Hiring is a team sport. As an engineering manager, you might source the candidates, skim the application docs, talk to the candidates to determine their fit, negotiate the conditions for their employment, agree on start date and deal with all sorts of last-minute changes. But then there are parts of the process better done by people who are suitably equipped with skills and who, supposedly, have incentives in place to make it work in the best company’s interest. Let’s talk about them.
Involve recruiters
Recruiters, or talent acquisition people, are there to get more people to join the company. They’re not responsible for the employee’s success after they join — you are! But this doesn’t mean recruiters don’t care, and it certainly doesn’t mean it’s enough to be transactional with them.
As an engineering manager, team up with the recruiters! Don’t use them as sourcing machines, but involve them in the process.
To make the team work, you need to collaborate with recruiters as early as first draft of a job description. In my experience working with recruiters on hiring even for generic, non-team-specific roles, they have a strong sense of smell in job ads, can point out things that are intuitively correct but don’t match the reaity, and thus are great at helping match your expectations with possibilities the talent market offers. We’d always put out much better, less biased and more realistic job postings after such collaboration.
Involve engineering managers
EMs typically get involved in hiring process in groups to load-balance and calibrate. If only one hiring manager is hiring for a role and/or into a team, the bias will do its work, and that’s really not what you want to happen.
Work with the peers, other engineering managers, together to establish a balanced framework for hiring into the role and/or team. An expression I found working well is, “This is the profile I believe we should hire for, I want you to challenge the hell out of it”. Expect critique and don’t expect the original draft to survive. Tearing the target profile apart and building up a new version with fellow hiring managers is where magic happens.
Involve engineers
Typically, engineering managers are proficient enough in tech to evaluate the tech fit of a candidate. For someone, it might be tempting to do exactly that, but there’s a better way.
Engineers in the org are more involved in the daily business of building software and, collectively, have much better knowledge of the system than each individual EM has. So the challenge here is to assemble a team of engineers that is small enough for you to not go crazy with admin challenges and bit enough that the shared knowledge is as close to the universal truth in the org as possible. 3–5 engineers in a hiring team is a fairly common range.
Some of the engineers might be looking to take on something that is beyond their daily work, and being part of hiring might be that thing. When the topic of supporting hiring is on their map, this might also mean a good alignment of incentives, if they need to demonstrate impact in that area in order to grow professionally and advance in their career. Just make sure here that they’re not optimizing too much for the next career step and accidentally end up doing something they’re not motivated to be continuously getting better at and feeding it back into how things are done.
Involve non-tech people
Even if you’re hiring a software engineer, chances are they won’t be writing code by the spec. A lot’s been said about empowered engineers and how the job is much more than writing code. On the averse of that, if an engineer is expected to be applying soft skills in situations where non-tech folks are present, it makes sense to test for exactly that, in the least biased way, hence non-tech interviewers.
Establish a group of people who are supposed to be peers of the future employee. For a software engineering candidate, a product designer, a business analyst, a product manager can provide feedback on how well that person is able to tailor their communication and explain things in language that is relatively far from tech.
Similar to finding engineers, look for the people who are motivated to do the interviews. Level of excitement matters, but don’t just pick ones who are interested; pick the ones who are committed and skilled. Don’t pick the ones who want to solve their immediate problem; look instead for people whose primary motivation is helping the company grow successfully.
Inspect and adapt
Ideally, with every next candidate for a role going through all the stages, the hiring process should improve. I found two ways to leverage the hiring team to make that happen: debriefing individual stages and debriefing individual candidates.
Quarterly (or bigger) retrospectives are fun to share numbers and summarize everyone’s experience, but I find them being more about entertainment and less about improvement. In order to really improve things, it’s important to think big while simultaneously acting small, making razor-thin improvements at high frequency.
As a candidate walks through the interview process, the interviewers will provide their reviews. They need feedback on that. This will help them improve the way they evaluate the candidate and get better at that every time they do it, which is great for them because they reinforce the skill and it’s good for you because you get increasingly better evaluations.
Debriefing individual stages usually happens with the team involved in that stage. If it’s early stages, it’s recruiters. If team and company fit, engineering managers. Skill and team fit, engineers. And culture fit with a bunch of sniff tests, non-tech interviewers. Come together on a regular basis and walk through the candidates, through the interviewers’ evaluations, and find improvement points. Agree on next actions. Repeat.
Debriefing individual candidates can’t be scheduled on a regular basis, and that’s okay. As soon as the interview process is about to terminate or just did, the hiring team comes together to discuss the case, what went down, determine the next step and who’s taking it. This helps with holding people accountable and encouraging everyone involved to put their best effort into the game.
Keep it healthy
The “what” of hiring is whether people sign with your company, but the “how” of hiring is whether the hiring process is smooth and the hiring team healthy. You typically can tell a healthy team by a few heuristics, like consistently high-quality evaluations (going beyond “nice person, would like to work together”, but that’s perhaps for another story) or people showing up to the interview prepared. While putting a fair amount of trust upfront, find ways to keep it working or make informed changes.
Hiring naturally leads to partially exposing internals of your company. Folks who interviewed with you, regardless of the outcome, will remember their experience and share it with other people. So it’s not enough for you as a hiring manager to be crisp, it’s also important for everyone involved in the process to do well, and that’s up to you. Invest time not only in the interviews, but in making sure the team behind them are working well together and become better at this job and it’ll start paying off soon.
