Hyper-growth in Engineering - A Recruiter's Perspective

Growing any function significantly in a short period of time requires a lot of things. Even the best recruiters in the world can’t hire good engineers without a serious investment from their Engineering team, so partnership and collaboration are key, along with a strong, consistent funnel, and all the data you can collect.  As we’ve scaled our Engineering team from 30-180 engineers in 7 months, I’ve learned quite a few things…..

Learning #1 - Interviewer Fatigue

The problem is real.  Consider this.  Assuming you do a fairly standard 5 part technical/manager/behavioral interview, the process of interviewing and adding 5 engineers per month takes 25 hours....and that’s just for the people you actually HIRE.  Now assume that in order to get 5 hires per month, you have to spend that 5 hours per candidate with 7 people...that increases the time required to 35 hours per month.  Now assume that in order to get 7 people onsite, an engineer actually has to spend one hour on the phone with 15 people….that adds another 15 hours per month.  We’re now at 50 hours per month .....just to hire 5 engineers…..

We’re hiring 20+ engineers per month.  Every month.  You can do the math….obviously as the team grows, the interviewer pool grows, but for the first few months, that initial pool of interviewers is carrying a heavy load and it’s critical to consider options to solve for this early on.

Things I wish I had considered sooner

• Make sure your best interviewers go first.  They can hold the quality bar and their opinion will be respected when they are pushing people forward.  This will help to make sure that the time interviewers invest, is leading to more offers, and not just more interviews.  They’re going to eliminate more people, but that’s ok, because it’s better to eliminate them sooner, than later.
• Train people on how to interview immediately.  Don’t wait.  Get them involved in the hiring process early so you can grow your interview pool
• Get buy-in early.  Talk to your team of interviewers about your hiring targets and the time commitment it requires from them to get there.  Don’t wait until they’re screaming for mercy...show them the funnel.  Discuss the challenges they’re going to face before they’re bringing it up to you.

Learning #2 - Consider the Machine

There’s a standard sourcer/recruiter model that many recruiting organizations lean on, because it often works.  But when you need to generate a lot of top of funnel activity with a relatively lean team, the few hires that a sourcer can generate suddenly aren’t enough and you have to think of other options.

Things I wish I had considered sooner

• Many teams wait to hire a “programs” or University Recruiter but it’s important to have someone like this feeding the machine early on.  Events, strategic university efforts, global online challenges; things that reach a lot of people will be critical to generating candidates and should be a focus early on and a traditional recruiter usually can’t be effective in these roles.  If this isn’t your background, then consider hiring for this skill set earlier than you think you need it
• Kill two birds with one stone: Consider events that allow you to reach a large pool of people, but also give you insight into their technical abilities (online coding challenges, Reddit Style AMAs with your engineers, etc. will allow you to do this)
• Focus on an even playing field for engineering interviews, which will allow you to hire based on meritocracy.  More traditional tactics based on resume, pedigree, GPA don’t work appropriately when you need to scale, so message that to your leadership team early.
• A large funnel requires a lot of recruiter time, so you’ll need to find tools to help automate the top of the funnel and can test for technical ability early in the process.  (you want to have an even playing field for the candidates, but again, make sure the right people are getting through so you don’t over-utilize your precious interviewing resources)  

Learning #3 - Data helps - a lot

It’s easy to just start churning through the volume now that you’ve generated it.  Candidates enter and exit the process, and you’re hitting the hiring targets.  Success, right!? Things seem great.   But suddenly scale takes on a different meaning and what was working a month or two ago, isn’t.  You’ve got new challenges, more interviewers, and more candidates and things aren’t working like they were.

Things I wish I had considered sooner

• Stay hyper-close to your funnel.  That may be obvious but doing this will help you understand the changes that are happening from month to month around # of interviews, percentage of candidates moving from one stage to the next and what that means in terms of interviewer time.  Recognize any upticks or downward trends in offer acceptance rates.   Being close to these things will help you recognize when you need to do things like add/train more interviewers, tighten up your pass-through rates at different stages, eliminate the candidates entering the funnel from the sources that aren’t producing hires, etc.  
• There are other things which are much harder to track with a standard ATS, but very worth it….like last-minute interviewer cancellations.  Tracking these things helps you to recognize when your interviewers are feeling over-worked and you need to reaffirm your partnership with the team, or consider options like week on/week off interviews for the team to alleviate some of the pain.  
• Significant changes in offer acceptance rates may signal that your story/EVP has changed or become less relevant as the team has grown and needs to be revisited….or that your recruiters are managing too much volume and the team may need to be augmented.
• this is my biggest learning and best tip for anyone scaling; especially those doing it for the first time - Be neurotic about tracking things because with a hyper-growth company you won’t necessarily know what’s broken until it’s broken.  It’s easier to have the appropriate data handy when you need  it, than trying to retroactively go back and find it.  Data will help you to understand why and where you need to pull levers and will always give you the power to reaffirm yourself as a partner for the business and not a service provider.

If you’d like to chat with me about tools or systems we’re using, I’m happy to.  Reach out to me at [email protected]