Impact Driven Tech Organizations
Part III — The secret to succeeding
This is part III of Building Impact Driven Tech Organisations. We’re going to focus on why recruiting should be part of the core engineering team and touch a bit on compensation — the support structures that are essential in succeeding, and ultimately make or break the autonomous, high ownership team model.
It’s all about talent 💙
As we are building an organisation that is based on trust, empowerment and freedom it is absolutely essential to have the right people with the right skillset, team fit and capability to grow. This is also where a lot of companies tend to fail, not holding themselves to the same standard in recruiting as they do in their ways of working.
Recruiting is a first class citizen, and everyone in the organisation takes part.
Beyond the quality of the candidates, recruiting is also the key driver of your growth in terms of impact. You always start lean when building disruption, but after you’ve gathered initial product market fit it’s mostly about blitzscaling as fast as possible, as wide as possible to maximize the impact of your product and the market situation. This is impossible without a quality recruiting operation.
I find it useful to set tenets or core principles for recruiting, that mirror in spirit the values of the company, but focus purely on the actions and approaches to recruiting. They work as a concrete method to align the organisation and expectations.
The following principles are the ones we use at Wolt, but I find them universally very applicable.
We keep the bar high.
- Hiring talent is a multiplier game. (0.5–1.5x)
We don’t settle when in pain.
- Good enough is not good enough.
Culture matters, values are upheld
- No assholes allowed. Ownership is king.
We look for attitude and excellence
- It’s all about skills and growth potential
Hiring is a first class citizen.
- We take the time. No excuses.
Benefits of building your own
The world is full of recruiting agencies and consultants that will endlessly sell you candidates. Occasionally they do work, and I’ve hired plenty through them. But if you’re serious about scaling, I warmly recommend hiring top class internal tech recruiting. In building a culture-led organisation, the message, feel and experience of your company starts from recruiting as a first point of contact for all. You want it to be as grand as the best parts of your organisation.
To keep tech recruiting efficient and on top of everything, it is best to make it a part of the tech organisation, rather than a separate HR lead initiative. You want your organization’s goals and dreams to align with recruiting, it makes much more efficient recruiters when they are sharing in both the challenges and the victories of your tech org. You are on the same journey after all.
Being close to the engineering itself also leads to great connections between your team leads and the recruiters. This alignment brings both importance to recruiting as well as even more context on what we are really searching for in each team. Recruiting can run way more efficiently when all the engineers are a part of the solution; it is too easy to deprioritize recruitment work as it’s not the main value driver, but in a scale up it is pure core.
With the recruiters having more context, they can talk about the company and the roles with detailed insights. It is immensly helpful in the first contact situations where the recruiter can really answer the deeper questions of the role and the requirements, which ultimately leads to better candidate communication and experience.
Added benefit of close relations between tech recruiters and the team leads is the deep understanding of what we really need right now and how it shows in candidates. It’s not beneficial to have long lists of required technologies or strict requirements for each candidate; they restrict too much the potential pool of talent, and remove focus from the essentials; culture fit and sheer talent.
For example at Wolt tech recruiting is owned by me, with the recruiters as direct reports. We build the hiring roadmaps together, and constantly share context about the plans of the org to ensure we are maximizing the impact of recruiting. The recruiters are actively in talks with all team leads and relevant interviewers, with both training as well as sharing context both ways.
Keeping up with the quality💪
The interview process is the first contact with your company a candidate has. It is what defines how people see your company and how they feel about their future. I believe interviews are always mutually evaluative, both sides are assessing weather or not the fit is there and the opportunity viable. This is the core reason why your interviews should match your culture, 100%.
In practice you should treat your interviewees as people who work at your company. Be curious, respectful, find common ground and always keep the tone friendly and inspirational. Despite the outcome, you want the people interviewing to be left with wanting to work at your company. It works when you want to continue the process, and leaves a great employee branding experience for the rest.
At Wolt we use the following approach to interviews
Comfortable, inspirational, challenging, talented, honest
- It’s the first contact for potential new Woltians
The interview experience matches what it’s like to work at Wolt
- Everyone who leaves the process, be it hired or not, wants to be here
Candidate communications are king
- We answer questions, we actively communicate, we show respect
Every interviewer has a voice
- Every vote counts, every decision matters
Leave your arrogance at the door 😑
There is a delicate balance between availability of talent and the rigor of evaluation in hiring engineers. You don’t want to exhaust your people, nor the candidates for that matter, with too many interview rounds, or inefficient smart-ass moments, tech interview processes tend to be full of. At the same time it is essential that you hire the right talent with the right fit.
What I’ve found works quite well is the following
Recruiter screening
- Find out culture fit, basic skill match, sales and inspiration.
- The first go/no-go point
First interview
- A mix of sharing ways of working, culture and the product, as well as verification and getting to know each other. Tone is very conversational, friendly and open
- Goal: Ensure culture fit and decide whether to send a task or to end the process.
Homework assignment
- Everyone shows concrete skills in their area of expertise. From engineering to product to design.
