First day in my new job

 December 17th: "We need to grow our team up to 14 engineers by the end of February, or we will close Guadalajara's office and hire the engineering team in SF"

Hiring Information

- Previous goal stated around July: 9 engineers by the end of December

- Conversion rate: ~25 interviews in 6 months
     2 hires.
     0.08%

- Interview Process: Generic written exam for all positions (front, back, mobile) and on-site.

Team

- HR

- Recruiter

Must-ask questions

• Why 14 engineers?
• What's the roadmap?
• What's our budget?
• Which areas of expertise do we need to cover?
• Why the time constraints?
• Why such a low conversion rate?
• Keep the questions coming.

Constraints

- We have to start a plan in January 3rd because of Christmas and New Year Vacations, which meant waiting 10+ days until unleashing the recruiting efforts

- Re-activation from candidates is usually slow after vacations

What do we need from a Process?

Candidate Process

Internal Process

• Kanban to track candidates
• Daily Stand-ups to follow up on candidates
• Goals per sprint

Screening Interview

Agenda

• HR Stuff
• Technical Exams depending on the role and seniority

Benefits

• Quick Filtering of Candidates with "easy" questions
• Recruiting - Engineering communication

Cons

• Longer Interviews and learning curve for recruiter

Take-home challenge

Goal

Sending a homework assessment to evaluate technical skills with languages or frameworks

Benefits

• Trade-off interview time with code revision time.
• Evaluation of production-like code

Cons

• Candidate had to spent around ~6 hours to the challenge (we aimed to give our most sincere feedback to compensate the effort)
• Skills assessment could be "ambiguous"
• Cheating

On Site Interview

Goal

Evaluate candidate understanding of the problem and solution

Benefits

• Conversation with candidates to identify skills and areas of opportunity 
• Technical debates

Cons

• Most of the team was in this interview, so it was time expensive.

Goal Completed! 🎉

Lessons Learned

• Hiring more people does not speed up development unless you have a very good reason to do so.
• Money should not be the trigger to grow a team.
• Trust your gut feeling about candidates.
• Never keep yourself quiet. Speak out.
• Embrace the change. Don't be afraid to break the status quo of things.

Some extra thoughts

• Shouldn't interviewing process be transparent for candidates?
• Shouldn't there be an entity in charge of skills assess the most repetitive requirements of all companies? 

We have the team, now what?

Figuring out stuff (?)

• Communication
• Planning
• Aligning the overall team

Benefits

• Go-to market
• Delegate ownership of how
• Building trust in the team

Cons

• Synchronization was expensive
• Codebases were growing without a same technical foundation
• Dependencies between teams
• Balancing Seniority

Keep the iterations coming

Lessons Learned

• Listen to the team. If someone thinks something is wrong, assume it is.
• Follow the rules, and then break them.
• Be a servant leader instead of a selfish leader.
• Question yourself, but don't get stuck

Team Patterns

Source: https://www.kennethlange.com/team-patterns-how-to-structure-an-engineering-team/

Thanks a lot!

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/albertoromnav/

Github: https://github.com/beeetooo/

Email: aromeronavia@gmail.com

I offer consulting services around:

- Building teams

- Development Processes

External Resources

• https://www.kennethlange.com/team-patterns-how-to-structure-an-engineering-team/
• https://www.infoq.com/news/2016/10/no-spotify-model/