“When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove that you are smarter than they are. ” — R.H. Grant.
Hiring is one of the important steps of building an awesome team which leads to building unicorns and successful companies. To filter out people, who are best fit to your company culture and values, the hiring process of a company needs to be thorough and rigorous. Plus it also needs to be easier for all the stake holders involved in the hiring process, so that best talent is hired along with all resources allocated and used efficiently.
In this article, I have pointed out some basic things to be kept in mind, when designing or outlining a hiring process for your company specially if you are dealing in the tech sector. This process works for companies as well as startups in general but there may be some changes which I will be mentioning at appropriate places.
Below are some important points to be kept in mind, while devising a hiring strategy for a company :
i) What are your needs ?
First of all you need to identify what are your needs ? What is the specific role for which you want to hire? What is the skill set of required people?
Technical HR Managers need to know subtle differences between different roles like that of a Software Developer and Software Engineer, Data Scientist and Data Engineer, Machine Learning and Deep Learning Engineer and Developer etc.
Normally, Developers are the people who are building things on the top of existing libraries and frameworks. However, Engineers are those people who are constantly innovating the things. So, if you have need of a Developer and you are hiring an Engineer, that might be an overuse of resources for your company.
Its’ important that you have an idea of what skill set a person will have? You will definitely have some existing stack so, you will need the people with proficiency in the same stack.
Plus, you should look for any resources in your social circle. Because, interviewing a person is a rigorous and thorough process. However, by searching the candidate in your circle, you may save all your expenses involved in this process.
The result of this step will be that you will have a complete picture of the ideal candidate which you want to hire. This would be of great help to you in the next steps.
ii) Who is your ideal candidate ?
Once you have a complete picture of required person, now you will need to document details of that person i.e you will need to write a Job Description.
Normally, JDs contain years of experience required, list of tools and skills that person needs to be proficient with and requirements related to behavior. Some JDs also include pay range and most have job location(s) as well.
Now when you are designing a JD, you may need to look at ads by other companies working in the same domain. Look out for how they present their needs to the target audience in the JD. You may need to gather chunks of information and then tweak them according to your own needs.
Also, try to be specific as more as possible while writing details of tools and skills. Because if you listed all things in one place, then it’s likely that you might end up hiring a jack-of-all but master-of-none. Normally good candidates don’t apply on the jobs which have a plethora of requirements, so being precise is best strategy.
Now upon the end of this step, you will have a complete description of the person you need.
iii) How to target the best people ?
LinkedIn is the best platform to target professional people. Other than that you can use Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to engage people.
There are some new options as well like StackOverflow, Dev.to, Gitter etc which have developer specific communities where you can find the best talent. Other than that you can reach out to recruitment agencies for finding the best people. Job portals like Indeed, OLX and others can also help you in this regard.
The result of this step would be that you will have a pool of candidates which you can use in subsequent steps.
iv) How to segment candidates ?
Now when you have a pool of candidates. First step is to filter out all irrelevant resumes. Plus you should checkout Spam/Junk folders of your email because sometimes emails are placed in these folders mistakenly by classification models used by Gmail, Yahoo, and others.
After that you have all relevant resumes in your hand. Now, if you are a well established company then you already have a pool of candidates. You may need to add all related resumes to appropriate pools. However, if you are a startup or a new company then you will have to create appropriate pools.
Pools are beneficial in that sense that if you want to hire some appropriate candidates in future then you will already have a pool of resources from where you can filter out people.
After that step you will have segmented candidates for present and future.
Conclusion :
So, that was first part of my article covering the design of a good hiring strategy for your company or startup.
In next part, I will be discussing the screening process, interview and other next steps involved in the hiring road map.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for next part.
Let me know in the comments, that how was this part and what strategies do you follow at your company to attract best people.
I will be very happy to hear from you.
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