Scaling Teams

Chapter 1. Scaling Hiring: Growing the Team

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Jim Collins, Good to Great (HarperBusiness)

Growing a team requires dedicated effort by team leaders to identify, recruit, and hire the best candidates, and probably a lot more effort than you think. You need a well-designed recruiting process that channels this effort to yield the results you want: great hires. This is especially critical in a team’s early days, since the founders and early employees form the bedrock of what the company hopes to become. Hiring poorly is often worse than not hiring at all.

In this and the next two chapters, we outline a scalable hiring process that can take a team from single digits to hundreds of employees. We’ll explain how to evaluate candidates efficiently and accurately, minimize bias in the recruiting process, and maximize the chance that your new hires will be strong contributors. But first, let’s discuss the principles that form the foundation of any effective recruiting process.

Hiring to Scale

Teams that need to hire are trying to bridge the gap between what they can do today and what they need to do in the future. These could be skill gaps, such as the group of hardware engineers who realize their product needs a major software component. Or they could be capacity gaps, such as when the founding team realizes they are unable to keep up with customer demand for new features and support requests. In either case, what should team leaders do ...