How to be a better Hiring Manager

Thank you for being patient, while I sorted out how to juggle work, exams and assignments. Now that I am done with exams and assignments for a while, I am looking forward to writing more.

Recently I’ve had to spend quite a bit of time and energy in trying to come up with the right hiring process for us at SensorFlow and to define what it means when we say we need this person in the team.

As of now, I feel like I am still far from being a great hiring manager but I’ve learnt that how we hire very heavily determines our success in the long run and our happiness in the short.

I think we can all agree that working with great people highly influences whether you feel like you want to go to work today. I want my team to enjoy coming to work, so I told myself that I am going to get better at hiring, not for myself, but for my team.

I feel that we as engineering managers need to get better at it as well. I’ve had too many interviews where I’ve left feeling like the interviewer just wasted everyone’s time. Which is why I wanted to share 4 philosophies I’ve been using to create a good interviewing experience for both my team and the interviewee.

Thankfully, so far, I’ve received great feedback from both my team and my interviewees.

Your Organisation’s Anthropology

Any endeavour worth mentioning has required great people to find each other and work together. But before we can do that we need to understand the organisation that we are hiring for, we need to be able to answer questions like these

• Where has this organisation been? Where does it want to go?
• Who are the people that have been here the longest and the shortest?
• Who are those that are happy here, content or sad?
• Who are those that are doing well here, and those who are suffering?
• What are the characteristics that we have an abundance of, and those that we are missing
• What are our strengths and our weaknesses?

Only after we understand the organisation we are hiring for, would we be ready to find people who fit in. More importantly, we also learn more about what needs to be fixed before we start hiring so that our hires join a healthy and effective environment.

A common misconception I hear is that we can fix broken cultures by bringing good people in. Unfortunately, we end up breaking these people instead.

Capabilities not Deliverables

This is a big part of my approach to hiring, I think about what capabilities I need in the team, not the deliverables I need this person to work on. When you invest time in understanding your team’s make up, you will uncover capabilities that your team is lacking, and you should hire for these capabilities instead.

As an example, at SensorFlow, we decided that we wanted more thought leadership on IOT Service Reliability or improving the team’s ability to communicate better. Once we knew the capability we are hiring for, it became much easier to screen candidates to find the right fit. It also helped us understand exactly what questions we need to ask in order to assess if candidates are going to bring valuable capabilities into the team.

There are stupid questions

You need to ask very specific questions to determine how this person will function within the different ways the company operates in. You need to ask yourself what questions will help you learn more about

• How the interviewee handles last minute feature requests?
• How the interviewee handles a junior engineer making an inaccurate statement?
• How does the interviewee go about choosing what work on, when there are 5 different things to do and she only has time to complete one?
• How does the interviewee distill technical information when talking to a non-technical person?

And most importantly, as a manager, you need to be asking questions that can help you identify if you are the right leader for this interviewee. You are going to be a major influence in their lives and it is only right that you evaluate if you are going to be the right kind of influence for the kind of growth the interviewee is looking for.

You need to stop asking questions that waste time. Your typical whiteboard interview will likely only tell you if the interviewee spent the last 6 months going through LeetCode exercises.

Try asking interview questions that point you towards gaining a better understanding of how the candidate will respond to common situations you’ve observed in your organisation.

For example, at SensorFlow we go through two major interviews

• The first interview is for me to understand whether I have what it’ll take to grow this engineer to be better than he is now
• The second is a system design interview that has been taken from issues we’ve worked on but scoped out into a smaller chunk of work that allows us to fully discuss it within 90 mins. This is for us to understand how the candidate operates when we are solving a problem together.

Interviewing != War

No one enjoys being surprised by your new whiteboard test asking them to implement Dijkstra's algorithm in SQL.

This is an interview, your objective should be to figure out what it takes to bring the best out in these people and then assess if you have an environment that supports them in doing their best work here.

You can start by giving them a walkthrough of the interview process and what you are looking for at each stage. This should be more than just “oh? we want to see your technical abilities”.

Technical ability to do what?, repair aircon? set up infra?, refactor codebase?.

You should be more specific than generic one-liners in order to “keep the candidate on their toes”. You can talk about the types of questions they may get asked, the capability that you are trying to assess or talk about what you are looking for i.e. “we want to see if you understand how you can write middlewares in NodeJS to resolve certain types of problems.”

You can also start by introducing yourself and the organisation, and this means, being more open about yourself than just, “Hi, I am Sunny, your interviewer, please reverse this binary tree and cure cancer”.

Instead you can try talking about

• What your role is in the organisation, and what is interesting about it
• Why you are optimistic about being in this team
• What is the outlook for the team

You want to begin the interview on a positive note. The idea is to help the interviewee realise you are there to understand their strengths and not pick on their weaknesses.

Conducting an interview as an adversary will only tell you whether the candidate is confident with being in adversarial interviews. You won't learn if the candidate has the capabilities you are looking for, because it is now shrouded by the anxiety they are experiencing being in a room with you.

Bonus Tip From Sai, one of SensorFlow’s Founders

The one thing I normally do in my interviews which I found useful is giving the candidate 15 minutes to ask me questions, this tells me how well they have prepared on us as SensorFlow and also what they look for in the team they are joining - it's an opening into their thought process and where they place emphasis on what's important to them.

Parting words

As the interview concludes, as far as possible, I always try and leave the last 5 mins with the candidate to provide them with immediate feedback on areas I think they can improve on for their next interview whether it is with us or with someone else.

So far every candidate has been appreciative of the feedback they've received, so I encourage you to try it too.

And finally, be kind. Interviewing is hard on most people, please don’t make it harder. I hope the above points you in the right direction in creating a better interviewing experience for everyone.

Would love to hear your thoughts on what you are doing at your workplace to help improve the interviewing experience. I am usually active on Twitter / LinkedIn.

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SensorFlow provides a smart wireless IoT solution that monitors, analyses and automates hotel room environments. With SensorFlow, hotels can improve their energy and operational efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint and help make the world a greener place.

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