Managing hiring in the technology organization

Linkedin has been going through the hyper-growth phase for some years now (in fact going from 8 engineers when I started in 2006 to more then 250 today). It is quite fascinating we have been able to pull this off and build a great team - and while dumb luck and sheer drive has played a role (luck doesn’t get enough credit these days) - I though I would share some highlights of our hiring machinery (fine tuned through many hard lessons and iterations).

I would break up the hiring process in 7 stages:

1. Bulding the pipeline
2. Screening
3. Managing the pipeline
4. The phone interview
5. The On-Site interview
6. Making a decision
7. Closing

1. Building the pipeline

Building the pipeline is a topic in of itself - there's multitude of tangibles and intangibles that go into it (many beyond your direct control as a hiring manager), so I am not going to focus on the this topic. One thing that is sure is that you know when you don’t have a good pipeline. Ultimately effective hiring is a numbers game.


2. Screening (weeding down the pipeline)

A decent pipeline presents a problem of it’s own - you can’t possibly interview (or even phone screen) every single candidate. So we need to weed it down and the larger or the lower quality the pipeline is, the more imperfect this process becomes. Here’s a couple tips that has worked for me:

Resume screening - look for good schools, relevant experience, genuine style (which would indicate that the candidate didn’t optimize his or her resume for mass submission to monster.coms of the world)

Recruiter screening - a good recruiter will do a fine job on soft skills and the cultural fit that will save you a lot time and here’s what you can do to help:

• Have recruiters attend your hiring standup meetings
• Make sure the recruiter knows your product very well
• Provide of list of easy technical questions/answers to be asked of every candidate - however corny it may sound, it weeds out a lot of candidates who are proficient only in talking
• Initially sit on a couple of recruiter phone screens with a recruiter

3. Managing the pipeline

Managing the pipeline tightly is often overlooked or outsourced to the HR department or some ATS software. Big mistake. A simple spreadsheet in Google docs can do wonders to make sure each screened candidate is handled through all the stages of the process and will also give you visibility to plan.


4. The phone interview

This is one of the most important steps of the entire process. What you want as an outcome is a set of candidates that are technically competent and the ones that you rather not have to walk out of the onsite interview. This is also a step we have spent the most time optimizing.

Here’s how our process works and so far it has been awesome (although it takes up to 1.5 hours for an engineer to do):

1. Coding exercise - we do a series of coding exercises on progressively increasing difficulty (also depending on the level of the candidate). We have actually learned the coding exercise is the most indicative of the end quality of candidates (perhaps because coding is what we do here)
2. Architecture/Design exercises
3. General basic computer science questions
4. Questions about the resume

5. The On-Site interview

We focus on:

1. Architecture and design in much higher depth
2. More coding on the white board
3. Questions designed to gauge the IQ
4. Evaluating the candidate’s ability to learn
5. Meeting the team and evaluating the cultural fit (this includes tolerating only a minimal amount of BS from a candidate)
6. Selling the company and the team

One thing we do specifically unique is that we have pair interviewing (2 interviewers in each round). This lets the team stay objective.


6. Making a decision

The rules here are:

1. Be quick, ideally the same day or the next day
2. Only “Yes” or “No” on evaluation forms, no “Maybe”
3. There has to be at least one “champion” of a candidate as result of the interview; when everyone says “Yes”, but no one is excited to argue for a candidate - that means “No”
4. Answer a question of what is special about this particular candidate and how he or she can complement the team in unique ways
5. When in doubt - just say “No”

7. Closing

After you have done all the interviewing and selling - that is where the difference between good and great recruiters comes into play. Negotiation of compensation terms and the title, especially in a highly competitive environment can be a fine art. The goal here is to make your company and the team specifically be as desirable to a candidate as possible.

A few words I’d like to add:

This is still work in process - for example we are thinking of new ways to evaluate candidate’s cultural fit and ability to work effectively as part of a specific team (this quality is often not well understood, but can affect team performance in major ways)

Only relevant experience matters - years of irrelevant experience are irreverent or worst (refer to “Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell)

Prepare to be surprised, embrace it and keep an open mind - candidates may not always be what they appear.

Hope this helps someone,

Ruslan
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rbelkin