The Cookbook: Finding and Hiring People (part 1)

Ingredient: Passion

Passion comes from the people. So getting this ingredient right is really about hiring the right people and keeping them motivated, engaged and inspired.

When you are building your team and hiring people, you are really hiring their passion. You’d think hiring someone with the right resume, the right experience and skill should be your goal. But it is not. Your goal is to find the person who has the passion to do what you want her to do. Without that passion all those certificates, skills and references mean nothing. Passion is what makes us do things right, it is what makes us not just finish a task but make sure that it really solves the problem that it is supposed to solve.

Fact of life is whatever you are making, it is probably not the cure for cancer. You may stay awake thinking about how your software platform will change the way people will manage projects in the future, but someone you are hiring will not be so enthused. So your job is to find the people who are passionate about their craft, everyday work – the immediate little task they have to do. That’s how you start and then if you take the right of steps you’ll be inspire them to see your version of reality, sell them your vision that will lead them to be passionate for your product. This is the end goal. But this second level of passion doesn’t happen without the first, the more granular level of passion for every day work.  The good news is that the first level of passion is easy to identify if you follow some steps. And then once you have the right set of people, the second level is once again just as easy. I will go over the list of steps to achieve both those levels in this section. But first let’s take the fuzziness out of the word “passion” in this context (once again, my promise in this cookbook is to take out all the hand wavy things and make them as concrete as possible).

People with passion for what they do are simply people who are a good fit for those tasks.

This essentially means that for any set of tasks there’s a certain type of personality, mindset and skill required to make someone be passionate of those tasks. That is the good fit you are looking for. If you find the fit, you are guaranteed to have found the passion. This also means that someone who is passionate for some parts of the work that needs to be done will not necessarily be passionate about other parts. So you will always have to balance your test for good fit (aka passion) so that your team as a group has passion for everything you need them to do. Classic example in my world: someone who is passionate about the look and feel of a website may completely hate working on the server side codes that generates the data that shows up on that website. And for me to succeed I need both these types of passion.

OK, enough of theory. Let’s get to those action items I promised. I’m going to break down this ingredient into a series of topics and then put in the actions within those topics.

Finding and hiring people

Hiring decisions are the most important decisions you will make in an organization. It is the single most significant factor that determines chances of success for an enterprise. This is one place you cannot cut corners or take a short cut. Save time or money on other things, skip a few meetings, get rid of the free coffee if you absolutely must (actually scrap that, it’s a really bad idea) but don’t skimp on the hiring process. If you don’t get the right people you’ll never get the right product. And if you hire someone who is not a good fit, then firing her is way more expensive (cost, loss in productivity and the hit in morale) than the cost of running a good hiring process.

#1 and #2 are about making sure that you and your team choose the person you are hiring. Hire directly and let the team, which is the hire for, make the final decision on the hire. Why? Because a third party such as an agency or even your HR department, will never have a proper understanding about your team’s needs and culture. They will always go by certain metrics like certificates, degrees and experience of a candidate. Good agencies may even try to understand your work culture and try the fit but it will never be as good as your judgement. Work relationships are dependent on human relationships. Only your team will be able feel if of a person will fit with them or not. Not just in work habits but also as a person. Some companies try to counter this point by saying that they let the agency just filter out people so that they can choose from a selected few. But isn’t that just the same? An agency will never be able to identify a candidate who can spot a single weird bug in a page code in a minute, when she has no formal education in software. A candidate like that will be lost during most third party filtering effort.

#3 point about a face to face onsite interview is extremely important. We use much more than our voice to communicate. A face to face interview brings those nonverbal modes of communication out for a check by the team. How your face changes when someone challenges you in a technical debate has huge implications as to if you’d play a good part in that debate or if you’d intimidate (or be intimidated) and reduce the value of the debate. It’s important to test these reactions during the onsite interview.

#4 and #5 is to ensure that the team understands the importance of the hiring process and gives it enough attention. The hiring process takes time and energy of the team. It’s also very distracting, taking the team away from important work at hand. And the worst of all it’s a pain and no one likes to do it. Hence, you as the leader need to make this the priority task. Pushing everything out of the way and making this the most important task is the only way you’ll get the team motivated enough to concentrate on the hiring process. It is definitely bad for the project at hand, in the short term, delaying things but you know that in the long term it is the best thing for the team. So this prioritization is correct.

