How to Out-hire Facebook and Google for Engineers, with Farhan Thawar
In just four years, Farhan hired almost 1000 people in Toronto as VP of Engineering at Xtreme Labs, a mobile agency (acq. Pivotal Labs, 2013). That team was ~35% women and ~25% female engineers.
“We would go to Waterloo and hire 65 engineers in one round and beat out Facebook and Twitter and Google.
One term, we had a 100% acceptance rate across 25 candidates, meaning every candidate we hired also had an offer at Twitter or Apple or Square or Amazon.”
At the September 2016 edition of TechTO, he told us how.
Farhan is a cofounder and the CTO at Helpful.com. He previously served as CTO of Mobile and VP of Engineering at Pivotal Labs, and CTO of Achievers. He’s also held technical leadership roles at Celestica and Microsoft.
Here’s Farhan:
I want to talk about hiring engineers. I‘ll tell a story.
I went to a career fair at the University of Toronto with my colleague, Leroy Mascarenas.
We get to the booth and see all these other companies setting up. They’ve got TV screens showcasing what they do, t-shirts and flyers, and big paraphernalia.
I ask Leroy, “Where’s our stuff?” And he’s like, “What stuff? … No, we didn’t bring anything.” We had this empty booth. So I said OK, let’s just start talking to people.
People started coming up, asking “What do you guys do?” We’re like, “We’re Extreme Labs and we build mobile apps. We work with Facebook and Twitter and Uber and Slack and the NFL and the NBA. You should come work here.”
And people said, “Cool. How do I apply?”
I said, “Well, you have ten minutes.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, why don’t I give you a quick thinking exercise — a little problem — , you think about it, and come back and talk to me.”
Some people came back and they wrote code because it was a programming algorithm problem. They walked me through their answer, and I asked follow-up questions — “What about this scenario? How do you think about this constraint? What do you think about that?”
They would answer, and then I would say something very shocking to them:
“You’re hired.”
People were like, “Me? I’m hired?” I’m like, “You’re hired, talk to Leroy.”
At the end of the day the booths were closing, and all the companies came together. We asked how it went for them. “Oh I gave away 50 t-shirts. I got 100 resumes. We got all our flyers distributed.” Great.
They asked, “What about you guys?” And I’m like, “Oh we hired seven people.” There was shock on their faces.
Instead of internalizing that, someone said, “Well we have this very strict interview process. We only take 1 percent of the candidates from this funnel here to this thing …”
But what was the goal, right? The goal was to hire people. And so we hired them.
Three things stand out to me:
- Speed. I just wanted to meet smart people, do a mini idiot test, and then hire them.
Those candidates took the speed at which I worked as a proxy for how the company ran. They felt that the company must must move very quickly, and they translated that to our business. - Interviews are a horrible predictor of performance. So, instead of spending eight hours on interviews, I compressed it into 15 minutes and spent that eight hours with the person when they started in the job.
- I didn’t have to go to anyone else. In most companies you have a hiring manager and committee and comp committee. I hired seven people, they all started Monday. I made all the decisions I would have had to go to a hiring committee for.
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