Hyper-growth through a pandemic

In my last post, I talked about how we helped ZOE double the size of their engineering team in the span of 8 weeks. Here, I’d like to go more in depth with our methodologies and how we turned 122 interviews into 11 offers.

Discuss expectations and build resilient relationships

If someone trusts you to solve a certain problem for them, especially within a business context, then they become a key part of your execution strategy. 

You need to be aligned on:

• your goals, 
• expectations, 
• delivery targets &
• general day-to-day execution.

In periods of hyper growth, your objectives, OKR/KPIs are intertwined to enable the company to reach the next milestone in the product road map. I've been fortunate to have the privilege of working alongside Julien and watching his take on building a high performing tech team. He's a natural "recruiter" and his eye for culture and technical ability is highly calibrated. It's important to complement your key stakeholder's work style, strengths and blinds spots, especially if you're looking to make 10+ hires in a short space of time.

Have the right tools in place

Understanding client objectives, desires and current challenges is imperative. What do the company, the team, the founders, the board, the investors want to see? Finding this out will help you pick the right solution on which to start your kick off. 

If you inherited legacy systems, we encourage you to spend time understanding them, trying to make them work to your specific needs. If you find that the platform is a bottleneck, don’t be afraid to shop around. There are plenty of affordable options that are optimised for different features. With modern tech advancements on simple backend systems, you can now transfer your entire database with a custom generated key, so long as you don’t mind the setup time. 

We chose to implement Lever and configured it to a 2 weeks time-to-hire. 

The dreaded “bar”

Having a strong leadership team is certainly an attractive asset to investors looking for the next “home-run”. People want to see battle scars, past successes and failures, and perhaps to a lesser extent a pedigree. 

By extension, we can assume you’d opt to build your future teams upholding the same standards. The issue arises in balancing practicality, affordability and image. If you’re too driven by pedigree, you’d lose out to the internet giants, hedge funds and other companies with more cash in their bank. Set a sensible bar. Understand what your culture is and what you value. Identify a way to incorporate that into your interview and feedback metrics and start applying it:

• Build enticing reach outs and marketing campaigns. This varies from business to business, and spending time understanding the technical landscape, challenges and interesting science problems that a client is trying to solve will go a long way into bolstering your reach-outs. 
• A/B testing on small sample sizes can be an effective strategy. Tweaking the tone, content and style and measuring engagement can help you generate a reachout with 50%+ response rate across most platforms. 
• Make sure to go into as much detail as possible in your reach outs; break down the technical challenges, include interesting and notable company accomplishments, the role of the title, names of the team, etc. 

Amplify your reach

Turn on your marketing engine and experiment with different platforms. The open source world is fascinating! @Julien suggested we host our roles on Hacker News - we had 2 final interviews and 1 hire who joined our team within a week of the ad being launched!

Once you've segmented your projects, dedicate the correct amount of recruiters to the roles and begin going through your network - gather referrals, look through past applicants and successful final interview candidates, hang out in interesting slack groups and developer communities and use all this information to begin creating highly tailored Boolean searches whilst keeping an eye out on who's looking and whether they fit in any of the projects you've created. With enough time, dedication and a certain amount of luck you can reach a point where it's possible to get 122 interviews from multiple streams of candidates in a short span of time.

Turning 122 interviews into 11 offers

Understand the feedback and learn from it

So, you've got a stream of candidates in the pipeline but how do you successfully turn this into offers (and eventually hires)?

• Calibrate your interview feedback! 
• Read, re-read and breakdown the feedback to begin picking out what your engineers and other key stakeholders say about the candidates you are putting in front of them. 
• Find out what is most important to them and what is not. It is fundamental to constantly study feedback and to ask questions on anything that you don't understand (whether it's too technical or simply unclear, someone will find time to explain it to you) as this will help you to tailor and fine tune your searches. 

You will eventually figure out the groove and be able to pick on early red flags.

Stay tuned for the next post where we discuss the final results and some of our candidate management experience.