VI #005: Efficient Hiring: Building a Recruiting Engine For Your Engineering Organization in 5 Steps

Read time: 5 minutes

Over the last 8 years, I helped grow an R&D venture for one of the World’s Most Admired Companies from 50 to over 500 people, as part of the founding engineering leadership team.

To meet the demands of the program we hired 10-15 people monthly, only accepting the top 1% of applicants, winning top top talent from FAANG and other well known companies and startups, and retaining engineers longer than the tech industry average. One of the ways this was achieved was via setting up an efficient recruitment “engine” that helped streamlined the hiring process and provided a positive candidate experience.

However, many companies struggle with recruitment due to lack of expertise, inadequate processes, poor candidate experience, and lack of metrics. Also, in the current economic downturn many companies are laying off recruiters to cut costs, yet the people who remain in such companies are then being asked to “do more with less”. Such challenges can be addressed by following a proven, efficient recruitment system.

If you’re a leader of a company looking to scale hiring or to increase recruiting efficiency during the economic downturn, here are some generalized steps that have worked well for my teams and I and that you might like to adapt to your needs:

Step 1: Centralize recruiting based on hiring needs

Once hiring needs, a plan, and budget approval have been locked down, centralized hiring by setting up an internal recruiting team.

The core team should ideally consist of internal recruiters and admin to own the hiring process end-to-end. They calibrate with hiring managers and HR on hiring needs and compensation, manage relationships with sourcing agencies and candidates, and coordinate screening, interviews, and candidate feedback. They also should report weekly to leadership on hiring KPIs and metrics.

The centralized recruitment team helps ensure that recruitment is a top priority and that the overall process is executed effectively and consistently.

Step 2: Identify hiring managers and assign interviewers

As an extension of the core team, strive to identify experienced, diverse interviewers with strong technical expertise, communication and listening skills, and who are culture contributors.

This group can be built out iteratively. In our case, in the early days when the organization was relatively small, the interviewing team was mostly our platform leadership team. Interviews were being run back-to-back almost daily. As the program grew, others were trained and included as interviewers, helping share the interviewing workload.

Step 3: Create a streamlined, lightweight recruiting process

The recruiting process includes sourcing, screening, interviewing, feedback, assessment, and offer phases.

Within this funnel, allow for variation as needed such as for different job families, levels, teams, and locations. Initially, it’s fine to start with manual processes, for example, using Outlook/email for scheduling interviews, spreadsheets for collecting feedback, and quick in-person calibration meetings for hiring decisions. Over time, to improve speed and quality it’s worth automating and standardizing with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), such as Greenhouse (for a midsized business).

Eventually, the process can be evolved into a hub-and-spoke model where individual teams can have more flexibility and control over their specific hiring needs and approach within the centralized framework.

Step 4: Prioritize a positive candidate experience

Aim to make the recruitment process seamless, transparent, responsive, and enjoyable for candidates.

The internal recruiting team should use a centralized ATS to post job descriptions on multiple channels, including the website and job boards, allowing candidates to apply online and receive regular updates and feedback. Interviewers should be trained and supported to be prepared, punctual, flexible, and empathetic in interactions with candidates. It is also helpful to emphasize the unique aspects of the work and help candidates “feel” what it would be like to work with your company through interview questions and discussions with them. For example, thinking about global-scale engineering problems in interviews, discuss desirable technologies they’d work with, and have candidates meet or have lunch with talented team members. To help close the deal with top candidates, consider introducing them to senior leaders and showing them on-site amenities.

Step 5: Continuously review and improve metrics

Take an agile approach by beginning with a minimal recruitment engine, collecting data and feedback, and iterating.

In our case, we started with a small internal recruitment team and platform leaders using Outlook and spreadsheets, and then built out as we went along. It’s essential to measure metrics, such as time to fill/hire, hiring rate, attrition, quality of hires, offer acceptance, sourcing channel efficiency, diversity, and candidate feedback, and review these with leadership frequently, e.g. weekly. The process should be improved over time for example adopting a more advanced ATS, holding calibration sessions with sourcing agencies to communicate and better align hiring needs, experimenting with screening tools such as HackerRank, and providing ongoing training to interviewers to maintain a consistently positive candidate experience.

That’s it for today.

TL;DR

To build an efficient recruiting engine:

1. Centralize recruiting based on hiring needs
2. Assign hiring managers and interviewers
3. Create a streamlined, lightweight recruiting process
4. Prioritize a positive candidate experience
5. Continuously review and improve metrics

I hope this helps. See you next Sunday.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Work with me 1:1 to build your team, product, platform, or career in tech.
2. Book a free discovery call with me to explore if your business needs would be a good fit for my advisory services. If we’re not a good fit, rest assured I’ll kindly let you know.