Hiring Managers: Know Who You Are Working With

You have been waiting for this position to open officially so you can fill it officially. Even more exciting, you've been given approval to use outside recruitment agencies in the search. Your immediate thought is more candidates and ideally better ones due to a larger resource pool – but before you know it, the excited feeling has devolved into a cocktail of feeling overwhelmed, overlapped and oversold.

It's a common thought that if you work with unlimited recruiters you'll receive a large number of candidates – aka "options" – and from there, you're confident in your own ability to reel them in. If it were only that simple! We are in the most competitive hiring market since 1999. It's going to take more than a nice email or a "hot startup" pitch to get the A-players in the door. So think again and remember that identification is only the first part of a successful recruitment outcome.

More important, delivery of solid recruitment results comes from leveraging relationships to ensure and align mutual interests and shared understanding of expectations. To do this effectively and efficiently (because we all know time is money) I'm sure you would prefer to bet on more than buzz words on a piece of paper.

Figure out how well you know who you are working with:

• Does your recruiter meet the candidate before you do?
• Is there an understanding of objective, experience, hot buttons, personal details per candidate?
• Are they knowledgeable about the technology, or better yet passionate about it?
• Can you genuinely sense their vested interest in your success and the success of your product/company?
• Do you have a relationship with your recruiter?
• Has the recruiter impressed you?

Keep it simple and remember people hire people. If you want to be successful in today's tech hiring market, then know who you are working with.

Your CTO Screens Resumes?

A resume is undoubtedly important, but it will only take you so far. You can’t condense a lifetime of experiences and skills into a few pages of buzzwords and employment dates. It is helpful for identifying a software developer from an executive chef, but any effective hiring manager can tell you that the interview is where the real work happens.

What’s surprising is how much emphasis some organizations still place on the paper and not on the person. One company, a Fortune 500 media juggernaut that employs thousands of people across three continents, goes so far as to pass every single new hire’s resume by the CTO before extending any job offers. Yes, you read that correctly-- every single resume. Long after the hiring manager has given the thumbs up, after additional tech screenings by engineers in other departments, and following the “Cultural Ambassador” discussion, the resume still sits in the CTO’s inbox because let’s face it, a CTO has more important things to do. The software engineer has taken another offer by now because the company in question is in the process of acquiring a national newspaper, and the CTO doesn’t have enough time to look at a JavaScript programmer’s resume, let alone eat or sleep.

I bet you’re saying, “What a waste of executive bandwidth.” However, before you come down too hard on Mystery Media Co, ask yourself how much emphasis your organization places on that same resume. Who have you given the onerous task of wading through the flood of paper coming across your doorstep? Do you forward them to Human Resources, who has to screen resumes for thirteen different jobs at once? Your lead developer, who’s already running behind on production? A senior programmer, who can tell a good from a bad resume, but is considering sending his own to your competitor so he can actually finish some work?

Outsource, communicate and relax. It’s as simple as that. Outsource the process of screening and qualifying to the agency, communicate your requirements to the recruiter, and focus on hitting that next target. Your recruiter will sort through the chaos and show you the winners. If he’s worth the commission, the candidates he chooses will be ready and eager to speak with you and learn more about the awesome projects you’re working on. Candidates should absolutely meet with someone senior, but if any part of your executive team knows what your new hire’s college GPA or the end date of a position she held six years ago, it’s time to reprioritize.

How to Create a Continuous Recruitment Process

A continuous recruitment process is an ongoing, real-time information stream regarding candidates, companies, and products in your market. While the traditional value of recruitment is defined as “filling jobs” and still is to a certain extent, it, like all other product/services, has evolved and as a hiring manager you should now expect more from your favorite recruiter (in-house or external). A good recruiter should work to discover direct competitors of yours that you’ve never heard of but should know, they should create a direct pipeline of feedback from your users or even become one themselves, and of course last but not least, not simply identifying talent, but delivering it towards your business needs.

Recruitment is more than just identification. The goal of any recruitment partnership should be to deliver, not simply identify talent. Keep this in mind when designing your process.

Input equals output. Good technical recruiters are priceless. But like all investments, it takes money to make money and in this case we are talking in terms of time, communication, and commitment. If you expect your trusted recruiter to spend unlimited hours, commit to finding you the best talent in the world, and communicate all the while, then expect to reciprocate.

Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. Tell them what you need now and what you envision in the future. Share your story. Give constructive feedback on candidates that are a good fit as well as those that are not. Remember that every minute that they spend chasing you down for feedback is another minute taken away from the process moving forward. Give them some credit. Positioned as such, a recruitment process has a unique vantage point into any situation. Typically, they have very valuable first-hand information and access to real-time updates from the evolving market. Some are truly passionate about business, learning, technology, building companies, studying business models, and so much more than just matching buzz words, spamming resumes, and waiting for their clients to do all of the work and hopefully hire someone. So find one you like and one that delivers, treat them with respect and give them some credit. After all, one day they may be the CEO with funding and connections, building a team that you just might want to be a part of.

Hiring Managers: Ask Better Interview Questions

We are in the tightest candidate market in recent memory and hiring managers continue to squander hiring opportunities by asking irrelevant and impracticable interview questions. Ultimately this allows the candidate with multiple opportunities, a reason to focus on more engaging interview processes. Don’t get me wrong, there is not a candidate in the market that misunderstands the purpose or thought behind the Google interview. In fact, most candidates agree for the type of company and culture Google promotes, this hiring method is quite effective. The consensus is that asking candidates why manhole covers are round, or how to fit a giraffe in a refrigerator, will result in a room filled with insanely smart researches that consistently find theories worth proving wrong and/or right. Many of these will fizzle out via extensive R&D, prototype and test. While fewer and far between, will actually make it to market. Furthermore, the flaw is that there is only one Google yet a majority of the companies hiring try this approach first before finding frustration and alternative interview methods.

Yes there is value to knowing Linked List by definition and off the top of your head, but at the end of the day implementations such as this are often times saved on a Safari bookshelf or one key stroke away from copy and paste.

Why is this important you ask? Because with an already depleted candidate market to begin with, it is ever more important to keep candidates engaged in the process and becoming a part of the solution. And if you are part of a business that has clearly defined goals and trajectory then hiring someone who can help stay on track and accomplish said goals is more important than patenting the world’s longest algorithm.

Keep things simple, get the candidate engaged:

• Here is a problem we’re trying to solve currently. How would you go about tackling this problem?
• Here is a problem we just solved. At first we tried it this way but it was a fail. Do you know why?
• We have an X-week release cycle. What is your current development release cycle and how would you adjust coding habits to our current cycle?
• In the near future we are thinking about this new feature. If you had a say in the choice of technology what would you choose and why?
• I know you are an engineer, but if I asked you to QA this application where would you start? What order would you proceed?
• If three senior managers approached you in the same day with problems called “urgent” how would you prioritize

This approach will allow you subjectively analyze the answer content while identifying whether or not this candidate will bring fresh and new perspective and experience to the team. In summary, the idea behind interviewing is getting a feel for how someone solves problems and uses the resources available. In this tight market, you may want the guy who nails the “google interview”, but guess what: Google wants that person to ;)

Hiring During the Holidays

When everyone seems to be focused on wrapping up the year and getting ready for the next, there is a surge in hiring that rivals any other quarter of the year. The common thought that companies don't hire during the holidays is a myth, however on the candidate front there is a massive drought that makes hiring during the holidays extremely difficult.

During the holidays the common candidate that is thinking about testing the job market usually puts their job search on hold until the new year. Even if they were looking before the holidays, they tend to take a break around this time to pick it up in the new year when "everyone is hiring again. It's always funny to me when I talk with a candidate that has this line of thinking because it's the exact opposite advice I would ever tell someone if they were looking for a job. Search for a job when your competition is thin, not when it's at its peak. The companies that are interviewing right now are serious about hiring someone before the end of the year, waiting for next year is a gamble that could have the candidate wait for longer than they think. It's the most honest job market you can find because the people who are looking to make a change or looking to find talent aren't window shopping, they've tested the market and they're looking to land something or someone before the end of the year - the exact opposite of what you'll get in January.

It's not all roses though, there are some serious challenges you face during the holidays when it comes to hiring. Here are just a few:

Long start dates

Be wary of some of these drawn out start dates. No one wants to be the bad guy and tell your new hire not to take that long holiday vacation but nothing is worse than hiring someone, waiting one month for the person to start only to find out that they had second thoughts about the opportunity a few days before their start date. You wasted all of that time waiting for the person to start when you could have continued the interview process. What do you do to prevent this?

• Ask if they can start for a few days before their vacation.
• Invite them to meet the team during one of your epic Holiday Parties.
• Ask if they could push off their vacation toward the end of the Holiday season and incorporate that in their PTO.

Counter Offers

This one stings the worst. You do all the work only to find out the candidate was fishing for a raise or a promotion and because of your courtship, they ended up getting a good holiday bump. Companies will do anything they can to keep their talent through the holidays so they can rev up a new search in the new year. Why not? If you need deadlines to be hit, throwing someone a $20K raise to their salary, paying only a month or two worth of that new salary and then hiring someone in the new year is a lot cheaper than feeling the pinch during the holidays, hiring someone urgently and most likely paying an agency fee for. What can you do?

