Building a Team
In this post, I’ll be talking about my take on building a team — what do I look for before I onboard someone in my team. Being an entrepreneur and running a company for the past several years, I’ve had my share of ups and downs in building a team. There’s nothing called a “perfect hiring process”, and I am continuously learning something new when I hire someone — have come so far, farther to go. So, here I am sharing my learnings on team building :)
Attitude >> Skills
I’ve seen many people over-emphasizing on Skills of the candidate and under-emphasizing on his/her Attitude. Earlier, I also used to follow a similar approach while hiring, only to realize later that the skills of a person are just a part of the story, it takes much more than just the skills for a person to assimilate well into a team (especially, in very fast-paced high growth teams).
One of the most important things I always look for in a person is “high learnability”. If a person has very high learnability, the current skills of the person, at times, take a back seat for me. How to assess if a person has high learnability or not? Well, ask them questions they don’t know the answer of, let them figure out the solutions, and see if they can convince you by their answers. If they understand the topic well, they should be able to give proper solutions. For example, I oftentimes give tasks during the interview process which involve things the candidate won’t know about beforehand (for example, asking the person to code using a different framework he/she is not familiar with). If the candidate is able to solve it within the stipulated time, voila! you’ve got someone with high learnability!
Another trait that I look for is a “never-give-up attitude”. In a fast-paced environment, where everyone’s up for the hustle, you have to have a never-give-up attitude to do well. Startups are all about the fast-paced hustle and the dopamine hits that you get when you do something which at first seemed to be a really gigantic task. How to assess the “never-give-up attitude”? Well, make the interview process longer and give the candidate really challenging problems to work on. If they don’t give up, well, you’ve got the one!
Another trait to look for — “ownership”. Do they “own” the thing they do? How to check this one? Ask them about past instances where they did something by going out of the way just because they felt it was important to do that, even though no one expected them to do so. Also, if something goes wrong, they should take ownership of the mistake and then fix it. If the person puts blames on his/her coworkers incessantly for something going wrong — it’s a red flag. No problem is somebody else’s problem — everyone in the team should take ownership and do their bit to solve the problem.
Some Innovation
Interview processes are ever-evolving based on past learnings. Also, in a short span of time, you can only get to know a slice of a person’s personality. In our quest to innovate the interview process, we came up with what we call “One-Day On-Job Experience”. For the candidates who have passed the previous interview rounds and seem promising, we ask them out for a One-Day On-Job Experience before they are actually selected. We take one full day where they meet with their potential coworkers and work on some challenging problems together. The idea is for the candidate to experience what working at Cogno AI would be like, and for the team to see if they would like to work with the person. If the energies match, it’s a match!
To conclude, there’s no failure-proof hiring process. No matter how much the hiring process is refined, there will still be some wrong hires. The idea is just to keep getting better by learning from the past mistakes of yourself and others :)
