Scale Your Tech team from 0 to Series A — talk @ The Family
We all know hiring tech people and engineer can be demanding. It is critical — and difficult — during the first 24 months of a startup. A month ago I was giving a talk at The Family with Jean-Baptiste Aviat (Jb Aviat — CTO of Sqreen). The theme we discussed was “Scale your tech team from 0 to Series A”. For those of you who could not make it, here is a quick summary of my talk. To go further you can watch the whole presentation: video at the end of the article !
Good news! To us, hiring is not an art but a science. We believe hiring tech people shouldn’t be complicated. The most important part of hiring is discipline: we divided the process in 5 easy phases model. On each step there is a “One Best Way” that matches your company and team.
1st : Preparation
Prepration is essential. If you want to go a bit further on this subject you can read our 4-hour preparation guide.
- Before sending any job offer, you should ponder on the candidate profile and missions. Similarly, it is necessary to create an employer brand and build some unfair advantages.
- Unfair advantage is a distinctively advantage you provide to your employees, your competitors don’t have. Some of those could be the team composition, specific tech challenges, salary package or good work/life balance. You should ensure you stand out by at least one of those. This means that none of your closest 5 competitors could use the same branding words. Those ‘ unfair advantages’ need to be visible on websites such as Angel Lists or Welcome to the Jungle.
- Finally, you should draft the process by listing right criteria, prepare all the stakeholders and set the appropriate tempo.
After having done this 3-steps preliminary assessment, you can send a job offer. For it to be good and catchy, you would have to:
- write a very personalized job offer, make sure it can not be replicated by any other company,
- avoid ‘Generic words’,
- describe the person’s first month,
- talk about all the unfair advantages you company provide,
- describe the stack and technical challenges.
2nd : Sourcing
There are 3 channels to source candidates : referral, inbound and outbound.
- Referral is more widely used at the early stage of your company. You will rely on active referral from personal and team network to hire.
- Inbound is the usual channel we think of when sourcing candidates. In inbound, you reach out to ‘ active candidates’, those ones are looking for a job and already open to consider your offer. You should use platforms, job boards, agencies and consider hiring freelancers.
- Outbound involves talking to ‘ passive candidates’. Those already have a job and might not have though about leaving it. In outbound, you need to draw up the very ideal candidate and reach out to them. This can be done manually or automatically using Hiresweet.
Never forget to build your network by meeting new people and asking for referrals.
3rd : Assessment
A resume can be appealing but you aways need to ensure the person you are hiring is the perfect fit.
The total interview process usually takes between 4 and 5 hours of your time, you always need to remember you would have to go through 16 phone screens to achieve 1 hire.
Assessment comprises 4 steps:
- Screening call ( 50% conversion rate):
It is paramount to both sell the company and let the candidate speak about himself. As the main aim is to convert to interview, you shouldn’t try to assess the candidate potential but rather to look for mismatches.
- Onsite Technical Interview (40% conversion rate):
Examples of proper technical interviews exist online: CodinGame, HackerRank, Codility
- Fit interview (80 % conversion ):
Scoring and selling are the to main aims of this stage. You will also be looking at the candidate past performance and introduce him/her to the team. Ask the team to assess the candidate regarding your company’s core values.
- Phone offer (50% conversion):
Optimizing conversion rates from the start is really demanding. Instead of focusing on that at the early stage, try to increase your candidate pipeline by diversifying your sourcing methods.
4th : Conversion
Always think of asking for candidates references to know about their strengths and weaknesses. You should ask for context, biggest strengths, overall performance rate and concrete example to try to understand NPS. This stage is paramount. You can check our article on how to embed reference checks into your tech interviewing process.
Conversion should be integrated in the whole process from day 1. Hiring process should be designed as a selling process to know about candidates’ wishes and expectations. Go all in, and ensure you can give quick answers. You should never forget to highlight what you can teach and how the candidate can grow in your company.
Follow-up is important but shouldn’t be agressive. Don’t do exploding offers. They dont’ lure best fit candidates but put them under pressure. Some might accept them for faulty reasons.
5th : Retention.
A whole article could be written on retention. Still, the onboarding process should not be neglected. From day 1, it is vital to ensure new hires discover the firm smoothly and feel fully integrated in it.
4 Main take-aways:
1. Hiring is paramount
2. Hiring is selling
3. Unfair advantages matter
4. Retention is paramount
Reading list
- Smart gets things done
- Who — The A method for hiring Work rules!
- The sales acceleration formula
- Work Rules!
In case you want to go further
You can always watch my talk on the subject:
