Yesterday, the excellent speaker Veronika Ilina saved the weakening ex-speaker Alexander (me) at a meetup about hiring, onboarding and offboarding. A bit about hiring today. it’s not very difficult to make some weird stuff in hiring from my experience. Looking for one position, realize “something is not right” and start looking for another. Opening, changing requirements, closing positions without hiring.
Yes, It is costly to hire! The time of the hiring manager and the recruiter, if any, and the time of the rest of the team in the interview. More stages are longer and more expensive. Onboarding is 1-3 months. Another plus one person on the communication map.
Since it’s costly to hire, let’s optimize everything we can reach to make cheaper. So we’ve checked the direction and the strategy. If there’s work we can ignore, let’s not do it. We optimize what else in the processes is slowing us down. Make sure we have enough work for a person for months to come. Recheck the direction and budget. It’s still cheaper than opening a position. If we’ve tried everything reasonably, we can open the position.
What do we write on it? Who do we want? What qualifications do we already have on the team? What would we want? Remembering that teaching something may be faster than finding someone with knowledge of everything required. Put all of this neatly into the vacancy, highlighting what is essential. What’s important to us, what’s unimportant, what’s easy to check, what’s hard. The unimportant, we don’t have to check much. The important ones, check. Easy to check at the interview, hard things to check at probation.
Examples, but jokes. Assembler! We can label it essential and easy to test; let force the candidate to solve a problem from Leetcode in assembler 🙃. Jira knowledge for a developer is relatively easy to check but not crucial in our context (we’ll check it when we promote him to Jira Admin). Whether a person can overwork 30 days in a row, we can’t check on the job interview, and doesn’t matter, we don’t care. We don’t intend to work 30 days in a row (29 maybe). Ah, I almost forgot the important one! How much a person is into the team (beer) work is vital, and it may not be easy to find out at the interview.
We will always have some funnel of people coming in, and if we’re lucky, there will be people coming out at the end of the funnel and passing probation. We are choosing the first suitable candidate, not the best one maybe later or never. The perfect unattainable funnel is a cylinder where one person responded that he was a good fit, and we hired him.
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I’m Alex, tech lead in Prestatech with experience from startups to middle-sized and big-tech companies. Loves to make effective and friendly team processes. The registry of talks and articles I gave is on the Published page.
You can freely drop a message to [email protected] or linkedin.com/in/aptakhin to greet and ask questions about any topic.