Building Best Engineering Team Quickly
I have been building teams for decades. Based on my own personal experiences for last 2+ decades, here are some best practices to build team of Engineers quickly in a large organisations.
- Job Descriptions (JD): I see tooooo lengthy JDs for each positions and we spend days (sometime weeks) in finalising the JDs and finally create 2–3 pages of JD for a position. In my opinion, the longer the JD longer it takes to fill the position. Instead, just have these 2 items :
a. Mandatory skills / experiences (MUST) : try to limit to 3–4 lines
b. Good to have skills : try to limit to 3–4 lines
If we spend time in these 2 items, we ourselves very clear what exactly we need.
2. Referrals (with Referral bonus): Ask your own team to refer their friends/relatives who meets the criteria. It is very easy to convey to your team what is your expectations from the candidates. Leverage their existing network and it also help them in expanding their network (say via LinkedIn). Have attractive referral bonus.
If the candidate referred by a most trusted person, your 50% of interview is taken care because trusted person cares for his/her own credibility and brand image before referring.
3. Smoothen the hiring process : Generally, internal processes / bureaucracies create frustrations and delays. It is very difficult to escape from them. While we continue challenge these we should also think of work arounds to navigate through them.
a. Understand the recruitment team challenges and help them
b. Create a good pool of interview panel
c. Have centralised channel for resumes / interviews / reporting
4. Diversity : Gender and Age diversity are the most important things as these brings completely diverse opinions/ideas compared to others. Out of these two, I recommend to give more importance to gender diversity (without impacting quality) as by default and by God’s design, we get diverse opinions/ideas for free.
Sometimes, people make biased decisions (consciously) just to meet diversity numbers. This will adversely impact on culture, quality of deliverables and finally business. Always, look for best person for the job & organisation culture. We need to do some research on supply side of each diverse category before setting up the numbers.
5. Events : Leverage currently running events to attract the talents
6. Interviews : If we have taken care of point#3 above, this becomes easy. Secondly, avoid trying to match 100% skills to candidate. I have seen people spending 6–12 months just trying to match 100% against the JD. My suggestion is always :
a. Give 50-60% importance to skills matching current position for which we are hiring
b. remaining 40–50% on culture fitment and adaptability.
c. Educate and provide easy guidelines to Interview panel
CONCLUSION:
In summary, if we follow below steps, we should be able to build quality teams quickly.
- Short & Clear JD
- Leverage Referrals
- Smoothen the process
- Target Diversity
- Leveraging Events
- Interview expectations