• Tell the candidate from the beginning that they will get a counter offer and you're not interested in playing those games.
• Tell the candidate that they will get a counter offer and if they take it they'll be back looking again in 90 days once the original reason for leaving resurfaces.
• Be very aware and sensitive as to why they're looking to leave their current company – does it make sense to you? Does it seem like it's a dead end?
• Ask the candidate if there's anything that their current company can do to keep them? If yes, tell them to ask for it now before you continue the process any further. Save yourself the frustration.

Competition

You're not the only company hiring during the holidays. You're also not the only company that needs someone to start before the end of the year. So what do you think happens when you find someone that's perfect for your role? You're not alone in pursuing this candidate and you're one of many competing for the same talent. So how do you hire them?

• Listen to what they're looking for and make sure you don't just sell them the reasons why you took the job. Most candidates want a growth path. Most technical candidates want the latest technology. But not all candidates are alike, so don't fall in the trap and sell what "most candidates" are looking for but tune in on what this person is looking for.
• Ask them directly if they want your job. Make them tell you why they want it. If they can't verbalize compelling reasons why they want your job then most likely they're not going to accept an offer, they're going to shop your offer somewhere else. Save yourself some time and move on to someone who does.
• Ask them what do you need to offer them to shut down their search? Remember, if the candidate's number is $100K but you know they'll still go on a few final round interviews while they consider the offer, find out what it will take for them to not go on those interviews. It might only be a few thousand dollars and in this market you don't want to take any chances on missing out on qualified people. You showed your cards and nothing gives your competition the advantage more than knowing what they're up against.

So if you're hiring right now and find it difficult to find people, stay focused and determined because waiting for next year's talent will only result in finding someone much later in the quarter than what you needed. You'll also be lined up against the majority of companies opening up their new positions for the year and you'll be lost in the shuffle. You'll find some really good talent during the holidays but finding and hiring are two separate things. Stay focused and determined to hire your next candidate and don't waste any time in the process.

Where do you find talent?

Where do you find talent? 

That is the question I’ve been asked more recently than any other. There is no isolated answer and for those who are currently spending countless hours and endless amounts of money trying to perfect the recruitment process with software – good luck.

My answer is an honest and simple one – get out and be a part of the community. This post by Robert Scoble aka @scobleizer following our one-on-one dinner is a great use case on this exact topic. Throughout the post he references the idea of taking on the unknown. He also uses the term “random” more than once and that works for me too. In his case he appreciated meeting me. In your case, it could be meeting the next lead engineer that helps you drive home a multi-million dollar initiative.

The traditional approach to hiring of posting ads, collecting resumes, conducting a batch of phone screens which lead to technical screens, which lead to more technical screening… are out. Open source technologies are converging on enterprise integration and the community is growing. The push is self-organization – being proactive and getting out to Meetups, conferences, Tweetups, Hackfests and/or any other type of event you can think of that is centered around technology.

 Attending a social function to find engineers may have been an awkward suggestion at best or a hypocritical suggestion perhaps – even five years ago. Today though, that is the only way to truly build a network of expanding interest and attraction within the developer community. Next time you are sitting in your office late at night trying to figure out why it has been so hard to fill your open role, ask yourself when was the last time you actually went out into the community and actually talked to people about the project, vision and opportunity on your team.  

So where do I find talent? Put yourself on an edge. 

Hiring Managers: Manage Yourself First

I hear a lot of managers talk about the proper way to manage people. There are many different theories on how to motivate your team in a way that makes them perform at very high levels, but everything comes down to not what you say but what you do that motivates your team to perform.

The days of commanding and controlling your team are largely over and there's a new cloud of awareness centered around the idea of empowering your employees. The idea of making your employees feel replaceable doesn't motivate them to perform at unusual levels, it makes them perform just enough to keep their job away from the firing squad. However, the confident manager allows every interaction with their team to foster the idea of mutual dependence.

Be Humble

It's a virtue, yes, but every manager struggles with this at the start and for some it cements into their management style and they don't know why people don't like working for them. Many new managers are nervous about proving themselves, so they end up discouraging their subordinates from speaking up and thereby fail to benefit from their experience. In other words they rely on war stories from the past to use to teach and instead of teaching it turns out to be just gloating on how the manager solved a similar problem in the past.

The tone can be, listen to me because you know nothing and I know everything. Ask yourself next time you find yourself waxing on about a situation that happened in the past, "Am I giving absurd details on how I figured out problem because it's relevant to a current problem or am I just making myself look better?"

You're just showcasing your own insecurities if you go on and on about yourself. People want to know your stories, but tell them when you're asked and don't go on about what you've done to get where you are today. So recount your experiences very briefly, but only if they directly relate to a current issue that needs to be solve.

