The Art of Leadership

Chapter 12. How to Recruit

From a recruiting perspective, the best engineering manager I’ve worked with established her reputation with two hires. It went like this:

ME: “We need to build an iOS team, and while we have talented engineers, we don’t have time to train the current team on iOS. It’ll be faster to hire.”

HER: “Great, who should we hire?”

ME: “Here’s the perfect profile. We’ll never get him, but he’s an incredible, well-known iOS engineer who is not only productive but also a phenomenal teacher. He’d be a perfect seed for the team. We need an engineer like him.”

HER: “Why not hire him?”

ME: “You’ll never get him. Everyone is throwing everything at him.”

Three months later, the long-shot hire that I thought we had no chance at getting signed an offer letter. Two months later, same story. I mentioned an unattainable hire, which was followed promptly by the hiring of that specific engineer.

You probably think there was some trick here. You may think we threw huge amounts of money at these engineers—we didn’t. Standard compensation packages. You may think we promised them an impossibly cool role—we didn’t. The offer was to build the first version of an iOS application with a talented group of engineers.

There is no trick other than carving out time every single day to do the job of recruiting.

First Rule of Recruiting: Give It 50%

Let’s start with the rule. For every open job on your team, you need to spend one hour a day per req on recruiting-related activities. Cap ...