Being a hiring manager

Recently Suhail Doshi twitted this delightful AMA on hiring, which inspired me to write this article.

I’ve been hiring for many years. While working at GetYourGuide, hiring became one of my top priorities for the first time. As a hiring manager, I scaled the frontend team from 2 engineers and hired ~25 frontend and full-stack engineers with zero offer rejections. Most of the hires were an excellent fit, some folks churned, and a few were not a good fit at all. I learned a few things I’d like to share.

Disclaimer: These pieces of advice apply to startups and scaleups where collaboration between individuals is crucial to driving innovation. This article is applicable mainly for hiring software engineers and their managers. Make adjustments for your situation.

What is a “Hiring Manager” role?

Hiring Manager is a person directly responsible for filling specific positions. Usually, this person makes a final call on whether to extend an offer or not.

Sometimes hiring managers would own the hiring for a specific team, sometimes for a particular role.

Being hiring managing is very tiring. At the same time, this role is critical for you, your team, and business in general. The people you hire will define your team’s dynamics, the future of your company, and your customers’ success.

Being a hiring manager is leverage - if you do your job well, you will have a more significant impact than you could have as an IC.

Usually, hiring managers are people with other management responsibilities. Sometimes it can be very senior ICs. In any case, the hiring manager needs excellent judgment.

Working with recruiters

The hiring manager should work closely with the recruiting team, preferably with a single recruiter.

It would be best if you met regularly with your partner recruiter to evaluate funnels, metrics, and, most of all, learn from each other. If you are in a war mode and recruiting has become your primary responsibility, work daily with your partner from recruiting team.

Preparing for the interview

Take your time to learn about the candidate before the interview.

Good hiring managers review candidate profiles carefully. Great hiring managers screen candidate profiles even before they enter the funnel.

Check their CV, LinkedIn. Read scorecards from previous interviews. Check their Twitter and GitHub - what are they passionate about? Make notes.

It might seem like a lot. With practice, this whole process takes 10 minutes. Instead, it saves hours of fruitless interviews for your company.

Interview questions

The hiring manager knows the role best. They should participate in at least one interview with each candidate that passed the initial screening. Earlier in the funnel is better. The best hiring managers are doing the screening themselves.

Have a well-prepared list of questions for your interview. The list should have more questions than candidates can answer during the interview. Experiment with your question list, but keep 70-90% of the questions intact. It will allow you to build up your intuition for this role.

I like to jump around the question list as the interview goes by. It allows diving deeper into areas where the candidate can showcase themselves better. Plus, it will enable structuring the interview as a conversation, allowing candidates to open up more. It’s a win-win.

Questions from candidates

Leave plenty of time for candidates to ask their questions, at least 15 minutes for an hour-long interview.

While you interview candidates, they interview your company as well. Giving them all the answers they need will help them make the right decisions in the end.

Be honest about everything you say to them. Disclose everything you are allowed to disclose. Honesty is the key to hiring the right people. There’s a bias to “sell” the position to candidates. Please don’t overdo it. You don’t want to hire someone just for them to leave during their probation or fail a business goal because they were not motivated to do their job. It’s a good sign if the candidate asks you some tough questions.

If you are working from the office and conducting interviews on-site, consider personally taking candidates for lunch. You’d be surprised how much more you can learn about the person in an informal setting, and it allows you to build even more trust between you and the candidate.

When to reject candidates

I almost certainly reject the candidate if any of these red flags were raised:

• Overconfidence. It’s a sign of close-minded people who don’t work well with others. They might be solving any problem you throw at them with flying colors, but if they can’t work in the team, it’s a no-go. Also, they often struggle with “disagree and commit” moments, which causes unnecessary exhaustion and conflicts for the whole team.
• Similarly, any sense of superiority to others.
• Candidate was complaining about their past job without proposing any solutions or taking accountability for those failures themself.
• Lack of any interest in the company. It’s OK to work for money. It’s also OK to demand excellence from your employees. If the candidate doesn’t want to know how the company works and what it means to its customers, they won’t be great at doing their job.

What to listen to

There are a couple of factors that are not necessarily good or bad but require special attention:

• How open-minded a person is. People can and should have strong opinions about things they care about. They also should change their opinion when they are proven wrong. People should accept that other points of view can exist. Sometimes they should commit to something they disagree with.
• Communication skills. People waste all their brilliance if they can’t involve others in their thought process. Good communication is crucial for any management role; I think it is also significant for any ICs collaborating with others.
• Candidate only worked on green-field projects. In our industry, people switch every 2-3 years on average. If a person only wrote new code and never had to deal with its maintenance, chances are they never learned from mistakes they or their colleagues made. On the contrary, people who genuinely enjoy working with legacy code tend to be great and pragmatic engineers.
• Candidate was switching jobs way too often. It’s OK if a person has had a few short-term positions recently. Bad match. Startup failure. Things happen. It’s usually not OK if they have switched five companies in five years. Dig deeper into their grit and commitment.

What to ignore

You must ignore race, gender, sexual orientation, and country of origin. If any of these or similar factors make any difference to you, you should not be involved in hiring.

When to trust your guts

I believe our brain is learning similar to machine learning algorithms. The more information we feed it, the better decision it makes.

When you start hiring in a company (even if you have years of experience), I suggest you not trust your guts too much but build an objective evaluation system.

As you interview more and more candidates, your intuition becomes better. You can start trusting it more and more over time.

I always had a bad feeling for the candidates I hired that weren’t a good fit in the end. Usually, they passed all the interviews so well that it was tough to reject them. I also was trying to be as objective as I could. Unfortunately, it was a waste of time for both company and those folks. I wish I would start listening to my intuition sooner.

In any case, make sure you are aware of your subconscious biases. If there’s any chance of you having biases, be careful with what your intuition tells you. They are called “subconscious” for a reason. I recommend everybody to take these bias tests from Project Implicit by Harvard University.

Conclusion

Here are the top-3 factors of being a good hiring manager:

• Build trust with candidates through being honest and transparent during the interview process.
• Build up your intuition over time and start trusting it, but keep your biases in check.
• Work closely with your recruiting partners.