how_to_attract_and_recruit_top_engineers.md

Intro

Finding great talent is hard. Tech companies are always hiring. This short video will cover 5 tips to hire.

Main

• 1. Great engineers knows other great engineers > Implement a referral program:
  • Rich source -- 30% from referrals (6 out of 19 in Force)
  • Shorter hiring times -- 36% reduction
  • Longest tenyard -- ~47% longer are such a rich source of talent that it -- 6 out of ~20 in Force (~30%! from referrals), risk is considerably lower and tenyard is 40% longer.
• 2. Invest in employer branding; -- Make sure great engineers know about your company and wants to work there
  • Create and maintain good relationship with local universities; -- 13 interns (10%) in 2 months!
  • Create and maintain an engineering blog -- let the world know what are the engineering challenges that you are facing and how you are solving them;
  • Have some of your more vocal engineering folks like senior engineers, tech leads, engineering managers, directors, CTO to talk in these universities. Getting people hyped about the possibility of working at your company; What makes these leaders thrilled about working there themselves;
• 3. Understand what you need and tune for that -- Listen to the team. Understand what the team need the most.
  • Composition? Seniority?
  • Traits:
    • Techinical: Problem Solving, Code Fluency, Technical Mastery;
    • Execution: Communication & Collaboration, Gets Things Done, How Work is Conducted;
    • Multiplier: Leadership, Scope of Influence, User-focus & Business Aware.
  • There are rockstar unicorn ninjas that excels at everything but they are rare. So, understand what you need the most and hire for it. Idea: as a hiring manager, do a workshop with the team and work with them to collect the traits that they value the most. Prioritize that list.
• 4. Speed matters! - revisit your process, know your bottlenecks and experiment.
  • How many days between the first contact to an offer?
  • How many people and steps involved?
  • Interviews:
  • Your job in an interview is to reduce uncertainty.
    • Prepare for the interview:
    • Read the candidates resume and LinkedIn profile throroughly;
    • Compile a list of questions to verify for the existance or lack of the traits the team is looking for; Always prefer situational questions over hypothetical questions -- the STAR framework is very good at it (Situation; Task; Action and Result);
  • In the end of the day, it's a balance game -- statistically, the longer it takes, the smaller the chance of the candidate accepting the offer. And if you move too fast and do not properly assess the candidate the bigger the chance he is not a good fit for the job - so, what do you do? You experiment, change one step - for example, do 1-day onsite assessment instead of 3-days for a couple interviews - see if that renders better results; Or instead of a 1-week long home-assingment, have a longer onsite interview with paired programming as part of the agenda;
  • Experiment. This is a very competitive market, you have to be creative and make decisions fast or you'll most likely lose to the competition.

• Recap

• 1. Referral;
• 2. Employer branding;
• 3. Tune for the team;
• 4. Speed matters.

Call to Action

• What do you need? Talk to the team and understand what you're missing the most and search for that;
• Speed matters! Find your bottlenecks and remove them;
• Experiment and be creative;