Hiring Guide

Quick links: Example of a completed alignment guide + Alignment Guide template | Example of a completed job description + Job Description template

Introduction

Hiring is a means to increase productivity—either through a new role, or to cover the productivity loss of a departure. Recycling the same job descriptions and interview plans for all candidates may save time upfront, but doing so may end up costing more time if we're not sourcing the right candidates because we haven't aligned on the role's needs.

Job description templates and interview plans get you started quickly, but they shouldn't be a substitute for thinking deeply about what you want out of the role. Even if it's "just" a back-fill, it's worthwhile to realign to your company's goals and make sure you're on the same page with your interviewers.

Hiring for diversity is often seen as a "nice to have". Instead, diversity should be considered a core part of what good hiring looks like as it brings many benefits: diverse candidates bring varied experiences and ways of thinking, bringing fresh ideas and new solutions; different cultural values keep a company open-minded and accepting; diversity leads to greater profits¹.

By hiring the right person for the right position, you'' have them stay longer, enhance team culture, and help challenge and grow the organisation.

Let's get stuck into how to hire the right person.

1. Educate yourself, and the interviewers

What are your hiring principles

When hiring, you're looking to hire the best candidate—one who elevates the company and adds to its culture. To do that, everyone involved in hiring needs to be aligned on a core set of hiring principles. When we're misaligned, we tend to hire in our own image, with the short-term in mind, and/or people who don't meet our hiring standards. Hiring principles helps bring speed, quality, diversity, and an exceptional candidate experience to the hiring process.

These principles define who you are as a company, how you aim to interview candidates, and how you decide on who to hire. Before interviewing candidates, it's important to read and understand these principles.

Who we are

Our hiring standards are high.

We hire people from diverse backgrounds who will add to our culture.

We don’t hire brilliant candidates who are arrogant and dismissive of others’ points of view.

How we interview

We know the best talent requires engaged hiring managers and interviewers.

Hiring managers select great interviewing teams and align interviewers on hiring role expectations and requirements.

Interviewers use clearly defined hiring criteria and assigned focus areas to consistently and fairly evaluate candidates.

We evaluate candidates using evidence of performance, not pedigree, to predict success.

Every interviewee goes through a fair and consistent interviewing process.

We treat all candidates the way we’d treat our customers.

How we make decisions

We take smart risks on candidates.

We make quality, consultative hiring decisions, quickly.

You can view the expanded principles in Hiring Principles.

What makes someone join and stay at a company

Your mission, a.k.a. the "why" – Engineers want to make useful things. They want to believe in a company or team's mission. It's enriching and motivating to serve humanity.
The team – Having inspiring peers is a huge motivator for great engineers. These engineers want to learn from others and, in turn, share their knowledge. Adding to this – If you're a top candidate in an underrepresented group, would you stay at a company who doesn't hire more people like you?
The technical problem – Having some difficult problems to solve is the third main reason great talent will want to work for you. Good engineers want something they can sink their teeth into—like creating something new or scaling up existing services.

Assuming compensation is fair, focusing on compensation above Mission, Team and Technical Problem might attract those with the wrong motivations.²

2. Define the need

For each new position, you will want to answer a series of questions in order to better understand the hard requirements of the role and what core values are most important for it. Even though you might be backfilling someone, it's significant to recognise that the needs of the role might have adjusted since it was first filled. Investing time upfront will help you filter for the right types of candidates and find a better fit at the end of the process.

Complete the Alignment Guide

The alignment guide is the heart of this hiring guide. Complete the template and we'll use it to:

Build out our job description
Plan out interview questions
Gain alignment with recruiting and the interviewers on expectations of the role

Write the job description

Pulling in details from your completed alignment guide, let's build out the job description. Remember that we want to be hiring a variety of candidates as part of building a strongly-performing team. Some language used, or content omitted, might exclude candidates. In general:

Avoid gender-coded words. Pass your completed document through a gender decoder for job descriptions.
Limit your job requirements to the “must-haves” from your alignment guide. By not being truthful with your requirements, you're actually introducing bias. Men apply for jobs when they only meet 60% of its requirements, but women only apply when they meet 100%³.
Avoid using unnecessary corporate speak and jargon. This kind of language is a barrier keeping talented young people from entry-level positions⁴.
Call out inclusive benefits like parental leave and childcare subsidies. It's not a critical step, but including some benefits speaks to your company's larger values of inclusion.

Remember what attracts and retains great employees: Mission, Team, and challenging Problems. When writing a job description, we're not just trying to narrow our applicants to those with the right qualifications—we're also trying to attract those qualified applicants.

With all that to consider, here's a job description template, and example.

Even though you've nailed the job description, make sure your recruiter is bought into the vision of the role and understands the must-haves you've defined.

Furthermore, you'll want to be explicit with them about your diversity goals, and call out any specific diversity boards you want this posted to.

This guide isn't going to go into specific sourcing best-practices, but at its core, an engaged hiring manager is more successful than a passive one. Share the job posting with your networks, reach out to old contacts and likely candidates, and engage with people who show interest in the role. Get your team engaged in sharing the role too!

4. Interviewing

Overview

What does a good experience look like for a candidate?

Process: Clearly defined (no surprises); the interview was conversational (not overly stressful); interviewers were engaged.
Company and Team: Everyone seemed excited to be working there, and to meet the candidate; company values were demonstrated in the interview.
The Job: The candidate got realistic expectations of the job; the mission is clear; any questions were answered satisfactorily.

The alignment guide you filled out at the beginning is the central tool used in making sure your candidates have a good experience. It contains prompts for: what a typical day is going to be; what "success" is in this role; what experience they need; what values you want to check for.

Realistically, you'll probably be reusing the base technical plans you have for similar roles (engineering, managerial, product, etc.), but don't forget to tweak them for your role.

What I want to stress here is the overall alignment with your interviewers!

Before kicking off the process, pre-brief with all interviewers. Share with them the alignment guide and make it clear to them your needs and desired traits.
After each interview, debrief with the interviewers. This is not only a chance to rate the candidate, but to also reflect on each interview process and whether the candidate should've made it this far.

Here's a more in-depth interviewing guide.

5. The end is just the beginning (a.k.a. don't forget about them before they start)

1. Pre-onboarding

Don't forget about them once they've signed an offer letter. If the candidate isn't starting for a month or so, we want them to feel confident they've made the right decision. Here are a few ideas to make them excited to join your team:

Offer them congratulations, and encourage your team to send them personalised welcome emails.
If you have any extra information on your company/organisation/team, now's a good time to send it through. Encourage them to ask questions, and offer to set them up on the product so they can get familiar with it.
Two weeks before their start date
- Check in—see if they have questions, and reiterate that you're looking forward to them joining.
- Now's a good time to give them an overview of their first couple of weeks.
One or two days before they start, make sure that you have everything lined up for their arrival: desk (if not remote), access to repositories, company login, company swag.

2. Define what their onboarding experience will look like

How are you going to introduce them to all the features they'll own? Can you give them a walkthrough of the product?
Do you know how to onboard them to all the new systems, and codebases they'll be touching?
Who should they meet while onboarding? Have you picked out a mentor for them?
What are some good onboarding bug tickets to ramp them up? What will their first major project be?

Here's a more in-depth onboarding guide.

Next steps

How do we define and measure success? This hiring guide does not yet reflect on what hires we've made and how they stack up to our hiring goals. This is something that should be covered in the future.