Hiring

As a manager, hiring is such a huge responsibility. Each new team member has the capacity to impact the culture in a myriad of ways so these decisions must be made with intention and care.

Team Vision & Skills Assessment
Just as product teams should have a vision of where their product is headed, design teams should have a vision of how the team operates and and contributes to the org in an ideal world. Having this in place provides clarity in assessing how a team grows organically with new roles and appropriately addressing backfills.

Identifying Desired Impact (for product team & design team)
Defining desired impact as a first step helps inform the job description, evaluation criteria and pressure test leveling expectations for an open role. This activity is held with designers and key product team members. An outcome of this activity is a comprehensive 30/60/90 document and ideal skills to screen for.

Defining Key Competencies
Desired competencies emerge from each stage of the processes mentioned above and are documented in a parking lot. In this activity, the sole objective is cleaning up and organizign the parking lot. Here, key themes are defined, analyzed and ranked. So when we use terms like “data-driven”, “generative research” or “autonomous” we are crystal clear that everyone in the interview panel has the same definition. A byproduct of this heightened clarity and alignment is objective candidate evaluation criteria. After this session, a document with the top criteria, definition and evaluation criteria is shared with the panel. Ultimately this list lives in Lever.

Detailed Job Description (JD)
Our team had a lot of support from the PeopleOps (HR) department that had strict guidelines on what to include in the JD. Clarity here helped us get more specialized applicants and well as being able to assess how thoroughly candidates had read through the JD. The JD included high level desired impact, 30/60/90 and general responsibilities. The clearer we were as an internal team, the better we were able to communicate what we were looking for. Exceptional candidates challenged aspects of our JD based on learnings during the interview process and personal experience. Of course, we always made space for these conversations.

Kickoff Call
This is where everyone participating in the interview process is aligned and downloaded. At this stage everyone should be familiar with themes discussed above, asynchronously, from in a 1:1, or time borrowed from a team heddle. Fresh perspectives almost always arise when everyone is in the same room. Here we also align on what is being evaluated in each step and best practices for objective and inclusive interviews.

Onboarding
Onboarding assets emerged from each stage. Once the hiring plan is complete, its time to review, re-evaluate and finalize an onboarding plan for the new team member. Additionally each new member is asked to share feedback on the onboarding process to ensure we’re continuing to evolve ands strengthen our practices.

Lessons I learned the hard way
When hiring goes on for too long, it impacts team morale and contributes to burnout. It becomes another item on the teams plate to manage alongside day to day work. I had a bad habit of moving candidates forward in the process that I knew weren’t a good fit to “give them a shot” but this actually wasted their time, our time and burned operational costs. Additionally in the first role I was hiring manager, I failed to appropriately align the interview panel before starting interviews which exasperated the dragging out of the process. Once addressing these pains, I noticed more crisp and objective candidate feedback and a stronger candidate pool.