So you’re building a team.

You’ve joined a new company or a new team, and you’re super excited! You show up day one and you’re given a stack of resumes to consider for your team. You know there’s a lot to do and your ability to hire is going to be critical to your success and that of your company.

As the hiring manager, you feel the pressure and the pain. Past hiring mistakes quickly flash before your eyes. You also see flashbacks of late nights and weekends you and your team worked because you were understaffed and just could not hire fast enough. A shiver runs through your spine. There’s no easy solution here.

If you hire someone in a rush because you’re understaffed and the team is burning out, you might actually make things worse. The wrong person does not alleviate the load on the team but rather makes it worse. They might impact the culture of the team or make someone feel taken advantage of. They might not be able to do the job and you might have to let them go. This will take time and effort and will impact the team’s morale. The team will have to pick up the slack and the cycle will continue. After being in this position a few times, and trying both options, I’ve realized its better to wait and fnd the right person.

The first thing to do is, to hire the right people.

Do not compromise. Do not settle. Hire the right people. Who are the right people? And how do you avoid waiting years for the right candidates to show up? I look for potential, for willingness to learn and a demonstrated ability to learn things to be successful at a job, for examples of initiative taken etc etc. I ask the candidates about the best projects they’ve executed and ask about what made them the best. I ask candidates what were the worst projects they worked on and what made them so bad? These questions quickly give you a sense for the person you are talking to.

Have different folks talk to your candidates. If you are hiring Test engineers, can your panel have some folks from Dev who work closely with your test team? Can you have some folks from the product team who work closely with your test team? Can you have some folks from the test team who will be working with the candidate? This will give you a more rounded view of the candidate and will also give the candidate a better view of the company.

I also have a set of questions prepared before the interview, based on the roles, and the skills needed. I use those questions with every single candidate so that I have a consistent way to evaluate them. If I don’t ask folks the same questions, there’s no way for me to calibrate their answers. If I modify my questions based on everyone’s resume, every candidate is going to have a different experience with me. And what if you catch me on a bad day and I dont have any standard questions, and neither do I have any questions that are specific to your experience? Well, you’ve just wasted a lot of time, for everyone. So be prepared, and be consistent. It was easier at Duo because as a company we came up with these questions, and had a rubric for what good answers to these questions looked like. We trained new managers on this and that helped keep things consistent across the board.

Ok, you’ve hired super stars. Now how do you keep them?

Keeping high performing employees engaged and motivated is an art. High performers will have high expectations. Do you have a clear path for them to grow through and has that been communicated clearly to them? Do you have regular 1:1 meetings or other types of frequent feedback sessions with them? If you wait a year or months before asking someone how they are doing or what problems they are facing, the first time you hear about those issues will be in their exit interview. Talk to your team often, get to know them, understand their motivations and expectations, assign them to projects that match those expectations whenever possible.

But they did so well on the interview. What happened after they came on board?

Some folks do really well on interviews. It may be that they have really good skills in one area but we’ve been giving them projects that require other skills that they do not possess. Or it may be that they just interview really well and we did not dig deep enough. The right thing to do there is to try and find out what really is the case. If its a matter of finding the right fit for them, in a different project, act quickly and do that. If its a matter of having a tough conversation with them and helping them with a performance improvement plan, so be it, do that quickly as well. The worst thing you can do when you have a problem is, nothing.

Impact based role definitions and evaluations

How do you define a role? Do you say just list all the projects or types of work you want folks filling the role to do and leave it at that? Have you thought about creating impact linked roles that help every employee understand the impact their work is expected to have on the company? I personally feel that it is highly motivating to see how my work makes the company better, helps grow our user base or in some other way, moves the needle.

Reward excellence

You have some high performers on your team. You help one of them reach the next level in his career path. You help another get that key role in another department. You help yet another land that architect role everyone is eying and that’s a great match for him. People are watching how you treat your best. If they know that they can go places by performing well on your team, guess what? There will always be people who will want to work on your team. This will also motivate the not so high performers to do better. If everyone knows that good work is noticed and rewarded, it really makes a difference.

The High potential leader

I’m reading this book called ‘The High potential leader’. Its got some good ideas. I’ll take notes via this blog and work some of those into my/my team’s work routine. Per chapter 3 of this book, the formula for building successful and high performing teams is,

People Quality + Job Fit + Collaboration = Team Performance

The key things are,

  • Identify your team’s strengths
  • Build on their strengths
  • Make necessary changes quickly
  • Look for opportunities to collaborate across organizational boundaries
  • Lead the dialogue (keep it pointed towards positive results)
  • Make your meetings effective
  • Be a social architect
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