📈Hiring going into Hyper Growth - Engineering
You work in an startup that is ready to jump into the hyper-growth mode. How do you prepare your hiring team for this challenge the Engineering perspective?
In today’s issue, I would like to come back to a topic that I like very much: Hiring in Hyper-growth. In the past, I wrote about hiring going into Hyper Growth but oriented to the Talent Acquisition side 👇🏻
In the current issue, I will focus on the engineering side of this aspect, based on my experience. As I did in the previous issue, you will read about:
Challenges you will face incoming into a hyper-growth mode
What to do to be prepared for those challenges
Let’s jump into this.
📆 Managing a busy calendar is one of the first challenges that you, as a person working in the engineering organization and participating in the hiring process, will face.
The above is a real and anonymized calendar, for a Software Engineer of the engineering organization participating in the hiring process during hyper-growth mode, and just for the interviews.
This is a very important challenge, considering that this person has to balance it with commitments and staying involved in coding while being responsible for hiring new members for your team or other teams in the organization.
Despite your expectations in this article, for this challenge, I do not have a real solution. What I used to try is to pack the hiring meetings at the beginning of the week because I feel fresh for a work like this, but it’s not always easy, since you have to adapt your agenda to the candidates’ agenda.
👩🏻💻 Figuring out if the candidate has the right technical skills is another challenge at the time to hire engineers. In order to address this, I used to provide a technical assessment to the candidates so they could solve it promptly. Each team I worked with used to have its own technical assessment, based on the needs they had, so they could ensure that the candidate had the skills required by the concrete team.
Other teams took another approach, putting in place a live code session during the face-to-face interview with the candidates.
What I observed at some point, when hyper-growth really began to take off, was that having different ways to validate the technical skills of candidates did not scale. It was too time-consuming to review the solutions to the technical assessments, even after reducing their scope. Each team could review only the quiz they designed, not the ones from other teams. Additionally, having different strategies did not provide consistency in hiring.
Our solution was to unify the technical assessment all across the board; the same for all teams. With this strategy, you can leverage the time from any member of the different teams involved in the hiring process, making the process to scale up.
This solution is also useful because, during hyper-growth, you will shift people (best case yearly) across teams, reorganize them, or even entire departments, so hiring based on the same skills makes sense. To support this, you must ensure that the people you hire are ready to work on any team within your organization.
Note aside: After those experiences with technical assessments, one keeps learning, and what I’m wondering nowadays is: Is a technical assessment really needed? Let’s answer that on another occasion 🙂.
🧩Ensuring the candidates are a cultural fit is another big challenge, moreover, when your company starts growing like hell. This is about ensuring that, the person that applied to the job offer, is a fit/match for your company.
You will probably face this challenge once both the Talent Acquisition call and the Technical Assessment have been successfully passed by the candidate. You are now in the face-to-face interview with that engineer, and some questions come to your mind during and after the interview:
Does this person have the level I’m looking for?
Should I hire this person or wait for more candidates?
Is it a fit for my company?
These are not simple questions to answer in my opinion.
In future issues, I will elaborate on the concept that I call:
The dilemma of the person with willingness but lack of experience
But not today; let’s continue with the challenge of the cultural fit.
My answer to this challenge is to use the “mirror technique”.
How that mirror technique is translated?
You have to be sure that the person in front of you fits with the company culture and values… whatever they are, either you consider them good or bad (hope you consider them good).
The person should be aligned with the vision, at the engineering level, of the company roadmap.
If those conditions are not met, even though the candidate has wonderful technical skills, you are taking a huge risk by hiring him/her; At some point, the new hire could be so misaligned that could decide to leave the company, and we know how costly is that 👇🏻
✨Takeaways
To summarize, when you hire in hyper-growth you have to focus and think about the big picture of your organization, You have to be sure that the people you are interviewing are:
Aligned with company values.
A cultural fit, not only for your team but potentially for the rest of the development team of your organization.
Willing to embrace the changes.
Hope you enjoy this issue. I would love to hear from your feedback and experiences in this matter, and see what worked for you!
Write in the comments!
Best,
Marcos.