Rethinking your team’s growth mindset
Scaling teams is hard. It’s a constant challenge. How do you grow a team 2x while still maintaining quality of work and efficiencies? The answer is to hire the right people as you scale. Of course, that’s easier said than done when you need to hire quickly.
The Thumbtack analytics team ran into this challenge late in 2018. We were getting feedback that our cross-functional partners felt road blocked due to our limited analytics staffing. In other words, too many things to analyze and not enough analysts.
Although we had open headcount and an active hiring funnel, we were closing only about 1 new hire per quarter — even with sourcing jams and referrals. It became clear that our interview process was holding us back.
We knew we had demanding requirements for job qualifications, take home exam performance, and time required for on-site interviews. In exploring what could be better, we realized we were being too restrictive and losing out on great candidates as a result. Additionally, we wanted to ensure that our hiring process was inclusive in order to build a team that’s diverse across many dimensions. So we gave ourselves two ambitious goals:
- Grow the team over 60% in 3 months.
- Recruit a diverse team.
Putting best practices in place
Our first step was to learn everything we could about best practices for diversity recruiting. In our research, we discovered that running a structured hiring process is one of the best things you can do to reduce bias and hire a diverse team.
Next, the team identified two areas of focus to help us achieve our goals:
- Evaluate for potential over subject-matter knowledge.
- Eliminate bias throughout the hiring process.
We believe that analysts can learn many technical skills on the job if they already have strong problem-solving skills and are analytical thinkers. This way of thinking creates an opportunity for candidates who have never been in a product analyst role.
To eliminate bias, we worked closely with the Diversity & Inclusion team here at Thumbtack. Once we identified our goals and areas of focus, we took a look at every step in the funnel. We found the most room for improvement in our job descriptions, hiring plans, and interview panels.
Identifying key skills and traits
When we dug into job descriptions and hiring plans, we asked ourselves: “What are the necessary traits for us to make a hiring decision?” The team created a shared spreadsheet where we listed all the possible traits an analyst could have, then voted for the ones that were most important for a candidate to be set up for success from the start.
We used this list as our guide in rewriting job descriptions, so that they included only the traits that are absolutely needed and nothing else. For our analytics internship roles, this meant we removed the ‘necessary qualification’ that students needed to be working towards a degree in mathematics, statistics, or economics. We realized the only part that mattered was that they had some quantitative analytical experience.
In looking at our interview process, we evaluated how well each applicant tested for the necessary skills and traits needed to do the job. If interviews overlapped in testing traits, we either adjusted or removed them altogether. This cut down the interview time for full-time hires from two on-site days to just one, which in turn allowed us to offer our final interview to new grads and interns remotely.
We also added more structure to our interview process. In order to run an interview, team members must first attend a training session, then be calibrated through shadowing twice, then run an interview once themselves with a shadow. As interviewing is part of our performance review, team members are incentivized to get involved. From this additional process, we ensure that all interviews are consistent and fair to candidates.
Measuring the impact of our changes
In order to test our new approach, we began measuring the performance of our changes. We chose to run the revised hiring process for the entirety of Q4 2018 then compare pre- vs. post-funnel performance. Diligently and often manually, we tracked every step — from resumes received to conversion to full-time offer.
So what happened? In short: we crushed it. The changes were a success and we grew the team by 63% in Q4 alone while maintaining gender balance. Now a year later, we are over 2x our original size. But the change in process wasn’t without its challenges.
What we learned along the way
Analysts spent many hours each week on interviews, which put additional strain on our cross-functional partners. In hindsight, we should have been more upfront with our partners ahead of time so they could better support our team during this phase of growth.
Another challenge was overhauling the process itself, especially when there was nothing inherently wrong with the status quo. As Claire Conly, head of analytics, put it: “The hardest part of implementing the changes was convincing the team and ourselves that we weren’t lowering our bar; rather, we were reducing false negatives and expanding our definition of a successful analyst. Once we hired a solid number of candidates and started onboarding them, everyone saw how well the team was growing and how the new hires were impacting the business.”
Moving forward with intention
As a result of our changes, we have established best practices to reduce bias as we recruit the next generation of analysts. It’s also easier than ever to hire as the interview process can be distributed between 35+ analysts instead of just 19.
While we are still working to improve diversity across race and ethnicity, we know that if we put our minds and collective efforts towards it, we can make it happen. Claire may have said it best, “I’m most proud of how we worked through differences of opinion and tried new, novel approaches. The results have spoken for themselves.”
We’re still growing! If you’re interested in joining the analytics team at Thumbtack, we’d love to hear from you — check out our careers page for open roles.
