Hiring amazing people is really hard work, lessons I learnt about recruitment this year

If you are a team lead or manager, hiring people to join your team is something you have to do well, in fact as a manager, I believe it is the most important thing I do. It is a difficult thing to learn and do well, but here are some of the things I have learnt in a year of recruiting team members.

Do not compromise by hiring the best under-performer that applied

When you need to hire someone, it is because you have work that really needs doing, therefore you are usually under a lot of pressure. The choice of many busy managers is inevitably to select the best person they can find quickly. Practically, this means advertising, shortlisting, interviewing and hiring the person who came out on top.

There is a big problem with that approach, if your advertisement did not entice anyone who has all of these attributes:

• Talent in their chosen field,
• Developed skills in applying those talents,
• Demonstrated effectiveness in delivering outcomes and;
• Mindset and passion to help build a great team culture

You will hire the best under-performer in your list, then your team will suffer your decision for months or even years until you eventually fire them. Your team might be under pressure now, but they will be under a lot more pressure if they have to carry a new, ineffective team member.

To avoid this, evaluate candidates against what your team requires, if you don’t find anyone in the list, go and rewrite your advert, work through your networks again and think about how to make the job more appealing to the people you need.

You are hiring for your team, not for you

When you are hiring a new team member, the ultimate decision rests with you, however you are not the one who will be affected most by the outcome.

Lets say you need to hire a new designer for a software team. Analysts and product managers will be working with that designer every day to help them design interfaces that will achieve the customer’s goals, developers will be working with them to implement the designs in code and quality assistants will be working with them to understand what parts of the design are most important to test.

You need to involve representatives from all these team functions in your evaluation of candidates, because they will all ask different questions, probing different areas until they are satisfied that the candidate is able and willing to achieve all that will be asked of them.

You wouldn’t hire a singer without hearing them sing and they wouldn’t join without hearing your band play

But for some reason, its often accepted to hire a business analyst without observing them analyse or a designer without asking them to design and expecting them to join without meeting their team.

The second step in my team’s interviews is an in-depth, practical assessment, for every full time role. We immerse the candidate in our team for a few hours, the team can determine what it is like to work with the candidate and the candidate can determine what it is like to work with the team.

For example a designer that has done well in the first round interview will be provided some context and reference information a week ahead of time and asked to design a single-screen user interface, then come to our office and:

• Meet with an analyst and work together to understand the user workflow and test how well the design meets the workflow and functionality requirements
• Test the interface design with two users (team members) for usability and gather feedback
• Present the design, feedback and ideas for improvement to the rest of the team, i.e. a product manager, developers, QA and me.

After this interaction has been completed, all 6+ people who have met with the candidate meet together and I ask for a walk through of their interaction, their opinion of the candidate and a hire/no hire recommendation. I consider everybody’s feedback and when I have made a decision, I will tell the team and keep them updated on the recruitment process until the candidate joins the team.

To date, I have not hired a candidate when there were serious concerns from team members, even if I thought they would have been suitable.

When you are meeting a great candidate, your team is the party that is being evaluated

When you are obsessed with finding great people to join your team, you must understand that great people can join any team they like, you are the one applying to them. From the moment you write your job ad to your new team member’s first day, your team needs to demonstrate to candidates why they should join.

When I think about Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, I believe that some candidates that might be out of work or uncomfortable at their current workplace, will be trying to fulfill basic needs like shelter, safety and belonging to a group, others will be looking to satisfy higher order needs.

We must first make sure that it is clear that everyone who works in your team is well compensated, has a safe environment in which to contribute and will be part of a team. But we should also keep in mind, that our highest performing candidates have met these basic needs and are looking for much more.

To appeal to top performing candidates, you will need to demonstrate that if they join you, they will have the opportunity to challenge themselves and push themselves to find the limits of their potential in their chosen field. Talk to these people about the immense challenges that need to be overcome to achieve your ambitious goals and the hard problems your team is working to solve. Do this by telling them about your customers, the importance of their work and your inspiring vision of the better world you will create for them.

If you need an example of the power of higher order motivation, look to SpaceX, where some of the most brilliant people in the fields of rocket science, precision engineering and machine control choose to join a company that has a reputation as insanely demanding and stressful, but they are really choosing to join a dream team with an incredibly ambitious mission.