#6 is all about making the sometimes tedious interview process more enjoyable. When you running a hiring process a team could be spending days going through resumes, interviewing, checking results of a test, etc. If you don’t make it fun for the team somehow there is no way this will run in full steam. Remember you team was never a good fit for running interviews! So they will never have the passion for this. So think of ways of making it interesting. Throw in a few pizzas in the process or even a little party celebrating a good hire This is one area that you should read up to get ideas, there are a lot of books on hiring that goes over this topic, my personal favorite is chapter 8 in Building Great Software Engineering Teams.

#7 is about not settling for a sub optimal fit just to get out of the hiring process – a shortcut. Sometimes you’ll find that none of the candidates fit the role. You’d be tempted to compromise but every time I’ve made that compromise I’ve regretted later on. It is much better to not hire, suffer the consequences of delays and more interviewees than to hire someone who is not the right person for a role and hope things will work out.

Great resources are always in demand. And since they love what they do they are very unlikely to move jobs a lot. Combine those two facts and you’ll realize that the chances of you finding great resources are very slim. You have to take definite action to attract the attention of great resources, create interest and keep them interested so that when the time comes they feel they should try out a new job opening at your place. Chapter 2 in Joel’s book is a must read (or the blog article where it came from) for this if you are in the software world. Here’s a great quote from there:

Instead of thinking as recruiting as a “gather resumes, filter resumes” procedure, you’re going to have to think of it as a “track down the winners and make them talk to you” procedure.

#1 is all about creating assets that will work for you to attract talents to your company. These days these assets probably are platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin but obviously new platforms and modes are coming up and you have to be aware where your target talents are. Posting interesting and informative posts on our Facebook and Linkedin pages has been one of the best ways to create interest in the developer community about us. This has gone to a point where sometime we don’t even advertise a job at all on job sites – a post on our page gets us the very filtered, interested and engaged resources we want to consider. And the beauty of using a social media asset is that the candidates are already convinced that they want to work for you. Remember that you have to have a plan on social media posting. You’ll first need to identify the topics that would interest your target talents. Then use that to create interesting post that people will engage with. It will take some time, but it is absolutely essential.

#2 and #3 is an extension to the idea of creating an interest in your target group that goes beyond some posts in social media. By contributing and building your company’s image in the community you are investing in your branding and helping create the right perception in your target talents. In the software space this could be creating an open source project that is used by a developers all over the world or helping a school for the under privileged like we do. Being active in online forums (and obviously offline ones) takes up time. So this has to be part of the job responsibility of someone in your team, ideally you.

#4 is about creating great content that helps your target group. This content could be in a blog that people visit or videos that you host on youtube, etc. The goal is to make the content become really useful part of daily work of people you want to hire. The value of this in creating a positive impression about your company and registering to stay updated is significant.

#5 is the best option you have if you are fine with accepting fresh new candidates. An internship process is really an extended interview, or it should be. Your goal for an internship program should never be to get some cheap labor to do some of your grunt work. It is a complete waste of everyone’s time that way. You should instead think of the intern as a possible hire, whom you are helping to achieve the fit you require and in that process evaluating her success and ability to learn. Since they are possible hires, all interns should go through a filtering process, so that you only start with the most likely hires.

 #6 is to ensure that you always have a way for people to send you’re their resumes at any time. If you do your social outreach properly you’ll find that people remember you and they reach out to you when they want to switch jobs or just want you to consider them. This is a great way for you to build up your library of resumes and also to find great talents you might have missed.  

OK, I’ll stop here today, watch out for part 2 where I go over the list of ideas and actions for finding the best fit and what to offer them.

Stay safe, stay home, we will win against this coronavirus.

Further Reading

1. Blog: Joel on Software https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

   Joel Spolsky’s writing in this blog has inspired me to do a lot of experiments at Kaz. Many of my greatest hits come from here. But many of his ideas failed badly too. Whatever the case it’s are a must read if you are in the software world. And some of his ideas work for pretty much any domains. Really good read, sadly he doesn’t write anymore on the blog.

2. Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent

   Book version of his blog on topics specifically about hiring. Perfect thing to have when you want to quickly check some ideas.

3. Building Great Software Engineering Teams

   A book that I’ve used a lot for tuning my interview process. Not so sure about the rest of the book, but chapter 7 & 8 are superb.