- The task is role specific, should be doable in an evening or two, depending on the role. Always respect the candidates time spent
Technical/Competence interview
- The biggest challenge for candidates. We want to know how they approach problem solving
- Go through of the home task, challenge the decisions made, try to understand the whys behind the solution and how the candidate approaches his expertise
- Goal: Are they excellent enough for us. (Biggest cutoff point)
Optionals (Depending on the role)
- Secondary competence interview for Team Leads / Other dual roles. We drill down on role specific special skill sets and experience.
- Team Lunch. Meet the team, assure team fit, get buy in from all parties
- Additional technical interview. In super senior cases where we are not 100% sure on the fit but don’t consider the candidate a lost cause. Different set of people, different approach.
Final round
- Answer all questions the candidate might have about working here
- Present compensation options, talk honestly about growth prospects, company future and cultural ways of working. Find alignment.
The process may seem long, but is actually rather light. The idea is to remove all extra clutter and focus on the things that actually matter. Having a variety of people meet the candidate during the process allows for cultural fit to be properly assessed by people with no vested interest in getting the candidate. Aim for the minimum effort required to evaluate the things that matter.
Everyone who joins should do a concrete task to evaluate how they actually work in their area. You aren’t hiring them for their ability to speak well in an interview. The idea is to give the candidate a chance to show how they work when they would be working for you; you want to get rid of social pressure of live coding and other artificial ways of evaluating engineers. Challenging the task result and discussing honestly about the approach gives you major insight into how the person really works.
A good task is something that relates to your industry and feels relevant in the area. You want to keep it as simple as possible but still valid in verifying the approach to problem solving in their respective area. For more senior roles the task might also be larger, to showcase deeper understanding as well as willingness to work hard for something they believe in.
Accountability of teams is also present in recruiting. Everyone participating in interviews fills written feedback about the candidate asap, so we have fresh information on who fits and where. Task reviews are done by volunteers swiftly, debates included. Every inch of friction in the process slows down the overall progress. Keep it smooth, keep it vital.
The actual interviewers outside the team leads should be volunteers. You should build a culture where engineers are interested in potential new team mates, and want to contribute on the way to greatness. You also want a good mix of different backgrounds and ways of thinking in order to fight personal bias. People have a strong tendency of biasing similar talent as they are, and you want to minimize the impact of homogeneity in the long run.
There is little point in focusing on employer branding as a separate topic. You should build your organisation, actual ways of working and the culture in a way that attracts great talent, and then spend time marketing that honestly. It always starts from how talented, happy and impactful your engineers are, the rest is just putting the word out.
One thing to specifically mention is hiring juniors and interns. Ideally you should have a healthy mix of young, talented heroes who inspire the seniors to work harder and learn new things, whilst nurturing the younger generation with experience. It is good for both sides; many seniors enjoy teaching their knowledge to hungry, sharp juniors and nothing is better in life than learning from those with more experience than you.
What do we really pay for? 💸
We are building teams of high autonomy and ownership. That ownership should go both ways. You can’t really expect full commitment from people and not commit yourself. Optimising for teams shouldn’t be just about values and ways of working, it should also be a part of your compensation mechanisms, the ways you concretely show value as a company.
I don’t believe personal performance based bonus systems really work to incentivise creative work. They tend to end up with politics and backstabbing and ultimately subpar solutions and worse customer experiences. You are building your products for your customers; where the real value lies. Your compensation models should reflect that, and guide the right behaviour.
If you do end up using bonus systems, tie them to a larger goal of your part of the org, or preferably the whole company. That way you don’t create inequality around support functions either, as everyone in your company has a part in making it big, otherwise they wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) be there. Overall strong preference towards recognition based praises and cultural championing, rather than throwing money around.
You should always aim to be fair with compensation, within the markets you’re in. There is always healthy variance in the pay of individuals, but largely people of similar experience and impact doing a similar job should be paid close to each other. This is even more essential for minorities and gender differences, where structural backgrounds tend to show themselves in compensation. This also goes to people growing in the company, there needs to be a way of evaluating compensation without changing companies. Don’t be lazy, just build it.
The best way to reward for ownership is to give ownership. For startups this means stock options or RSUs. Every full time contributor should have a chance to get options. In addition to creating a culture of owners who actually care about where your company is going, it works as a great retention mechanism due to vesting. Too many companies tend to have stock for managers and upwards, it makes little sense if you want to distribute ownership and build efficient and impactful teams. The teams provide the value, they should also take part in the ownership.
To be true to the teams, you should not automatically pay your leads more. You want to pay for performance, not for existing. When you step up and take more responsibility, it is amazing. After 3–6 months of doing it successfully you should review how it has gone and reward accordingly. It also creates a good cultural reinforcement mechanism, when leads aren’t necessary the best paid people in their teams. You should of course have different tracks for professionals, from managing to product to craft. But that’s the basics.
I cannot really disclose how Wolt does compensation, as it is a competitive advantage. The principles here are the way I personally feel compensation models should reinforce the cultural structures presented.
In conclusion 🙇
We went through the core principles of hiring and compensation and tried to tie the support structures necessary to build efficient teams in place. You can’t scale without focusing on recruiting and you can’t build ownership without giving ownership. Simple, but not easy. And requires a lot especially from the management of the company to be able to really keep it going.
In Part IV we wrap it all up with some choice visions, a timeline for scaling, best practices from the world and helpful next steps in reading.
Grandest of thanks for reading, as always, feedback is a gift 💙
