do great job and so you have to have the right people in place. When I look at engineers and engineering managers, there are several kind of traits that I’m typically looking for. Obviously we want to all hire technically strong people that understand the technology really well and know how to code very well. But what I found predicts success more than…

When I hire, of course I hire with a certain role in mind. However, instead of trying find someone who perfectly fits into the role today, I feel much more comfortable to hire a person who has potential to grow into this role and beyond this role. This means in many cases, I don’t look for an exact match with a candidate’s prior experience, but I look for intelligence, passion, focus and diversity of experience, and approach to solving problems. If I think the person can fill the role soon, but will possibly outgrow this role at some point, then I feel comfortable hiring this person. This means two things. First, it means taking a risk,…

Identify the required skills and values for the role. Turn that into an inclusive job description using Textio. Aggressively share my vision with my hiring panel through a position-specific, values-aligned document and a pre-huddle meeting. Continuously calibrate in post-huddle meetings to ensure that we’re all assessing for the right skills and values. Iterate. Sell, sell, sell.

My co-author Ron and I agree strongly that the most important job a manager has is to hire the right people. It’s why it’s number 1 on my list above. I’ve probably hired thousands of people (directly or indirectly) over my 40+ year career, and I know my approach to hiring improved over time. Early on I was probably looking more for specific experience. But I gravitated to the following attributes for those I hire:

background and experience smarts character and interpersonal skills passion

We started with a few fundamental principles considering our fully remote organization, with everyone working from home. We have remained true to these for the six plus years I have been at Sonatype. They resulted in extremely high success rates from the start, and the evolutionary refinements we have made since then have been to improve efficiency. This has benefitted both the candidates and everyone that participates in the recruiting process from Sonatype. The basic tenants of our hiring practices are:

I look for people whole will fit with the team. People who understand production. I naturally prefer people with a performance background because when you are on stage, or supporting someone on stage, your success is based upon the whole team, not an individual. (Remember the whole person?). If a person is smart, they can learn a skill. If a person is patient, they can work on a team. If a person is engaged, they will find a path forward.

In terms of hiring, there are few important things. I believe technical foundation is important for hiring engineers but this is not the only criteria. What I like to focus on is to build a diverse, engaged, and effective team. I pay a lot of attention to the culture and also people’s passion and drive.

I believe strongly in the hiring philosophy Steve Jobs had: hiring smart people to tell us what to do, and who work well in an autonomous environment. At Codecademy, we look for people who think like a founder, who are willing to take on multiple responsibilities and do things outside of their job descriptions.

I look for individuals who aren’t just technically strong but are also able to communicate their ideas well and, most importantly, advocate for ideas of others. One of my favorite interview questions is, “When was the last time you advocated for someone else’s idea or initiative and how did you go about it?”

At Stitch Fix, we seek to hire bright, kind, and goal oriented people. I find if we get those three things right a lot of other things get much easier.

Beyond that, I look for people who ship meaningful things and care deeply about the impact of their work.

As to process, I find it incredibly important to design an appropriate hiring process for your current stage of a company. If you’re a 3 person company you shouldn’t try to replicate Stitch Fix’s hiring process. And we shouldn’t try to replicate Google’s hiring process.

I hire in San Francisco and it’s a very competitive environment. And I would say there are two things. I think, as a PM, a lot of things are actually teachable, and so we look for hiring people that are really smart and have strong drive to improve and cares about customer. And that’s probably, I have to say, these are the things that are hardest to teach. But everything else, like UX design, analytical feel, strategic thinking, it’s actually more or less teachable and we try to kind of boil down to like the core things that we think are critical for the product management job, and that is being able to process new information quickly,…

My approach to hiring is to look for people that have three qualities – Willingness to learn, flexible attitude and an inquisitive mind.

In technology, people with great technical knowledge are hired and they are very good at what they do. Sometimes, technical experts,are only good at what they know, and don’t want to learn. They just want to stay inside their box. But technology environment is constantly and we have to keep on learning. So I’m always looking for people who have the ability to learn, who are willing to learn, and want to learn.

I have really thought a lot about this. We can teach technical skills, but it’s really hard to motivate people. There’s a lady named Erika Anderson who’s author of a book called Be Bad First with the subtitle of Getting Good at Things Fast so You Stay Ready for the Future. She puts forward a model of, it’s called ANEW, so look for people that are Aspirational, that have a Neutral self image, that have Exceeding curiosity, and they are Willing to be bad before they’re good. If we are able to hire people that have that philosophy, then my experience has been, I don’t have to motivate them every day. They come to work ready to do good things,…

Have clear explicit goals for what you are looking for—this informs the recruiting targets you want to set and profiles you’re looking for, and can help refine your rubrics and hiring criteria. Don’t forget to focus on the candidate experience as well; by giving everyone equal access to information, you can even the playing field and help people feel more prepared and show their best work.

