Building Great Software Engineering Teams: Recruiting, Hiring, and Managing Your Team from Startup to Success

CHAPTER 7

The Hiring Decision Checklist

Startups experiencing rapid growth have a lot of hiring meetings. In fact, these meetings may be the single largest use of meeting time in your company.

In my early days at Course Hero, hiring meetings tended to be long, drawn-out discussions that often went in circles. We debated topics that were often too open-ended and general to be useful. For example:

• Is this person smart?
• Do they match our requirements?
• Do they fit in with the culture?

At the end of the meeting, we had a hard time making clear, confident decisions.

Over time, we’ve refined our discussions to be much more efficient and decisive, and one of the biggest improvements has been to articulate a specific, actionable checklist of characteristics ...