Prove to your people not that you have a record as a problem solver but that your ideas and advice can help them now.

Finally, remember to share both your mistakes and your successes. Achieving that balance brings you down to earth in the eyes of your team, and it makes you reflect on why you are telling stories in the first place.

Don't Be Obsessed with the Rules

Rules are a good thing but to simply state the rules because they're a rules isn't enough for the motivated team member. You need to understand and state the why behind the rules so that the person understands why they're there even though they may not agree with them. It becomes more about the manager doing a great job being a manager and following the rules and less about cultivating a team of people that feel like they have the ability to change things within the organization. No one wants to work with the manager who can't affect change.

If you find yourself continually referencing the "hand book" to solidify to your people why you're making a decision your team will soon realize that you're not a manager but the police to make sure you're following the rules. You will lose your team's confidence very quickly as the person they entrust with their career and the smart ones will seek out the person who wrote the "hand book" to further themselves and effect change within an organization.

Listen and Show It

One of my turning points in my career was when I first started with my organization and the COO, Brian, was visiting Chicago from Boston for one reason or another. We went out as a region one night and had a few beers, Brian sat down with me and started asking questions about who I was and what I was looking to do here. It became very apparent to me, a month into the job and by far the most junior person in the region, that Brian was listening to my every word. He wasn't looking elsewhere when I was talking but he was looking right in my eyes and commenting on my stories. We talked about my upbringing, college and a few stories about my early obsession with U2 and a new band called Kings of Leon. The conversation went on for about an hour at the bar we were at and soon the rest of the senior region left to go home, leaving myself and my COO just chatting one on one. I remember apologizing to Brian for taking up his time while the more accomplished people were leaving, surely he didn't travel from Boston to chat with an unproven trainee. It mean a lot to me.

It wasn't until a year later, however, that it really started to impact me on how great of a leader Brian truly was. I saw Brian in Boston this time for a company party and out of 300 people, Brian came up to me and immediately reference our conversation about U2 how, after our conversation, went to listen to Kings of Leon and how he didn't agree that they were similar to a U2. I was floored. Not only did Brian recognize that the time he spent with me meant more to me than if he had spent that same time with someone who was more "worthy" of his time but he remembered it. Brian knew how to get more out of his time.

The point is that communication is multifaceted. Not only did Brian listen to me, he was 100% present in our conversation. His body language was engaged, he looked into my eyes when I spoke and then he referenced the conversation a year later. Every time I spoke to Brian and still to this day realize that every word I choose to say with Brian is heard. This taught me one of the most valuable lessons in how to manage people effectively and it happened before I was even managing people. If people know that you're listening and processing what they say they will make sure they look to impress you every time they interact with you. That breeds a culture of people looking to impress and everyone performs at a high level if they're continually looking to impress one another. They stop trying to impress when they feel you're not even noticing their efforts.

First Round Interview? No, First Round Impressions

Preface: This post is written less as my opinion and more as a culmination of all the feedback (use cases) some four thousand high-end technology professionals have given me over the past three plus years.

We are in one of the tightest, if not the tightest candidate markets since, well…forever. More open positions than qualified candidates and new companies sprouting up every day (like the dot com). That said, the technical community has maintained a very high bar for talent and experience to make the cut when interviewing (not so much like the dot com). Modern day job descriptions look like a good action story super hero or better yet, Mark Zuckerberg. This and the fact that many still think we are in a soft market due to lasting effects of a recession, lead to ineffective first round interviews often, so I hear.

The first round interview is a first impression of your organization, and a lasting one. With the supply-and-demand curve favoring them, candidates are more likely to just move on from a bad experience. So, is it better to cover technical strengths? Or weaknesses? Code test?

If you use this simple model while conducting first round interviews you’ll find the ability to make a good assessment while also leaving a great impression on each candidate you interview whether or not you decide to move forward with them in the process.

1. Set the agenda (Duration of the call and topics covered)
2. Start by asking about them (Above and beyond your resume, tell me your story)
3. Ask more questions about them (What technologies were you using, what are you building, team size, % breakdown of role)
4. Tell your story (Before this, when I got here, why I joined, since I joined, why I’m staying)
5. Tell the story of the company (Who, What, When/where we started, where we came from, where we are, where we are going)
6. Dive into the product/application (Core business, user base, market, competitors)
7. Detail the team break down (Overall employees, tech numbers, tech stack, seniority, tenure)
8. Light overview of the role as it pertains to the current business need (Describe business need in a way to objective the must have skills)
9. Ask an open ended question to incite communication and articulation from the candidate (Personalized question about their story)
10. Wrap up the call and set a reference point regarding next steps (Set up a second round at the end of a first round or check-in call if unsure)
11. Follow through with next step (Let the NOs go)