Hiring for Collaborative Innovators

In my last post, I promised a look behind the scenes of our team. How we build and operate. Here's more about the most important thing I do as a manager: hiring.

How Do You Hire for Collaborative Innovation and Trust?

One of our chief concerns in OCTO is hiring and developing people who can excel within a culture of collaboration. Some might ask, “Why?” Why not hire for performance and work ethic? Or any number of attributes important to an organization?

Our customers aren’t looking for off-the-shelf solutions. They bring their industry expertise, and our job is to create a space to brainstorm, build, test and iterate new projects and initiatives, all within safe confines. They may be building a business case or justification and may not have the time and space within their own organization to test and iterate. In many projects, our customers are moving into an area of ambiguity, where no one quite knows what they’re doing, and they need to trust we can do it together. We need to be that trusted partner. And that requires a team that excels at collaborative innovation.

Qualities

Certain qualities make people good candidates for co-creating and operating inside a trust bubble with our customers. Here are a few qualities we seek:

1. Leadership: There are many definitions of leadership, but we prioritize two dimensions:

• The ability to influence others without having explicit authority. This capability builds on a foundation of intrinsic credibility, which in turn requires domain expertise.?
• The ability to inspire and maintain a group of fellow travelers on an ambiguous, high-risk project.?

2. Role-related knowledge: This includes technical expertise and is essential to being credible.

3. Curiosity: Long-term success in our teams requires a genuine interest in the projects we tackle, in how things work and in how they could work.

4. Culture add (vs. culture fit): It’s hard to evolve a culture if you keep hiring people that fit your existing culture. So instead, we look for people who will advance our culture.?

This last quality is relatively new to us—culture add vs. culture fit. It's essential in OCTO and the process of innovation. We’re not trying to carbon copy people and bring in ten of the same. We want ten different profiles that together as a team are much stronger than individual parts.?

Earlier this year, we had a candidate with a very skeptical point of view. While some may have characterized the candidate as negative, I thought it was admirable that the hiring manager leaned into the discussion to explore this candidate's perspective and personality and why they might be useful to our team. We ended up hiring the candidate, who is now providing critical contributions to our work.?

Hiring?

There are three basic tenets involved in our hiring process:

1. We take our time.
2. The whole team participates.
3. The interview is a coaching session.

We take our time.?

I interview all candidates at the beginning and the end. We go slow, and it’s painful. The average time to find someone on this team is nine months. From the time a spot opens, it takes 9-12 months with a considerable amount of effort to find candidates internally and externally. In rare cases we’ve hired faster, but great candidates are usually doing incredible things in their current role and a resume or LinkedIn profile never tells the story we need to hear. So we take our time and make both the candidate and our team build the foundation necessary to make a good hiring/employment decision.

The whole team participates.?

We make sure many members of our team are involved in the hiring process. We're not just practicing collaborative innovation with customers; we practice it internally. As a result, no new hire is ever a surprise. For most roles, we have at least 20% of our team formally or informally interview candidates.?

A lot of our customers ask about how we hire at Google, and specifically for a CTO organization. When I describe our hiring process, what resonates most is how our approach is not manager-driven. It's decentralized. Each interviewer has an equal say. That's a very different framework for some companies. The other thing that typically resonates with customers is the way we structure interviews. Each interviewer is assigned a responsibility area. They must focus on the topics that the hiring manager or recruiter has assigned.

The interview is a coaching session.

Most of my interviews resemble coaching sessions. They’re not a 60-minute conversation with 45 minutes of questions on my part and 15 minutes for the candidate’s questions.?

Many hiring processes are designed to weed people out; by the time we find a strong candidate, we want the opposite—to uncover the magic this person can provide. So, I first ask how the role fits into the candidate’s career goals. This is the single most important element of role “fit”.? That doesn’t mean it’s always obvious. But the process of thinking through it together is critical.? Then, I put them in the driver’s seat and focus on their career aspirations, professional development and interests. It’s not unusual for 45 minutes of the interview to be driven by the candidate, which mirrors how our CTOs drive collaborative innovation in our work.

Then I test for how they approach problem-solving. There's no one correct answer, but I want to see how they'd handle real life challenges we’ve actually run into over the last 6 years. These aren’t abstract questions about year 1 computer science concepts, nor are they ridiculous questions about fitting golf balls into airplanes. I make it clear that there are no right answers because I want to be clear that ambiguity is a big part of our work. Many people feel uncomfortable with a high level of ambiguity in their work, and they weed themselves out of the process.?

Finally, I’ll describe our objectives and key results (OKRs), performance management systems and how they’re tied together. I want candidates who are taking a chance on us to know exactly what we do, how that translates to performance outcomes, and where the role differs from other CTO-like roles. Then, I map out what they can expect two to three years down the road based on the journeys I’ve observed leading this team since its inception, and try to put them at ease about how impact in this role takes time, but done right, can surpass the scale and scope of most other roles (even ones with much fancier titles and much larger teams).

Why collaboration

In addition to being able to collaborate with customers, candidates need to collaborate internally for multiple reasons:

• Our OKRs are team-based. I share our OKRs with potential hires and make a point of how they're team goals. People are expected to contribute to others' projects as much as their own. Our incentive and governance systems align with our values.?
• We thrive in swarms. Swarming occurs when multiple members congregate to tackle a problem—including issues outside their main project focus. A colleague may be leading one or two projects and swarming on three or four. This style of work reinforces our culture of collaboration and trust. It’s not hierarchical. It’s a peer-led approach to problem-solving.?

What “collaborative” looks like

Ultimately, when we say we want a collaborative team, it means we’re looking for people who are very interested in the success of others. There’s a very small population of people who want to surrender their identity and ego into a collective because that takes a lot of trust. Yet it's precisely the type of people we seek and hire.

As a result, internal competition in our team is somewhat muted compared to a lot of peer-driven organizations. Our colleagues look to leverage others’ strengths more than highlight their own talent or knowledge. Ultimately, that’s what our customers want in a partner: a leader who will tap into the collective team’s strengths to solve problems versus proving their own value and expertise. Collaborative innovation is what our customers need and what makes our team successful. Because of who we hire, big, undefined challenges get us going, but it's our teammates who keep us and our customers going in the face of ambiguous, complex problems.?

It’s hard to do things for the first time, but doing it together makes it a lot more fun.??

In my next article, I'll share more about our processes, the "how" we do what we do here in the CTO organization.