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Reflections around Hiring
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Reflections around hiring.md

Evolving vs holding true to your core values

There are two conflicting forces and you as a company have to continually make the right decisions regarding this trade-off:

  1. as a company we have to evolve, follow your ideas, discover and explore new markets, and hiring is the key for a company to evolve.
  2. as a company, you want to hold true to your core values (e.g. XPeppers belives in agile values: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage, respect) and hiring is a key factor again to assess the "cultural fit".

Benefits of reflecting on your hiring process

The first benefits of thinking about your hiring process is that it will force you to think about

  1. Your values: what kind of values or non-tech qualities, preferences and skills should the candidate have? What are the current team's skills and personalities?
  2. The problems you want to solve: why should I hire someone in the first place? couldn't I resolve my problems without new hires? Why not?

So now you can clear your mind with two important results:

  1. having a shared understanding and declaration of your company's values and your team's values
  2. having a clear target that you want to reach hiring someone.

Now you can build a map that will bring you there. This map will define basically your hiring strategy.

Creating a "everyone recruits" company

Ideally, you want everyone in your company to be able to attract perspective hires, and to recruit them.

Nevertheless, you have to keep a balance between

  • collecting and sharing as much informations as possible, in a shared knowledge base (as in a wiki e.g.), so that everyone in your company, everyone in your team can become an effective recruiter: collect tips & tricks, what to avoid, how to recognize bias in evaluating candidates, how to use different kind of questions (open, closed, behavioral, hypotetical, etc), how to prepare an interview, how to welcome the candidate and let him/her feel confortable, collecting email templates, etc
  • don't define in too much details your process, because you want your hiring process to be as easy as possible to change and modify based on the feedback you collect

So, collect those info and build a shared knowledge, but not too much details in doing that.

How to evaluate and assess cultural fit

  • There's no 100% guarantee that what you assess is correct: ain't no science
  • Gain experience doing as much interviews as possible
  • Use recruiter shadowing for building a strong recruitment attitute / mindset
  • Create checklist for your process. List the values, skills, non-tech qualities and pref that you want to find in the candidate.
  • Reflect retrospectively on your past recruitment sessions and interviews: what went well? what could be improved?

Candidate qualities, preferences and non-tech skills

Necessary qualities:

  • initiative: how much is required? what type of initiative?
  • flexibility
  • tech leadership

Preferences

For how the job should be done vs how the candidate likes to work.

  • procedural preferences: follow procedures vs breaking rules
  • goal-orientation pref
  • problem-solving pref (how much independence?)
  • learning pref
  • collaboration pref (individual collaborator vs teamwork)

Non-tech skills

  • communication skills
  • preformance-versatility skills
  • negotiation skills
  • problem-solving skills
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