Lessons and learnings from Hiring

I have been in my current role at Amazon for close to two years and I continue to be excited about what we are building. My team defines product vision and strategy for personalization and ML (including LLMs) at Amazon Music to deliver great recommendations to customers on our visual and voice interfaces across music and podcasts. We work with great science, engineering, and program leaders and partners to achieve this. I have been fortunate with building a great product manager team here at Amazon and I would love to share the lessons I have learnt along the way.

Hiring great talent in any industry or organization takes work and time. It is often like finding a needle in a haystack but a clear strategy, right balance of speed and quality, and persistence can lead to great outcomes. Following are four ideas that helped me in this journey at Amazon and prior at Walmart Labs. The ideas are not new but living through them helped me understand and appreciate their value.

(1) Cast a wide net: You do not know where your next great hire might come from. A referral, a networking event, a jobs site application, or someone who meet every week. What helped me is keeping my eyes and ears open, leveraging my network inside and outside the company effectively, and vetting every application we received. It is not easy though to go through every resume and one must decide where they want to spend more time. For example, I leveraged my recruiting team to pre-vet resumes and I spent more time on referrals specially from people I trusted and respected. LinkedIn worked well to market and sell the job and role. My network knew I was hiring including my colleagues. The viral nature of social media helped spread my hiring posts beyond my direct network and increased my leads multiple fold. Working actively with my recruiters to identify new strategies to grow the funnel also paid dividends.

(2) Follow the process, no matter how long and painful: As a seasoned and experienced leader, it can feel easy to trust one’s judgment and intuition more than every detailed step of the process. However, the process, specially at a large firm like Amazon or Walmart, has been tried and tested for decades and it exists because it generally works well. I learnt how useful it was to follow key steps of the process to maintain objectivity, fairness, integrity and transparency for both the candidates and the hiring panels. Just like any major corporation, Amazon prescribes a hiring process while allowing the hiring manager a certain level of flexibility to make adjustments to fit their needs. I learnt how to leverage this flexibility while ensuring the process was useful for all stakeholders and led to good outcomes.

(3) Balance speed and quality: This was probably the toughest part of the process. The wait for the perfect candidate. This is where using one’s judgment and experience comes handy. I learnt to balance urgency (how urgently do you need a role filled), quality (will a 7.5/10 candidate work or do you need a 10/10), and effort (how much time are you and your team willing to invest in hiring). A long dragged process can cause hiring fatigue while hurrying into closing a role can lead to a less than ideal candidate. Doing a pulse check on this frequently with my manager, recruiters and key interviewers helped me balance our priorities well. Also, keep in mind that if you wait too long to hire, the role might not exist due to organizational changes.

(4) Convert, convert, convert: There are many steps in a hiring process from requesting a requisition, to creating one, to selling to potential candidates, to interviewing, to closing the candidate. Once you reach the final step and you have found a great candidate, you have to convert and bring them on board. Great candidates are often interviewing for multiple roles at many organizations and they might have more than one offer. Their current employer might incentivize them to stay. I experienced this twice while hiring recently and was able to close the candidate in both cases. What worked for me was understanding their career goals, selling them on our vision and growth opportunities, getting the candidate to talk to top performers in the organization, getting my manager to sell the role to them, and moving fast in decision making.

Hiring is as much art as it’s science. I feel fortunate to be able to invest in the process, learn from it and share my learnings. These learnings will fuel and improve my hiring as and when I go back out in the market. Right now, I am proud and excited of the team I have and am looking forward to working with them to build great products.