Hiring Your Dream Team

Chris Winn

Transcript

3. Know your management philosophy • Ask yourself: what do I value? • You’re paid to have opinions and state them. • What will work well for you as a first-time manager? • You need to be able to clearly express what your team’s about to a new candidate.
5. Align to your company • What type of engineering team makes my company more successful? • Are you high growth? Do you have compliance needs? • Think about stakeholders. Who works with your team a lot? What do they value?
7. Build your pitch • It’s a competitive market and your job is to get talent through the door. • Your pitch should be honest. • Every great pitch has a narrative arc. • There’s a big challenge; you’re uniquely qualified to help us achieve it; we can’t do it without you.
9. Pick your hiring tools • Hiring is all about filling the top of the funnel so you can comparison shop. • Tools help you stay organized and cadence will define the quality of your hiring experience. • Your process is their first experience with you! • Your email inbox is not an option.
11. Clearly define the role • Know what you need! • You can cast a wide net, but you need to know what success looks like. • Know when and why you’ll say no to a candidate. How difficult it is to join your team says something about how much you value the people who are already there.
13. Build your interview • Think strategically about which questions you ask and how you ask them. • Are you a good planner? “Yeah, I think so.” • Make them choose, then make them demonstrate. • If you end up hiring the candidate, your interview was actually your first 1:1.
15. Create a peer panel • Build a team that offers diverse viewpoints. • Let them know they’re representing the company and it’s a privilege to interview. • Have them write down their questions. Review the questions and give feedback.
17. Run a skills assessment • Make it mirror real work as much as possible. • You want to encourage their best work. They won’t have the same level of support on their own. • A skills assessment can tease out soft skills, too. Does this person take feedback well when I poke at their work?
19. Check references • Bias toward managers. Make it easy for them to give candid feedback. • I like to speak “manager to manager.” How do I help this person succeed?
21. Know how to close the deal • Your hiring process should have an even cadence to it, but the pace should pick up at the end. • There should be a momentum that drives toward a signed offer letter. • Hiring is really hard until it’s easy, and then it’s hard all over again.