Fit over skills, definitely (https://www.thisisprofessionalservices.com/the-ps-guide/2017/11/15/look-for-fit-and-drive-instead-of-skillsets). Every organization has a scorecard of barebones skills, but I find that when push comes to shove, skills can be learned by anyone who has the drive to. I have a couple of litmus tests, but the “after work social” test is something I personally believe in: If I don’t mind spending an hour or two (or more!) after work with a person engaged in lively conversation, then that’s a person I think I’ll have fun working with. If that person can join in on an after-work social with the team, then that’s a person…

Intercom is a mission driven, product-first company with strong values and beliefs that shine through in our hiring approach. Our mission is to make business personal, and we’re unique in how we think about product. Within the Engineering/Product org we have strong values aligned around deeply understanding problems before solving them. We think of ourselves as builders, problem solvers and product owners who happen to have strong software engineering skills. We think big but start small, and we’re always trying to learn as we go.

When we interview developers, we’re trying to find humans who will work great with other humans. The idea of having anyone who only focuses their attention on their code isn’t feasible. So, we try to get a good read on their personality and communication skills.

Can they explain technical concepts to non-technical people? How confident are we that they’ll align with our core values? Are they humble and hungry? Will they be good team members?

Interesting you should ask that. The center section of our book is 300 engineering-manager rules of thumb that Mickey and I had been collecting for a decade – the section is printed on half-tone – on gray – but one reviewer called it the book’s “creamy center.” When the book came out five years ago, one of the early interviewers asked Mickey and me which of those rules of thumb was most important. We both – and we hadn’t discussed it beforehand – answered, “Always be recruiting.”

Yeah, so hiring is a tremendous challenge. Like I said, I think I spend most of my time hiring like most of the engineering leaders do. And, I think what is really helpful for me is to set clear expectations when I’m hiring. So, I tend to do a lot of data-driven hiring, Vidal. I keep that… For example, if I publish a role, I will spend a lot of time initially clarifying the job description and what I’m looking for in the role with my partners in recruitment. We make sure we create detailed rubrics and have a question bank and we make sure we have make debrief interviews with everyone as they join, especially in a remote environment, setting…

I think I’ve never articulated this way but your questions are kind of helping me realize the connection between those two challenges: hiring and retention.

I approach hiring based on whether the need is tactical or strategic. For tactical roles, I look for a consultant to fulfill the need. However, each year, I build a hiring plan that aligns engineering teams to strategic needs of the company. Typically involves, identifying right roles, building job description that is tailored to the specific role, developing interview panel and looking at interviewing as wholesome experience for candidate as well as the team. Hiring is primarily based on skill, culture fit as well as purpose. Hiring decisions are based on a collaborative assessment of the candidate from the panel’s feedback.

My approach to hiring has been to figure out what my team is missing both technically and, more importantly, non-technically. Who is the kind of person that will bring everyone to the next level and really allow the team to work together better than they have been. Retaining diversity allows to build diverse products and scale the product to different kinds of users – this all is achievable by hiring and retaining diverse talent.

I want to hire engineers who are able to think outside the box and also have some related experience. I love it when my engineers come to me with an idea of something they would like to add to our services or tweak our calculations. Although I might have the ultimate say, I like to see it as a partnership between all of us to ensure that our customers get the best possible product while, of course, watching our bottom line.

I have still much to learn in this area.

The one thing that anecdotally improved our candidates pipeline was writing the job description in terms of what the candidate is looking for, as opposed to what the company is looking for. I was inspired by https://hiringengineersbook.com/post/trouble-hiring/ .

In the future, I would spend more time on having a standard operating procedure for hiring.

At DoorDash, recruiting is a big part of every manager’s job. I am involved at every stage of recruiting from sourcing to the initial hiring manager screen, to interviewing, to closing conversations and beyond until we hire. When I’m interviewing candidates, I am careful to evaluate not only their technical skills but also their values as a professional and if they will be a good culture fit for the team and the company overall. A cultural assessment is a significant part of the interview process at DoorDash. I also want to be sure that future team members can take ownership of a project and run with confidence in the right direction.

Yeah, so I look for three things, humility, hunger and passionate, but it’s very hard to judge a person in the first meeting. When I’m interviewing, I’m looking for what are they passionate about, do they have the hunger to learn new things. I’m looking for more of the softer skills at my level rather than digging down on the technical side. Then I can sense that the person I’m interviewing is hunger even though he may not know everything and no one knows everything, but he’s hungry to learn new things and especially at about what they are doing. I’ll definitely call them for the next round to meet the team to see how they interact with…

The standard “algorithm-on-the-whiteboard” method of interviewing isn’t working anymore. It’s not totally useless – you certainly find people who are smart in an algorithmic way, and can write pseudocode expressing an algorithm. But this isn’t actually what makes an engineer successful at most tech companies (and certainly Thumbtack). Things like being tenacious when tracing a difficult bug, collaborating well with your interviewer, designing a class structure with clear semantics, or big picture thinking on product and metrics often matter much more than being an algorithms whiz. We found these skills were often undervalued and under-tested…

My wife used to be an HR Manager experienced in recruitment, and she was great at it. So I’ve had a good mentor, and I’m still learning loads from her.

One important part of hiring happens before I even see the first résumé: reviewing the reasons that trigger the recruitment, deciding whether recruiting externally or internally, and writing the job description from our expectations as opposed to starting from a title and developing the description for that title.