7 Steps to Hiring 10x Engineers

It’s not possible to build a great team without great people. Steve Jobs says it best:

I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream … A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.

If you’re not spending your time finding 10x and 100x engineers, you’re building a B team (or worse), and while B teams might take you somewhere, you’ll run into a wall at some point.

So how do you hire great people? It’s quite challenging to be honest. Here are some of the tactics we’ve successfully employed at Storyblocks:

1. Use many candidate sources. Recruiting is ultimately a numbers game. Increase your chances of “winning” by boosting the top of your funnel. At Storyblocks we’ve used many channels successfully: former co-workers; referrals; filtered “marketplaces” like Hired.com and Vettery; job boards like HackerNews, StackOverflow, AngelList; an inbound career site; on-campus college recruiting; and of course recruiters.
2. Structure your interview process. We employ two phone screens and an onsite with five technical interviews plus a culture screen during lunch. We use a scorecard for grading candidates on a common set of skills / traits from 1 to 4. Everyone on our engineering team is invited to the follow up discussion. Successful hiring decisions require at least one “champion” (overall score of 4). Anyone involved in the hiring process can veto a hire. While you don’t necessarily need to use our system, you should employ some system that everyone on your team understands. Not only does it make hiring easier, it makes your team look more professional from the candidate’s perspective and gives you a better chance of closing a hire.
3. Look for the right things. Evaluation is an extremely important part of the hiring process. Ideally you can develop a methodology that allows you to distinguish 1x from 10x from 100x engineers. While assessing candidates’ technical abilities is a no brainer, you should also consider seven other skills / traits: grit, rigor, impact, teamwork, ownership, curiosity, and polish. There’s also another framework you could use to evaluate candidates, the “ABCEF’s of Technical Hiring”: agility, brains, communication, drive, empathy, and fit.
4. Provide a great culture. Great engineers want to work in a great environment. If you don’t have one, you won’t be able to hire them.
5. Sell and tell the truth. You need to “sell” candidates from first contact. Polish your career site and Hired.com company profile. Communicate your company vision and culture during the first phone screen. Provide space to learn what the candidate wants from their new job and explain how your team / company can provide it. That being said, at no point exaggerate, tell half-truths, or lie outright. You want candidates to join because they’re genuinely excited about the opportunity and it’s in their best interest, not because you hoodwinked them. TrackMaven CEO Alan Gannett discusses the topic in this article. I highly recommend reading it.
6. Build your reputation. Your company’s, your team’s, and your personal reputation. All are important and will help you hire great talent. The better your reputation, the more top candidates will seek you out and the higher your close rate will be.
7. Hire great engineers (and leaders). Great engineers love working with other great engineers. If you hire great engineers, you create a virtuous cycle. An important corollary to this is that your first few hires need to be A+ engineers. If you mis-step, you’ll need to course-correct quickly or you’ll likely build a B team. Also, don’t overlook your engineering leadership, which fundamentally caps your talent pool. At the end of the day, great talent likes working for people they trust and respect. As Steve Jobs put it, “If you’re a great person, why do you want to work for someone you can’t learn anything from?”

I’ll finish much the way I started, with more advice from Steve Jobs (watch the video on YouTube). Some highlights below:

• The greatest people are self-managing, they don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it.
• What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is. What leadership is is having a vision, being able to articulate that so that the people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision.
• We wanted people who were insanely great at what they did but were not necessarily those seasoned professionals but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that technology and who wanted to bring that to lots of people.
• When you get a core group of 10 great people it becomes self-policing as to who they let in to that group.
• So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting.
• We went out and hired a bunch of professional management…it didn’t work at all. Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage but they didn’t know how to do anything. If you’re a great person, why do you want to work for someone you can’t learn anything from?
• You know what’s interesting, you know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.