The Engineering Leader

Chapter 8. Hiring That Scales

When given the opportunity to establish a hiring process, we’re all biased to advocate for a process in which we would be successful ourselves. In hiring, this plays out in two main ways: “A” players build monocultures, hiring people just like them, and “B” players hire “C” players, hiring people who won’t threaten them.

In other words, top performers too narrowly define what top performance is, and OK performers hire mediocre people; in both cases, they’re making selections that bolster their own position.

From the candidate perspective, the hiring process is the start of someone’s experience with your team. In an ideal world, this connects all the way through their employment with the company: the competencies you evaluate are consistent with your promotion process, the ways in which you evaluate them are consistent with the way you work, and how you approach that evaluation demonstrates the kind of team that you are.

Hiring is an eternal struggle, especially in software, because of (1) market changes, (2) the internet being full of bad advice, and (3) the impossibility of complete data. Regrettably (thankfully?), we cannot A/B test humans, and we will never know how the people we didn’t hire would have done if they had been hired. Even the data from the people we did hire can be noisy, with no clean control based on their onboarding support, manager, first projects, and personal lives.

In this, probably the most tactical chapter in this book, we’ll ...