Member-only story
How to Recruit and Hire When You Need to Move Fast
As you scale from hiring 10 people a year to 10 people a week, a small number of processes can go a long way
One of the biggest challenges a company faces as it scales is to revamp its recruiting and employee onboarding processes. When Twitter bought my startup, it had just 90 employees. By the time I left, two and half years later, Twitter had grown to close to 1,500 people — 93 percent of the employees were new.
To add 500 people a year, you need to change the way you approach and scale your recruiting organization, you need to think deeply about employee onboarding, and you need to maintain and evolve your culture.
Recruiting Best Practices
As you scale from hiring 10 people a year to 10 people a week, a small number of recruiting processes can go a long way in maintaining a high bar and expediting key hires.
Write a Job Description for Every Role
Many companies start off recruiting via personal networks for a small number of roles — for example, engineers and designers. As a company scales beyond individual contributors in a handful of functions, it is important for people hiring for a role to understand what is important in the person they hire. For example, if you are hiring a business development person for the first time, what should people look for in that person and role? An engineer on the interview panel might not know the difference between a business development employee and a salesperson. Clarifying skill set and role is important so everyone is looking for the same type of candidate.
Ask Every Candidate the Same Questions
For each candidate for a given role, ask the same or similar interview questions. This will allow you to calibrate candidates across identical questions.
Assign Focus Areas to Interviewers Prior to the Interview
Often you want to interview candidates for specific aspects of their role. For example, you might interview a product manager on their product insights, past accomplishments, culture fit, etc…
